The 90:10 Lie - How to Avoid the Negativity Bias (Episode 3)

Brent and Janis Sharpe, licensed therapists, discuss how to be mindful of our natural human negative bias and how our focus determines our attitude toward anything in life.

This podcast should not be considered or used for counseling but for educational purposes only.

Transcript:

Welcome to Life & Love Nuggets, where licensed therapist Brent and Janis Sharp share how you can thrive in your life your love and your relationships.

[Brent]: Hello, welcome to Life & Love Nuggets. We're glad that you're with us today. We're just stepping into a new year. Wow, Christmas, that was something. We had a blast; we've got six little grandbabies and--

[Janis]: We had a great time. I was given the gift of a cold from the grandbabies, so I’m going to sound a little bit off.

[Brent]: These children…

[Janis]: But we had a wonderful time.

[Brent]: Yeah, we had a wonderful, wonderful time with all of our grown children and their spouses and six grandbabies and little grandbabies are wonderful, but little petri dishes and so, sorry that you are not feeling well.

[Janis]: It's okay, it was worth it all.

[Brent]: It was worth it all.

[Janis]: Yes

[Brent]: And so, hopefully you've stepped into a new year with some anticipation, with some-- Hopefully looking for some new things in your life that can be a blessing and strengthen your life going forward. That's what our whole goal here is, is to help you find the best life possible and so, we're going to talk about one of the most significant things today, that we see that crops up over and over and over again in our work and we have-- As we step into a new year, we have an opportunity to develop some new rhythms.

[Janis]: New healthy habits. Most of us are thinking about healthy habits that we want to start for the year and so, we want to develop some healthy habits in our relationship and today specifically, we want to talk about focus or perspective. It's what are we really focusing on? And as humans, we have a negative bias. I mean, you have-- You end up getting a review and maybe eight out of the ten things you get excellent and two things, you get very good, but you can walk away going “oh man, those two areas I’m just really bad at”. So, as humans we do tend to really focus on the negative.

[Brent]: Yeah, and whatever we focus on, ultimately determines our attitude toward the thing and so, that's what we want to look at today and again--

[Janis]: I was thinking about when our kids were little.

[Janis]: And we had the video cameras that were the great big ones that you carried on your shoulder and our kids are always in a lot of productions and so, they would do singing and dancing and acting and I would have this big video camera on my shoulder and I would be trying to record them, but I didn't feel like I could really see them. So, I would lean out a little bit so I could see them, assuming the recording was going. Well, it was, but it was on auto focus and so, I have-- We have hours and hours and hours of video with a close-up of the person's head in front of us and just blurry figures of our children singing and dancing in the background and that's how our mind can be sometimes. Sometimes we're not focusing on the very thing that is important to us.

[Brent]: So, again, whatever you focus on determines your attitude towards a thing and we found this principle we want to talk about, we call it the “90:10 lie” and we found it cropping up. Particularly, we do a lot of affair recovery and we saw it particularly cropping up there and-- But yeah, we've seen it impact so many different areas of our life. That's what we find out in marriage is, you know, all of us-- I mean, we met, oh gosh, 47 years ago now?

[Janis]: Yes

[Brent]: A long time ago and I was submitting with her. I don't know, it took a little while maybe for her to get cement with me, but-- And you know, you remember. If you're married, you remember those moments of “oh my gosh, I have found everything that I’ve ever been looking for” and we just feel swallowed up in this aura of amazement. Well, no one human could ever be 100% of what you're looking for, I mean, that would be idolatry.

[Brent]: I mean, God wouldn't even allow that to happen. What we found out is most of us marry somebody that's about 80% to 90% of what we're looking for in a spouse. Now, as marriage counselors we help people go from 70 to 72 to 75 to 78, 82, 85 maybe, but it's never going to be 100%. The challenge with that is, there are going to be people in the world that do have that 10% or 15% that our spouse doesn't have and it will affect us and if we're not careful, it can begin to poison our attitude towards our spouse and so, we-- Again, we have a negative bias as humans and so--

[Janis]: And it's not just in marriage, I mean, that negative bias is in everything we do. I may think my job is great, but there's this and that really bothers me or you know, my church, it was so wonderful in the beginning, but now there's this and this and this that I don't like. Even our kids, you know? “Yeah, they're such a great kid, but--" and we can easily focus on those negatives and lose sight of all the positives that are in our lives.

