242. Emotional Reality

I’m Jody Moore and this is Better Than Happy episode 242: Emotional Reality.

This podcast is for people who know that living an extraordinary life is not easy or comfortable, it’s so much better than that. This is Better Than Happy and I’m your host, Jody Moore.

Hey, everybody. Welcome to the podcast. So thrilled that you’re here today to join me for this episode on emotional reality. This is going to be a really fun episode. It’s a concept I’ve been thinking about and sort of playing with for a while, and I think I’m ready to share it with you here.

If you’re new to the podcast, then welcome. Thanks for giving this a try. I highly recommend that you go grab the podcast Roadmap if you like what you hear after this episode. It will just walk you through the eight episodes that I recommend you listen to, to get yourself up to speed on the basic concepts that I teach, and then go ahead and, of course, listen to any other one that sounds interesting to you after that, but those eight episodes will give you the foundation for everything that you need to know to basically change your life.

I’m not exaggerating. I get messages all the time from people whose lives are changed. I certainly was able to change my life and still am changing my life through these tools. So, go to JodyMoore.com/Map. That’s where you get the podcast Roadmap. We’ll link it in the show notes, but you’re going to want to have that.

Let’s talk about emotional reality for just a minute. I’m constantly trying to teach you guys that what’s happening outside of you isn’t creating your reality, first of all. It isn’t the reason for your experience. The way your husband is, and the way your kids are, and the way your bank account is, and the size of your body, and all of those things are not creating your current experience. Your brain is creating your current experience.

Now, many of you have been listening for a long time, and you know intellectually, conceptually, that that’s true, and yet we still have situations in our life where we don’t see that. We all have blind spots, including myself, where we don’t want to believe that, and that’s okay. The goal isn’t to become a robot. The goal isn’t to become happy all the time. That’s not the goal.

I think that we have negative emotion to drive us to become more of who we have the potential of becoming, as well as help us contribute more in the world. It’s not to say that we don’t want to work to make things better, and it’s not to say that you wouldn’t want to change a circumstance sometimes that’s challenging to one that’s easier.

I’m all for doing all of those things, but we want to do all of that with the background knowledge that our brains are going to come with us. We’re going to always have a human brain that’s going to do what human brains do, which is going to be to create some negativity as it is supposed to.

One of the tools that I have created that I want to share with you today to try to help you wrap your head around and get just more awareness of the truth of that in your own life is this idea of emotional reality. Each of us have constructed for ourselves an emotional reality. It’s the way that we believe the world is. It’s what we think is just true and what we think is real.

Now, it’s not the same for all of us. We’ve all constructed our own slightly different realities in terms of what we think is true and real. Sometimes we call this a personality. We describe certain people as having certain personalities, which is sort of their demeanor. It’s the way that they are, the way they show up, the way they view the world, the way they tend to feel, which drives the way that they show up on a regular basis, and it’s all based on their emotional reality.

Now, when we’re young kids, we’re still in the process of creating this reality, although some of it comes pre-wired within us. Some of it is just something we inherit, part of our DNA, part of our genes, but some of it is moldable, and changeable, and it’s in a lot of flux as we grow up, as we’re young kids. Kids’ brains are more neuro plastic than adults. So, it’s not as easy to identify in a kid, although there is a lot of it there.

This emotional reality I want to offer to you is a mental construct that creates the way that you feel on the regular. Now, of course, we all experience an entire range of emotions, and there are times when we feel happier and times when we feel more sad. There’s times when we’re grumpy. There’s times when we’re frustrated. There’s times when we’re irritable, and then other times when we feel peaceful, and joyful, and amused, and all of those other positive emotions.

I don’t mean to say that you live there all the time, but again, if you think about someone’s personality, the way you would describe the way that person seems to feel and then therefore act on the regular, that’s what I’m talking about in terms of an emotional reality.

In order to understand what your emotional reality is, I want you to picture a wall that’s made of bricks. Each brick in the wall is a part of your emotional reality. Maybe you have a guilt brick in your wall. Maybe you tend to feel guilt off and on in your life. Maybe you feel guilty, and you think it’s because you leave your kids at home while you go do whatever it is you do. You go to work, or you go to the gym, or whatever it is that you’re doing.

