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Hello my friends and welcome to another episode. I'm so excited to have you here. I'm excited because I wanna talk about one of my favorite concepts that I learned that changed my life that I think will change your life too when you stop fighting it. I will have to say that my clients normally hate this concept at first, and then when you give into it, you start realizing how liberating it is. Um, I also hated it at first, but I'm telling you, it is a thing that will change your life and its understanding that life will always be good and bad.

That life will always be 50 50, both good and bad emotions, negative emotions, no matter what happens. The reason that this is such an important concept is that somewhere along the line we were sold some kind of lie. I don't even know where it came from. It came from all over that there is some place we have to get where we will be happy, where we will be whole, everything will be wonderful. And so we spend our lives on this hamster wheel trying to get there, trying to get the degree and the job and the promotion and the house and the kids and the marriage and the body and whatever it is that when I get to that place, I can kick up my feet and be like, I arrived and I'm finally happy. And what happens is that we get those things. All of you have experienced that you got something that you wanted, you had a goal and you got it.
You got the job, you got the money, you got married and you thought like, this is what I need to make my life full. And what happened? It was good. Some of it's good and some of it's still bad, right? Like you got there and you were the same person with the same brain just experiencing this new part of life. And I think that the reason that this lie is so insidious and so detrimental and why I am so hell bent on getting people to understand this is that it does like three things that I think are really harmful to us. I think first is that when we have this belief that we should be happy, that like because we accomplish this thing that we want, we just should feel more happy. We should be better than this. We should feel grateful and we should feel whatever.

A lot of us seek the next best thing. We can't have happiness all the time. So we seek pleasure, right? We want that dopamine hit and we think that we should have it like we should feel good all day. And so if I can't get it from like true happiness, then I'm gonna get it through scrolling TikTok or watching Netflix or eating the potato chips or drinking that wine or overworking, right? Getting all the my my to-do list done or exercising for two hours. Like you can get dopamine from a lot of things. There's a lot of things that you can buffer with, but you can really damage your life by constantly trying to chase that pleasure, right? When you have that level of pleasure where we feel like I need it every single day because I should feel happy instead of understanding that like of course I'm not gonna feel happy all the time.
Nothing has gone wrong, that's okay. That's the human experience. Maybe today I'm just a little bit sad or anxious or frustrated or bored and I don't have to keep masking it. I don't have to keep numbing it because I should feel happy, I should feel better, right? That's the first thing. The second thing that happens is that we continue on this perpetual hamster wheel. We keep thinking, well, I just need the next thing. I thought it was the degree, but I, okay, yes, I got the degree, but now I need a job, right? If I don't get a job, then the degree is kind of pointless once I get the job, but then I get the job and then the job has a lot of stress and I'm like, no, but I need to like get promoted. Like I don't really know what I'm doing.

I feel like an imposter. If I get to this position, if I become partner, if I you know, become manager or whatever, then I'll feel secure and I'll feel good and I'll feel happy. And then I get there and then I'm still stressed and I'm like, now I have more responsibility and I don't know what I'm doing and I feel like, right? And so then we go after the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. And we're constantly looking for things outside of us to make ourselves happy. We're like, well, the job is great, but I still don't have my life partner. And if I had that, then I would feel happy. And then I have the partner and it's like, of course things aren't perfect between us, but like if we had kids, then we would really have the package and then we just keep adding.

It's like if I had the house or the vacation home or the vacation or whatever it might be. And I want you to be able to like take off that pressure. I know that like you can, and we're gonna talk about like why you should go after those goals, why you should have certain things you wanna have. But it's not going to take you to some place where it's gonna be rainbows and butterflies every day. You're not gonna wake up all of a sudden and be a different person. Like we think like, I'm gonna get in shape, I'm gonna have that beach body I want and I'm gonna, you know, do my skincare routine and one day I'm gonna wake up and I'm just gonna be this person who, you know, wakes up without hitting the snooze button and always remembers things and isn't petty at all and never gets jealous, never compares and doesn't have these like negative aspects to them.
And it's just, that's nobody ever, it doesn't matter what you accomplish, it doesn't matter what you do, it doesn't matter what you have in your life. We all have those parts of us. We all have the petty, jealous, judgmental, you know, and we should work on it. But there's nothing wrong with you. I think so many people reach their goals and then become depressed. Like they get the body that they wanted and they're like, I'm still me in this body. Or they get the job that they wanted or they make the money that they wanted and they're like, huh. It didn't change the fact that my family dynamics are the same and the fact that I feel unloved and the fact that I feel not good enough. If money and accomplishments and power and all that stuff was gonna make people happy all the time, there would be a lot of rich happy people.