[Brent]: Yeah, and we call it a lie because, again, we see this so much in marriage is that, if we focus on the 10% of what I don't have, then it begins to spoil the 90% or the 85% that I have and it affects all of us in some way. On the lower end of the continuum, it will affect us in a way that I just-- It just impacts my attitude. I don't really say anything, but I just-- “I wish my partner was a little bit more like that” or we see somebody that coaches their kids, you know, teams in sports and “I wish my spouse was, you know, able to do that” or “I wish my spouse had this kind of a job or we could have live in this kind of a house” or whatever and it just begins to affect my attitude. Now, we move up the ladder a little bit and the continuum and I now begin to criticize or pick at them and “I wish you could do this different. I wish you could do that different”. We move up continuum a little bit farther and we see people “I have to have that. I cannot live without that”.

[Janis]: Right

[Brent]: And they go after it. Unfortunately, once they get out there, so often they find “I got the 10%”, but then all of a sudden, they become more objective because it's very tunnel vision when you're focused on the ten and you don't have it. They become more objective and begin to go “oh my gosh, I got the 10%, but this person's never going to be the 90% or the 85%” and sometimes, it's hard to get back, sometimes they've burnt the bridge and it's hard to get back and it really begins again to spoil their whole perspective on their partner.

[Brent]: And so, the other challenge behind that is, when it's-- Even though it's only 10%, if it's just that, then I think “oh my gosh, I have to have that”. It's bigger than we think it is.

[Janis]: Yes, it gets magnified.

[Brent]: It gets magnified and so, you know, I was raised with a couple of brothers and we would come home from school all the time and my mom oftentimes had bake some cookies or some brownies or something, they were sitting on the counter and she knew we were hungry and so, she'd say “now, go to the refrigerator, get whatever snack you want, just don't touch the cookies”. All I could think about was the cookies. Because I can't have that, it becomes bigger and so, the key is how do I stay focused on the 85% to 90%?

[Brent]: Now, it doesn't mean we don't have to work on some of the things that the are in the 10% because I can create some conflict or some problems and we have to work on that, but the key is, if I can stay focused, if I can keep that camera lens focused on the 85% or 90%, it just puts the other in proper perspective.

[Janis]: And it's in so many little ways in our lives, it doesn't have to be affair or affair recovery, it's so many little things. Like, I was just thinking this morning, you know, Brent almost always makes our bed, which I’m very thankful for, but there are days that he makes my phone in the bed or my iPad in the bed. Well, I can go “oh my gosh, I can't believe you did that again” or I can focus on the fact of “wow, he makes the bed more than anybody I know. I think Brent would make the bed if he was in a coma” and in marriage counseling a lot of times, I’ll hear people go “my spouse just doesn't load the dishwasher right” and I’m like “they do load the dishwasher, but it's not right” and so, those little things can eat at us and we tend to become critical. We miss all of the great things that they do, because of these little things that we focus on.

[Brent]: Yeah. So, everything we've ever shared with people comes out of stuff we had to learn the hard way.

[Brent]: And so, every couple I’ve ever met in 40 years of working with couples, we tend to be attracted to somebody that is different than we are and we certainly found that it's the greatest potential strength of every relationship. We tell people “if you marry somebody exactly like you, then one of you is unnecessary”. I think God's design is you take difference and you blend it together, so that we can have a greater strength than we could by ourselves.

[Janis]: But it's also the source of almost every conflict that we'll have.

[Brent]: Absolutely

[Janis]: Because we live together and we're imperfect humans and we're married to imperfect humans and so, there's gonna be things that we're gonna run into.

[Brent]: And sometimes the very quality that I appreciate about this person, there's just a part of that personality that will drive us crazy and so, Janis always said that she was attracted to the fact that I’m pretty steady, I don't change a lot. Well, that can get a bit boring and so, she's had to live with boring over the years. I was attracted to the fact that she's very creative and spontaneous and likes to do new things and I love that and yet, sometimes I’m like “oh, we're going to change that now” and so--

[Janis]: But I think over the years we have seen so much value in that, because we've really grown more towards center. Not that we're supposed to be exactly alike, but I appreciate his steadiness, because I don't have to worry when tax season comes or his organization, I should say. He's going to have all the documents there. I don't want to mess with that, I can do that. I’ve done it over the years, but it's kind of like, sticking needles in my eye. So, he can do that and I think you've learned from me over the years the sense of adventure.