You think you feel guilty because of that action that you’re taking, because the thing you’re doing, but we know that that’s not the reason you feel guilty. The reason you feel guilty is because of your thoughts. Your brain is looking to fill that guilt brick in. So, if you feel guilty because you work, and you leave your kids at home, and you have thoughts about that, we could change up the circumstance. You could quit your job. You could not leave the house anymore. You could just stay home

Now, temporarily, you might feel less guilt, but eventually, remember, if you have a guilt brick in your emotional reality wall, then your brain is going to look for another reason to fill it in. Eventually, you’re going to be like, “You know why I feel guilty now? Because I’m not contributing to the family income. I feel guilty because I’m not going to the gym on the regular. I’m not working out. I’m not taking care of myself.”

You’re just going to find all new reasons eventually to feel guilty if there’s a guilt brick in your wall. Maybe you have a brick of just general dissatisfaction, a general dislike of things. Then your brain is looking out for, “What can we dislike today? What do we dislike about this town where we live, or this house we live in, or this movie we saw this?”

Whatever it is, if there’s a dissatisfaction brick, “It’s just not very good, it just could be better, it should be better,” then we’re going to find a way to fill that brick. We can keep changing circumstances, we can keep moving, probably eventually our brain will catch up to us if we have a dissatisfaction brick.

Now, maybe you have a brick of resentment and self-pity, something along those lines, I promise you will always be able to find a reason that other people aren’t showing up the way they should, or your life is hard or unfair, and we can keep swapping out circumstances over and over again. But eventually, we’re going to find a new way to satisfy that brick in our emotional reality wall.

Now, this all sounds very negative and doom and gloom, but guess what? The good news is you probably have a lot of really awesome good feeling bricks in that emotional reality wall as well. You probably have gratitude, hopefully, is a brick in your wall, and you’ll occasionally find things to be grateful for.

Even though we have an abundance of things to be grateful for, and so even though we might be grateful in the moment, eventually, we start taking it for granted and we stop noticing it. There will probably be something else though that you will fill in that gratitude brick with if you have gratitude in your emotional reality.

If you have a general belief that’s part of your personality that drives you, that says, “I’m pretty lucky, I have a pretty good life,” then even though what you fill in, the circumstance you use to fill in that brick might change, you’ll probably continually find reasons to fill that brick in your wall.

Maybe you have a brick of amusement. I like to have fun. I noticed that life is fun and it can be fun. So, I think I have a brick of amusement in my emotional reality wall. It’s not that my life is more fun. It’s not that I just have a more enjoyable situation. It’s that part of my personality is humor, and lightheartedness, and fun, amusement. So, I find reasons to fill in that wall. When the circumstance changes, then I feel a little bit out of sorts until I can find a new thing to fill in that brick with.

For example, I used to work in corporate America. I had a lot of different jobs in corporate, but one job in particular when I was a telemarketer selling things on the phone basically. I worked with a group of people that were really fun, and we used to find ways to make that job more enjoyable. I used to laugh with those people and have a lot of fun with some of my fellow sales team members.

Now, when that job changed, or I left that position, I actually ended up moving out of that town to somewhere totally different and took a different position, then that reason for filling in my amusement brick went away, but then eventually, I found another one because I’m looking for that, because my emotional reality says, “There are parts of life that are funny. There are parts of life that are enjoyable. There are parts of life that are amusing.”

Then I’ll constantly look for the new circumstance that I can use then to have thoughts about that will create that emotion for me. You see what I’m saying? Until I do, I’m going to feel uncomfortable because my emotional reality is off balance.

So, this emotional wall that we have. and I dare say that we probably each have about 10 to 12 bricks in our emotional reality wall, they’re just the way that we think the world is, the way that we think that we are, the way we think we should “feel”, or the way that we’re really used to feeling on the regular.