And we know that that's just not the case. There's a lot of famous people that have everything you seemingly could want, and yet they are highly anxious and depressed and sad and lonely because it is the human experience. Because as soon as they have one thing, it brings on the next set of stresses. I always tell people this when they go after these goals. Like I want you to go after big goals, but you're gonna get to that goal and you're gonna celebrate it for like 30 seconds, maybe five minutes. And then your brain is gonna go on to the next set of stress. It's gonna be like, oh, I wanted that promotion. I'm gonna work towards that, you know, and then I'm gonna get it. And all of a sudden my whole worldview is now gonna become, oh my God, but what if I fail at this?

And what if I'm not good at this position and now I have so much more responsibility and now that everyone's looking at me and if I fail this, it's gonna be even worse, right? And so we just move on to the next thing and the next thing. And again, I just want you to know that nothing has gone wrong. That's the way that your brain has evolved to be. Your brain is always scanning for problems because that's what keeps you alive, right? It's looking for the thing that can kill you. It's looking for the thing that can cause problems. And so it doesn't matter that in, you know, our current form of civilization, we're not at risk of dying all the time. And yet we look at it as the same way. Like me getting passed up for this promotion feels like I'm gonna die and I'm constantly gonna look for what's wrong and I'm constantly gonna look for what's not working.
And there are ways to work on that, like managing your mind, which is what I teach people. But I want you to just understand that that is the way that it's evolved. So things outside of you accomplishments, things that you're gonna like achieve, are not gonna change that internal human experience. And the third reason I think it's so damaging is that while we're seeking all this pleasure and we're trying to accomplish more, we also take on a lot of shame and guilt. We think there's something wrong with us, right? It's like there's something wrong with me that I can't be happy. Like this is what I wanted, this is what I had been working towards all this time. I thought I needed a partner to be happy. I thought I needed to get this job to be happy. Like once I make you know, a hundred thousand dollars a year, then I'll be happy.

What's wrong with me? So many people sit in a lot of that guilt and a lot of that shame like other people would kill to be in this position. Why can't I just be happy? I can't tell you how many people I've coached that have said that to me. Maybe I just can't be happy. And I'm like, Nope, nope. That's not a thing. Because happiness is not a state in which you live in. It is a fleeting emotion. Like anything else, like if you think about your emotions, like waves, they're all gonna come and go. The good ones and the bad ones. We want the bad ones to go right? We just want the good ones to stick, but they don't. And so it becomes so much easier when you know, like I'm feeling a lot of joy and fulfillment and happiness right now, but this is also gonna leave and I'm gonna, you know, have some more stress and anxiety and frustration and that's okay too.

I can handle that too. I know how to process that too. And then that's gonna leave and it's gonna make way for other emotions. And so I think when we really understand this concept, it can help liberate so much of the expectation that we have that like we should be this person that has all these things and is just always happy. We can make room for like what is the actual human experience? My actual human experience is that it's gonna be a jumble of emotions all the time. And I can learn how to manage that better and I can learn how to relate to that and I can learn how to process that and I can learn how like those emotions feel in my body. And it's not to say that I can't work on some of the emotions I can. I can learn how to manage my anxiety better.

I can learn how to not get stressed about things as much, but it doesn't mean that it's all gonna go away and I'm all of a sudden gonna like be a different human being with a different brain. And so I wanna offer this to you in earnest as my gift to you. Nobody is ever happy all the time, no one. And that doesn't mean there's anything wrong with them. And that doesn't mean there's anything wrong with you. It's just the human experience to experience all the emotions all the time. And they have a concept in psychology called the hedonic treadmill. And the concept is basically that we have kind of a happiness set point and no matter how far we go above it, let's say you win the lottery, you have like a, some huge windfall, you have some really amazing thing happen or you go below it, you have a very tragic accident, you lose someone you love, you go through some really horrific heartbreak.