[Brent]: Oh, my word.

[Janis]: Let's go on trips, let's go do something fun.

[Brent]: Yes, my life is so much richer because of that and yet, we could have gotten focused on that little part, that little 10% that was bugging us.

[Janis]: Right

[Brent]: And so, how do we stay focused on the positive and deal with the negative? So, we had a situation early in our marriage, one of the ways that we are different is kind of how we keep a closet. When we first started in marriage, for the first couple of years we shared a walk-in closet. Now, you have to understand my personality is very structured, very orderly and I’m probably about that close, very close from needing medication for obsessive compulsive disorder. Janis probably thought I should have been on medication for several years and so, my half of the closet was, she would say, it was kind of perfectly in order. My white shirts were together, my blue shirts were together.

[Janis]: The hangers were a quarter of an inch apart.

[Brent]: I don't remember that part, but she remembers that part.

[Janis]: The shoe trees, I didn't even know what shoe trees were until I married him.

[Brent]: You know, in your dress shoes, you know, to keep them stretched out and so, I had it all lined up, all organized and her half of the closet, again, first couple years of our marriage, there were a few things hung up. There were quite a few things on the floor, there were some things laid over on the edge of a chair.

[Janis]: And in my defense, I was 21 going to grad school and working full-time.

[Brent]: Yes, she were.

[Janis]: Just saying.

[Brent]: And so, but what I found is every time I walked into the closet, all I could see was this pile of clothes and I just like “oh, you got to be kidding me” and I began to focus on that and it began to poison my attitude and so, one day-- Now, I was not incredibly bright at this time, I remember we were 21 - 22 years old. I was not incredibly bright at this time in my life, but I decided I was going to help fix this and I thought if we could get it the right way, because I live-- My personality lives in very much of a right way world, okay? Things need to be done right and so, I decided I was-- I went through the entire house, I picked up all of her stuff, I went in her closet and I organized it before she got home from work. I’d gotten home a little early and I hear her coming in the back door. I went and grabbed her by the hand thinking “oh, she's gonna really appreciate this. I mean, this is going to be so helpful because now that we get it the right way, then she'll be able to keep it like this”.

[Janis]: People are cringing everywhere as they listen to this.

[Brent]: Well, I’m so sorry people.

[Janis]: This is not what we recommend.

[Brent]: Again, it’s not incredibly wise and so, I went and grabbed her by the hand, walk her through the door into the bedroom and I think I said “well, honey, I want to show you what I did for you”. Like, I was doing it for her. She got in the doorway of the closet and froze and she didn't say a word. Her face flushed; I saw tears coming out of her eyes, her little fists clenched. She spun, walked out of the door without a word spoken.

[Brent]: Now, this was like “oh dear, this is not good”.

[Janis]: Yes, it was.

[Brent]: “This is not good”. Now, I’m very thankful for the Holy Spirit. I believe there was an internal voice and I did not hear an audible voice, okay? No writing on the wall, but if I could tell you what hit me, what I was convicted of, the voice said “what are you doing!? I’ve given you a gift here to help you to learn how to relax and stop and smell the roses and not have a heart attack by the age of 40, and you're taking a square peg, you're trying to put it in a round hole. You're gonna kill this”. That's what I felt like I heard the spirit say to me.

[Brent]: It arrested me. At the same time, I felt like all of these really amazing qualities that Janis has came back to me. She's one of the brightest people in every room. She's witty, she's fun-loving, she's creative, she loves beauty, she's spontaneous. Now, I loved all of that stuff.

[Janis]: I really love you saying all of that stuff.

[Brent]: Do you want me to just keep going?

[Janis]: Yeah

[Brent]: Now, I loved all of that stuff, but I wanted all of that and an obsessive-compulsive neat nut in the same package. They usually don't come in the same package and I was focused on that that she wasn't. But as I refocused on all these positive qualities, the closet began to change. Now, you have to understand, you know, I had the closet up close to like world peace or world hunger, you know, it's kind of that important. The closet had settled down into “this is a closet” and it really began to change my attitude. Now, I’ve told that story over the years and I’ve had people say “wait a second. Are you telling me that just because you focused on her positive qualities that the closet never bothered you again?” and I’d have to say “no, no, no, I’m not saying that. What I’m saying is my attitude changed”. My attitude went from “I think you're broken. I think we need to get you fixed here”.