Our brains love familiarity. They like comfort. We like to feel the same way that we’ve always felt because then we can believe that our emotional reality is actual reality, is the truth about the way the world works. Nothing feels scarier to us than to believe that we’re wrong about all of this, and we actually don’t know how the world works at all, and we’ve been misled or tricked in some way. We don’t want to believe that.

We want to think that we understand what’s real and what’s true. So, we desperately want that emotional reality wall to be satisfied in different ways. This is both a blessing and a curse because on the one hand, if I like the feeling of amusement, and I’m pretty good at finding a way to be amused with my life, then that’s serving me well, and I want to keep it. Same with gratitude. Same with joy. Same with happiness. Same with love. All these positive emotions that we experience on the regular.

It’s great that our brains will find ways to fill them in, even if the thing that we thought was providing it changes. But it’s a struggle when we have some negative bricks in the wall that we want to swap out. It’s a struggle when we think, “If I could just solve this one problem, then I would feel better.”

Let’s take a particular circumstance like your marriage, for example. This is something I hear a lot in coaching. I’ll hear, “My husband is so great. We have a great marriage. We get along really well about most things. There’s just this one thing that’s a problem. It’s just that he doesn’t really get along with my parents very well. If it weren’t for that, then our marriage would just be great all the time,” or, “It’s just our sex life, that we have different drives and different desires and needs when it comes to sex, and if we could just solve that one thing, then our marriage would be perfect, it seems like.”

I hear this over and over again, and what I tell people is, “No, if we solved that one problem, that one circumstance, then, yeah, you would feel some relief, and it would seem like everything was perfect, but eventually, you would fill in that brick in your emotional wall with the one other thing that just isn’t quite right. It would just be something different.”

They’ll tell me, “Oh, no, but this is the only problem we’ve had in all our 18 years of marriage.” I’m like, “Yeah, because you haven’t had to try to fill in that brick with anything else. Your brain has already had that situation to occupy that brick in your emotional reality wall, and so, it hasn’t looked for anything else.”

This is true about anything. Some of you have one thing about yourself that you’re just like, “Gosh, if I could just fix this one thing about me, if I just could lose these 20 pounds, then I really think I would love myself. It’s the one thing that I use to beat myself up. It’s the one area of self-loathing where if I just could achieve this goal, if I could just get to this one thing I’m trying to accomplish in the world, if I could just make that happen, then I really think I would be so confident because that’s the thing that I used to beat myself up.”

You know what? Your brain thinks, “We’re pretty good in a lot of ways, but there’s one way, it’s a big way, but there’s one area where we’re not good, where we’re not cutting it, where we’re not enough.” As soon as we swap out that circumstance, temporarily, your brain would settle down.

Your brain would be like, “Now, we’ve made it,” but then your emotional reality wall would catch up to you, and you’d be like, “Oh, you know what is actually really wrong now is this thing. I didn’t notice it before because I was so busy worrying about the other thing that’s wrong with me, but now that I’ve solved that, I’m starting to realize this actually is a problem too, this one thing about me.”

This is the nature of being a human being. It’s like emotional reality Whack-A-Mole. We solve for one, and then why does something else always come up? Why is it that as we change circumstances, we don’t have the lasting happiness, and relief, and peace that we thought we would, and that we maybe even do have temporarily? It’s because of our brains.

Now, what do we do about this then? Is this a problem? Is this just, “Okay, let’s just agree that half our lives are going to be uncomfortable?” Yes and no. Here’s what I think. I talk a lot about the 50/50 concept that I learned from my teacher, Brooke Castillo, who also talks a lot about this because we found that as we teach our clients to accept that 50% of the time your brain is going to tell you something is wrong and be dissatisfied, then we actually get a lot of relief and peace, and we don’t have to fight against all of it.

I do think that there’s a lot of you listening who are living with more than 50% negative emotion at least in a certain area of your life. If you have more than 50% negative emotion about your relationship, or about yourself, or about your money. Most people I find have an area of their life where they’re out of that 50/50 proportion. They’re like 70% negative emotion.