We eventually come back to that set point. This is a really beautiful defense mechanism by your brain to not keep you in the depths of despair. There's a reason we have like, you know the saying, time heals all wounds. Okay? You can have your own thoughts about that and that's not what I'm here to discuss. But there's a reason because over time your focus, your emotions kind of go back to where that happiness set point is, right? And so they, they've studied, they've studied lottery winners and then they've studied people who have become like paraplegic in horrific accidents. And all of them go back to where their happiness set point was where they relatively were before these events. Again, it's a beautiful thing that happens to you. Most of us want this because our lives will always have some kind of tragedy. All of us will lose people we love.

We will go through a heartbreak, we will, you know, get passed up for the promotion. We will have things that will devastate us. And if your brain didn't know how to bounce back from that, most of us would just live all of our lives depressed in grief, right? Unable to kind of like get ourselves out of those clutches. But our brain does this beautiful thing that it brings us back. And if you want that with the negative side, you also have to accept it with the positive side is that even when you get that big promotion or you make that money or you buy that house, it's great, but it's gonna become normalized and you're gonna go back to the way that you were. Now the question becomes can you change your happiness set point? And there's good data that you can. One of the easiest ways is to start with a gratitude practice.

Just every day write down one to three things that you're grateful for. Your brain will start looking for those things. You'll start seeing how much is actually going right in your life, how good your life actually is, how good you actually are. And it can start changing the way that you relate to your own world and to your own life. So there are things that you can do. It's not to say like all of my work is in teaching people how to manage their mind. And there's ways to manage your thoughts to make yourself let go of a lot of dirty pain, a lot of negative thoughts that don't serve any purpose other than to harm you. But it's just not ever gonna be that like you're gonna be happy all the time. That's just toxic positivity. You don't want to be happy all the time when bad things happen in the world.

You want to be upset when bad things happen to you. You want to be upset, you want to have those feelings. One of the things I think about a lot is that there's this duality of life. The only way that you can actually experience good feelings is by experiencing the bad ones. If you were always full, if you were always satiated, food wouldn't taste good. Like the reason food tastes so good is because you know what hunger feels like, right? The same thing with emotions. If you think about it, like think about the last time like were you super proud and elated and like just over the moon because you walked up a flight of stairs? No, because it's easy for you, right? Like a little child might be a little baby that's learning to climb, might get super excited when they make it up a flight of stairs because it's hard for them.

There was a lot of frustration and testing and falling and stuff. But for us, when something becomes easy, when it's not hard, when you don't have frustration, when you don't have stress, when you don't have sadness, it's very difficult to then have pride and joy and elation and all the other emotions. Those come on the backs of things being hard. Like the reason why reaching a goal feels good is because usually that goal was difficult for you. The guy who's ran 40 marathons before and has always been an athlete and has just always been the person that was like in sports likely finishes that, you know, like I dunno how many marathons they say they've had 50 marathons, that 51st marathon is not gonna feel that good. Like it's gonna feel fine, but it's almost like a to-do list checkoff, right? It's like okay, I just ran another marathon.

But the person who has never ran before in their life and was always a couch potato and never really was into fitness and decided to take on the training routine of learning to run a marathon and push themselves when they didn't want to and got up every day when it was really difficult and went running and their body is in pain and their feet are in blisters when they cross that marathon finish line, the reason it feels so good is because there was so much negative emotion because they know how hard it was because they know how much discipline it took and how much frustration and how much heartache and all of the other stuff which makes it so much more exciting and something they can be proud of. And so I think for a lot of us, when we realize like when we go after goals and we're like, why is it so hard?

You want it to be hard or it's not gonna feel good when you figure it out. If everybody could do it, it's not that exciting, right? We're not passing out rewards for people that can pour a good cup of coffee 'cause we can all kind of do it at this point. You are doing things that is hard for other people because it is that difficulty. It's that negative emotion that makes it that much sweeter. And so I think the next time when you're thinking about like why is my life so hard? Why are all these things so hard? Like how could it be that? Like on the opposite side of that is what all those emotions that you want to feel so many just want to feel that passion and that pride and that fulfillment and that elation and that joy that comes from doing these things that are hard.