[Janis]: Which again, always goes over well.

[Brent]: It goes over. Into “this is a closet. Honey, there's something that's bugging me. Can we talk about this?”, which is a pretty significant shift.

[Brent]: Now, we didn't-- We train couples in issue resolution strategies, we talk about unproductive ways that people resolve conflict. We didn't know any of that yet, we had just started grad school, we hadn't developed a lot of the things yet and that day probably didn't go real well in our conversations, but the next day, we finally sat down and had a pretty good conversation. Janis was able to say “I just feel like everything I do gets picked at, I feel like I can't do anything right”, which was really grievous to me to hear that. Grieved me a lot.

[Brent]: I think there were times where she felt like, she was nervous coming into the house, because what's the next thing I’m gonna pick at? Which was just really unfortunate.

[Janis]: It's the last thing you wanted me to feed.

[Brent]: Absolutely. I was able to share “I just wish this didn't bother me. When I walk into a space that's kind of disheveled like that, I literally feel anxiety, I feel something physical in my chest. I don't know, just weird, I just wish I didn't” and we sat down and we came up with a plan and this is one of our probably first effective conversations that we had about a conflict.

[Janis]: Issue, yes.

[Brent]: Yeah, but a serious conflict, and we decided we were about ready to leave this apartment and buy our first house and we decided we were only going to look at houses that had separate closets in the master room.

[Brent]: Now, this was in the early 80s, I mean, it was hard to find.

[Janis]: And we found one.

[Brent]: We found one and I said “if you can just get your stuff in the closet, I don't care if you kick it in there, just keep the door closed and I won't say another word about this” and I think you were like “okay”.

[Janis]: It worked for me.

[Brent]: Sweet!

[Janis]: Yeah, I was a different perspective on how we saw things. But when you stopped criticizing me, then I could take a look and go “oh, you know what? He has some good habits that maybe I should adopt. He doesn't have to run around looking for his car keys, he doesn't have to every day. He doesn't have to, you know, sort through his shoes to figure out ‘oh, how can I find two matching ones?’”. He had everything organized and I could learn from him when I wasn't being defensive. But when he was sending me the message or I received the message of “I’m just doing everything wrong; I don't do things well enough”, then my defenses would go up and I being this really sweet person that I am, I tended to be messy. “You think this is messy? Honey, you have not seen messy, like I could do messy.”

[Brent]: “I’ll show you messy”.

[Janis]: So, I learned to adapt and I learned from his habits, which I truly appreciate and I think by now over the years, we've come together in a lot of ways.

[Brent]: Well, I appreciated the fact-- I mean, your personality is such that that before kids, we'd finished eating our dinner meal and she'd go “let's go play tennis” and I’d think “we need to clean up first”. In my family you'd spend the next two hours scrubbing everything from top to bottom and then, if you had any time left in your day, then you might relax and play, which means I didn't know how to relax and play and so, I realized you could go play tennis, come back, clean up the kitchen later and sometimes the next morning and the world wouldn't come to an end and so, I began to kind of pull back a little bit, begin to learn how to relax and learn how to play a little bit more. So, that 25 years ago we bought our final house.

[Brent]: And we now live in a house that has a shared walk-in closet and we do fine.

[Janis]: We do. In fact, right now we're in the process of kind of remodeling it and I’m the one saying we need to switch some of this around and you know, coming up with a new plan to keep it even neater.

[Brent]: And when the first time you said that, I thought “what!? Who are you?”. Now, I was just gonna say the point of this is not that we become the same.

[Brent]: The point of this is that we get the full benefit of the unique differences that we find in our lives together and that we both are thriving, that we're both fully able to be completely who we are and I think that comes from two sources. One of those is “am I focused on the right thing? And do I have that 90% in my focus?” and then, we have to have good healthy conversations about closets.

[Brent]: You know, we still have to resolve conflict and deal with those kinds of issues, but it really comes down to “what are you focused on? And is that capturing my attention?”.

[Janis]: And I also think we have to focus on-- We have to focus on focusing. We have to really make an effort really be intentional to let our spouse know or our kids or people at work or our church or wherever, the positive qualities that we see in them. Because it's so easy to have that little bit of a snarky negative attitude that people pick up on and if we don't speak that to other people, especially your spouse, your kids, the people you live with. If you don't say “you know what? I really appreciate how neat and organized you are. I really appreciate how stable and steady you are”. If we feel like we're constantly being criticized, our defenses go up and so, we're not going to receive anything from the other person.