Or I’ve coached people who are not allowing the 50% negative, and it’s not a problem until it is a problem, and now, they’re sort of stuck with like, “Wait a second. What do I do? I’ve been the happy, easygoing, never stressed out person, but all of these traumatic events have happened. I’ve been resisting emotion. I haven’t been living into the 50% reality that is probably healthy. So, how do I deal with that now?”

If you’re in either one of those situations, if you have a circumstance in your life, a situation, a particular area of your life, where you notice you have more than 50% negative emotion, or you haven’t been allowing the 50%, and it’s creating a problem for you, then we need to take a look at your emotional reality wall.

We don’t need to look at every brick, and we don’t need to change every brick, but we want to pick one or two. We want to get you to a 50/50 balance. We also want to help you realize that all of it’s created by your thinking. So, I call it emotional reality because it is your reality. It feels real to you, but I want you to be able to take ten steps back, and take a look at your wall, and know that it is just an illusion that your brain is creating.

None of it is non-negotiable. It’s all up for grabs. We just want to be selective about which parts we want to take a look at, about the parts that aren’t serving you. The goal is to ultimately change out some of those bricks in your wall, like a worry brick, for example.

Some of you have worry in your emotional reality wall, and it is possible to get rid of that brick altogether. Not just to solve the problem that your brain is worried about. Not just to try to control circumstances in the world and manipulate the things around you to try to prevent anything bad from happening. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about removing the worry brick from your wall and replacing it with a brick like peace.

That is available to you. That is some deeper work though. That is much deeper than just manipulating circumstances. That is much deeper than just solving for one problem at a time as they come. That comes from questioning some of your core beliefs. It’s sometimes uncomfortable. I won’t lie. It’s not as easy as just flipping a switch.

It’s not as easy sometimes as just solving for the problem outside of you, but when we completely remove worry from your emotional reality wall and we replace it with peace, then it is a change that will impact every area of your life, and it will be a life-long available change to you. It will be you actually changing your personality. Did you know this? You can change your personality, you guys. I’ve seen it happen over and over again with my clients. Worry is a great example of it.

I have clients who will tell me, “I used to worry all the time until I started doing all the work that I’ve done in Be Bold.” It’s not as simple as just hearing a cute quote on Pinterest, that can be a good start, but genuinely removing the worry brick and replacing it with a peace brick. It takes some time, it takes some repetition, it takes some deep level of awareness, but that is the work that I’m trying to help people do, and that’s what my work is about as a coach.

So, for the purposes of this podcast, I want you to just see if you can become aware of what your emotional reality is. If you have an emotional wall with 10 to 12 bricks in it, what are those bricks in that wall? What are the emotions that you live from on the regular? Your brain will always find reasons to fill in the wall with circumstances. It will. That’s its job. That’s what it’s supposed to do. It’s very good at doing it.

We want to identify what those bricks are. We want to take a look at any of them that aren’t serving you, and we want to get to the root cause of them, which is, again, your fundamental core belief system. We don’t need to question anything that’s serving you, but the ones that aren’t, we definitely want to dive into. I hope that you’re finding there’s a lot of podcast episodes here that are designed to help you do that. We can certainly take all of that to the next level in Be Bold.

So if you’re not in there or you’re not working with a coach, I highly recommend that you get a coach. In Be Bold, we do this through the classes and the coaching programs, but we also have private coaching if you want a little one-on-one attention to take it to the next level. So, make sure you check that out if you haven’t.

All right, you guys. Emotional reality, pretty powerful thing to take a look at in yourself. Do not judge yourself for what you find there. There’s nothing wrong. We just want to take a look at it and see if we want to switch up your reality a little bit. Pretty fun work to do. Thanks for joining me today, you guys. I will see you next week on another episode.

If you have a question about something you’ve heard me talk about on this podcast or anything else going on in your life, I want to invite you to a free public call. Ask Jody Anything. I will teach you the main coaching tool I use with all of my clients in the way to solve any problem in your life, and we will plug in real life examples. Come to the call and ask me a question anonymously or just listen in. Go to JodyMoore.com/AskJody and register before your miss it. I’ll see you there.