It should be hard. I should feel those feelings. Now I said a lot of people give me grief. A lot of my students do not like this concept because they don't wanna believe that everywhere is gonna be 50 50. Now here's the thing, this isn't like a scientific breakdown. Maybe it's 60 40, maybe it's 70 30. You can believe whatever you want. For me, I think it is a cleaner concept to know that like there's just always gonna be negative emotions. It's always gonna be good and bad. And I do think that the 50 50 changes, I think, you know, when I was a lawyer my 50 50 was very different than what it is now. And I would choose this 50 50 over it any day of the week because yes, like when I was a lawyer, the good parts was I had a really secure job.

I was doing really interesting work. I was a quote unquote success in society's eyes. So I got a lot of like kind of dopamine from those ego hits. But the 50 50 that was bad was I was under an unbelievable amount of stress and anxiety. I was a stress ball all the time. I felt really inadequate. I was really frustrated and bored and there was a lot of dread Now to my 50 50 as a business owner and doing kind of a personal brand and kind coaching work, the good parts is I do something that is absolutely fulfilling to me that I love doing and talking about. I get to help people, which makes me feel incredible and I get to kind of have the flexibility of creating a business on my own time. I get to kind of be with my kids when I want to.

That's unbeatable. But the negative 50 50 is I am in front of a lot of people and I face a lot of criticism kind of publicly. I had to face a lot of my fear of being judged. I am frustrated all the time because I don't know how to do half the stuff I wanna do in my business. There's security but it's not the same as like a paycheck. And so there's a different 50 50. I would rather choose this type of fulfillment and this type of pushing myself to grow and dealing with kind of the negative emotions I don't wanna deal with rather than the stress that came with being a lawyer. So it's not to say that you can't choose different things for different reasons. And it's not to say that like maybe my life isn't really 50 50, maybe as a lawyer it was like 40% good and 60% bad and now here it's like 60% good and 40% bad.

But you get the point like the concept is that it's both good and bad. I know that a lot of people want to fight it because they want to believe that there's some place that they're gonna get and it's gonna be so much better and there is some things are gonna be so much better. But the reason I want you to like know this is because I think we've convinced ourselves that like the grass is greener somewhere else, that other people we watch on social media and they have these things and that means they're so much happier. And I dunno how many times we need this example, we see it over and over again like the influencer that you think has the most amazing life comes out and talks about how they're suicidal and how they've been oppressed and have all these mental health issues.

Or you know the movie star who is rich and famous and beautiful and they come out and they talk about how lonely they are and how they hate it all. And you see it over and over again. And I just want you all to really understand that like it is not greener anywhere else. And so when you start realizing like, okay, all of these emotions are gonna come and go, how do I wanna deal with them? How do I wanna manage them? What are the ones I wanna choose on purpose? What can I feel like the hard emotions in order to feel more of these really good ones I want? Right? Um, and that brings me kind of to the last point where I think a lot of people ask me like, okay fine if it's 50 50 then why would I even change my career?

Or why would I go after this goal? Or why would I wanna get the promotion? And that's a great question. I think for the, the first part of it's that you don't have to, I think I want you to really understand like you could be happy where you are. You could learn to manage that 50 50 and not have to change a lot of things to change your experience of your life right now. And I think that you don't have to change for that reason. And I think it's really important to know that you shouldn't change for that reason. You shouldn't pick a goal because that's what's gonna like make me happy. I think you should pick a goal because it helps you grow and try new things and see what you're capable of. I think you can grow into the best version of yourself and like I said, like have a different 50 50 experience without needing it to be the end all, be all that fixes everything in your life.

I think the more acceptance you have for like my flawed human self is okay, it's gonna be 50 50, I'm gonna get jealous, I'm gonna compare myself, I'm gonna be judgmental. Sometimes I can still love myself and I can work on it, but I don't need to completely change in order to have a good kind of experience here. And I think when I started really figuring out like I'm gonna set these goals just to see what I can do just to experience more of life, just to be an example for other people, just to see what I'm capable of, just to work on different parts of myself. Like for me, I think a lot of this work, what I wanted to do when I wanted to do this podcast and this business was like, I wanna stop being afraid of failing. I wanna stop being afraid of what people think of me.