[Brent]: That’s good.

[Janis]: But if we are if as spouses or parents or whatever, if we are letting people know we value them, that we see good qualities in them, their defenses are going to be lower and it's going to be so much easier for them to receive things, when you do want to talk to them about legitimate issues.

[Brent]: Yeah. So, it's not only keeping my focus, but what I hear you saying is we've got to speak it, right?

[Brent]: To those significant relationships in our life. You know, we saw this as we were pastoring for years, we'd have a family come in and they'd be there for a couple weeks and they’d go “oh, my gosh, this is so amazing! Where have you all been? We're so excited about being here” and inside, I didn't always say this, but inside I’m like “well, just wait. Just wait a few weeks and pretty soon, you'll find something that you don't quite like about what we're doing” and “well, our other church did it this way”. It's just, we just have this negative bias, it's part of our humanity and this is something we have to proactively work out.

[Brent]: To push against that tendency, to just slip into just thinking about what we don't have and what our spouse doesn't have or our children don't have or our job doesn't have or our church doesn't have.

[Janis]: And again, we have to be intentional and so, that's where a lot of times I’ll have people write things down. Just as they think about when we started dating or when I started this job, “why did I take this on? What are the good things that I saw in this that made me want to do this?” and have them somewhere, so that you can see them consistently to remind you of all the good qualities. We see this especially with kids. You know, sometimes your kids go through difficult stages, we have one that just went through-- One of our grandchildren just went-- The three-nager year.

[Brent]: Three-nager?

[Janis]: Yes, and the teenage years and some of those years, where they're just a little bit snarkier. We have to continue to focus on what are the good things that we see in them and speak those good things. Because when people are going through times where they're a little snarkier, generally it's because they're stretched in some way and they need that affirmation, they need that love. So, writing list of the positive qualities that you can see really does make a difference, especially if we focus on them daily. What are the positive things I see in this?

[Brent]: You know, Philippians talks about-- In Philippians 4 says “Finally, beloved, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. Keep on doing the things you've learned and received and heard and seen in me and the God of Peace will be with you”. Peace is what follows focusing on those things and so, as you go today, I want to talk about an action step. We always want to leave you-- That's the counselors in us, that I want to leave you with some action step, how do you actually put this into practice in your life and so, this could be a great exercise with your spouse. Be a wonderful exercise with your children. You might want to do it with your job as we step into a new year or your church, but we have you kind of get a little card or a piece of paper and if I’m doing this with my spouse, I’m going to write Janis at the top and I’m going to list all of those qualities. Maybe pick the top 10 qualities that you believe your partner possesses. Go to each of your children and maybe have a card for each of your kids, what are the top 10 qualities that you appreciate about them?

[Brent]: And for the next 30 days, we're going to be-- We encourage people to do a lot of stuff in 30-day increments because--

[Janis]: It's January, we're all starting new habits.

[Brent]: Yeah, and you know, some people don't like the January, you know, New Year's resolution thing, but I think there's markings, there's different times of the year that people think about “what do I want to do different?”. In our birthdays, “how do I live into my next year differently?”. I think January 1 is one of those times, “how do I want to live differently?”. Now, we all know that a lot of people make a commitment for a few days, they don't last and so, you know, I think people kind of pale in their thoughts about how much help this is. But if it can help you, start January 1 doing this and we write these qualities and then just read over those, one time a day for 30 days. Again, it generally takes at least 30 days to form a habit in our life and so, trying to develop this as a purposeful rhythm.

[Brent]: I think we have to purposely move away from that natural tendency to think about the negative and focus on the positives. Pray through that list, read it through and then look for every opportunity where your child displays one of those qualities and just get into practice of verbally affirming them. Do that with your spouse, when you see them display one of these things, tell them about it. “I so appreciate this in you” and just see what happens, just kind of try it, test us in this, see what happens in 30 days and see if it doesn't begin to change your heart and your attitude and it keep you in a healthy rhythm a healthy, a healthy way of living in this new year.

[Brent]: So, here we go.

[Janis]: Here we go.

[Brent]: 2023. Can you believe it?

[Janis]: We're ready for it.

[Brent]: Here we go. Well, go in peace, blessings to you in your new year.

The Life & Love Nuggets podcast should not be considered or used for counseling, but for educational purposes only.