(Photo by China Doll)
What a glorious day!
When is this day going be over with?
People tend to have mixed emotions in regards to many areas of their lives
From friends to family, relationships to work, and everything in between, people seem to have roller-coaster reactions to the many things that happen in our day to day lives
This roller-coaster is not in fact a new attraction that you can find at Six Flags, but rather it is a state of mind known as ambivalence
What is ambivalence? Why should I care? Wouldn’t I rather be on a rollercoaster for fun than living in one?
Good old Wikipedia defines ambivalence as,
Ambivalence is a state of having simultaneous, conflicting feelings toward a person or thing. Stated another way, ambivalence is the experience of having thoughts and emotions of both positive and negative valence toward someone or something.
All of us experience ambivalence in our lives
You have a partner and at times you feel as if you want to simultaneously ravish them and put corks in your ears
You love your parents but also find yourself wanting to tell them to mind their own business
You live for the the feeling of driving a stick shift on the autobahn, but you want to take a shotgun to your car when you hit rush hour
The examples go on and on, but the underlying feeling remains the same
You can love and hate something in the same moment
Now I’m sure your thinking, “That’s awesome Gabriel, by why the hell, $%^&, heck, (Insert explicative) should I care?” 😉
When you feel powerful emotions about anything in life, it creates a massive amount of energy inside your self
Its passion, hatred, love, and power all wrapped into one not-so-neat package of chaos
While you could unleash these feelings on yourself, others, or in the form of a shotgun to your broken down car, why not use this immense amount of energy to benefit your life somehow?
Ambivalence can be used as a tool for motivation and better control in your life
I don’t need to guide you to capturing the moments of ambivalence in your life
When any ambivalence-laced moment occurs, you instantly know it
You can feel the range of emotions run through you like a downstream current through the Amazon
When you feel that energy inside you, you can capture it by directing it towards something that could use that passion
I remember when I had gotten pulled over by a police officer for the umpteenth time a few years back
My heart was racing and I knew I was going to get a ticket the minute I got a ticket
As the officer approached my car with my papers in hand, he did of course have a long grene piece of paper, aka my next 180$ adventure
After he walked away I felt angry, sad, stressed, a whirlpool of emotions were abound
As I walked into the bar that night, I had an epiphany amidst all the cursing and worrying
As I watched the beautiful girls dancing, people smiling and spending time with their friends, I realized how much I love meeting new people and going out to experience new things
In that moment I was on, in the moment, in the zone, everything looked and felt luminescent
I felt all my emotions reach a boiling point, and then blow off like steam right onto the people I struck up for a conversation
It wasn’t anger, or sadness, or happiness
It was merely me on steroids
I realized that I was taking part in one of my passions in life, and my emotions were merely fuel to the fire, and it felt sweet
Now I might be sounding like a hippie who has had one too many mushrooms, but the fact of the matter is that this technique is used by many people already, they just don’t know it
When an artist is feeling the bitter sweet feelings of a breakout, they channel those feelings onto canvas and give us some of the most beautiful paintings and sculptures that have ever graced a museum
When a body builder get into a heated argument with a friend and goes to the gym that day, he uses that anger and bitterness to push himself to a new weight limit on the bench press
Or when wife gets flustered by her husband for not taking out the trash for the millionth time, she focuses her frustration and sadness on making the kitchen sparkle that much more when she is cleaning
This is channeling ambivalence in action, and the benefits speak for themselves:
So when you feel a swirl of emotions inside you, harness it, and channel it into something that you love
Whether you are painting, writing, playing a sport, working on a project, or even going for a workout, this bundle of inner energy and produce some of the most amazing results for your life, even things that you never thought possible
I want to hear about the next time you encounter ambivalence in your life. Email me or leave a comment on this article and let me know how you used it to do something amazing
Gabriel
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