I wanna stop being a people pleaser. I wanna stop being a perfectionist. I'm gonna do this and it's gonna have a lot of both emotions because that's how I wanna grow. 'cause as I grow in my life, I wanna learn how to like push myself to the boundaries and go after things. And I think that like the more I do that and I stop needing to feel good all the time, I stop needing to feel happy all the time. I stop doing things because I think that's what I need in order to enjoy my life. I can slow down and enjoy this process. I don't need my business to get any bigger. I don't need this podcast to go viral. I don't need any of that. I get to just do this because it's something that uses my creativity and pushes me to think about different things and allows me to help people.

And I can learn and I can grow and I can try to grow it in different ways, but I don't need to get there in order to feel happy. 'cause I know when I get there it's just gonna be another set of stresses and negative emotion. So how do I slow myself down to just enjoy it here? One of the biggest questions I ask myself when I notice when I'm setting a goal and I feel like I need to hit that goal quickly, it's like, oh I need to do this in the next six months or the next year I need to focus and get this done. I always ask like what's my rush? Because there's always the thought that's not real that like once I get there, it'll be better. Once my business grows and I make a million dollars, it'll be better. Once I hire an employee, it'll be better once I do whatever.

And I always have to like bring my, when I ask myself that question, what is my rush? Why am I rushing through my life? It instantly brings me back. 'cause I'm like, I know when my business grows, it's just gonna bring a whole new set of problems. When I hire an employee, I have a whole new set of problems I have to deal with in managing that person, right? Whatever the thing is. When I get this thing that I think I need, it's going to be 50 50 there too. So what if I can still work towards it? I wanna do it 'cause it sounds cool 'cause I wanna make more money. 'cause money is fun and I wanna help more people and I wanna see what it's like to have a business that's over a million dollars. All of those things are fine, but I don't have to be in a rush to get there.

I don't have to do it to prove that I'm a success. I don't have to do it because I think once I get there then I, I can kick my feet up and have rainbows and butterflies everywhere. That's not gonna happen. And I promise you, like when I really understood this concept, it really allowed me to like slow down and actually enjoy my life here. Like what about the 50 50 here? Can I really lean into what are the negative emotions I can kind of choose on purpose to deal with? Like whether that is, you know, the fear of judgment or frustration when I'm doing something hard so that I know on the back of that I have a lot of the good emotions I wanna feel when I achieve it. And so I want you to sit with this concept for a little while, especially if you don't like it.

Especially if you're like, no, there's a place where it's a hundred percent and I wanna get there. That's fine. I just want you to ask yourself like what if? What if that's not true? And what if it's okay that I have both positive and negative emotions all the time? And what if I can learn how to process those and I can learn how to handle those emotions so I'm not so scared of them coming and going and then I can choose goals and my job and my spouse and my partner and my friends for other reasons other than I need these things in order to be happy. I promise you, when you really embrace this concept, it is so liberating. It's like I don't have to change myself. I don't have to be this different person. I don't have to be perfect. I don't have to have every aspect of my life be perfect in order to enjoy my life.

I can enjoy it here. I can have both emotions. I can slow down, I can calm down, and I can actually experience this life as I'm going through it instead of trying to rush to the next thing and the next thing and the next thing.

That's what I want for you my friends. I promise you it will always be both good and bad. And that's actually a pretty cool thing. And if you want help learning how to process those emotions and learning how to manage them so that you're not so afraid of them, that's what we do in my membership, the Quitter Club. I would love to have you in there and to join me as we go deeper in these concepts that you can get coached unlike your own thoughts and your own feelings and you can learn how to deal with them instead of being blindsided by them. You can go to lessonsfromaquitter.com/quitterclub. I hope to see you in there. And if I don't, I'll see you next week here for another episode.

Hey, if you are looking for more in-depth help with your career, whether that's dealing with all of the stress, worry, and anxiety that's leading to burnout in your current career or figuring out what your dream career is and actually going after it, I want you to join me in the Quitter Club. It is where we quit what is no longer working like perfectionism, people pleasing imposter syndrome, and we start working on what does and we start taking action towards the career and the life that you actually want. We will take the concepts that we talk about on the podcast and apply them to your life and you will get the coaching tools and support that you need to actually make some real change. So go to lessonsfromaquitter.com/quitterclub and get on the wait list. Doors are closed right now, but they will be open soon.