Balance

We all struggle to find a balance to our lives. What does balance really mean? What does it look like? How can we achieve this? What is reasonable?

Transcript

Welcome to Life,

Lessons and Laughter with your host Glenn Ambrose.

Hello,

Welcome to Life,

Lessons and Laughter.

You paused again every week.

I will always pause.

We ended the last episode with saying that you can never remember the name of stuff.

I know and I'm going to do that.

That's going to be my thing now.

Oh yeah,

Forgetting the name of your own podcast.

I'm going to do that with every show,

With every workshop.

I'm going to put in this little pause and it will be known as the Glenn Pause.

That is taking a negative and turning it into a positive.

Absolutely,

I'm going to trademark it.

Which we should do a podcast on sometime.

However,

Not today because today we're talking about.

.

.

Drum roll.

Balance.

Oh my god.

Yeah,

Balance,

Life balance.

So basically we're going to talk about what it is and what it ain't.

Is it like the yin and the yang?

No.

Is it like.

.

.

This isn't Ben guesses when we're talking about time.

No,

You don't need to guess,

I'll actually tell you.

You guys couldn't see it but I just.

.

.

He was waiting with bated breath.

Yes.

I realize this is not a visual medium.

No,

No.

All we'd be doing is laughing.

Video podcast coming soon.

It's not.

Don't expect that.

No.

Anyhow,

Back to balance.

Balance is really good to have.

And it's bad not to have.

A lot of times people think balance is getting everything in order.

I like to say it's like 33% of three things.

You get the work and you get the family and then you get the hobbies and you have it all balanced out and it's just perfect and then you try to maintain it.

And that is a recipe for disaster.

It's not going to happen.

It's that.

99% that's left that's going to kill you.

That throws it all off.

Yeah,

No.

It's that life always changes.

The only thing that we know is that everything changes.

So it's never going to be a set.

You're never going to have the right job,

The right relationship,

The right hobbies and everything and just wake up every morning,

Go to work,

Come home,

Do your thing,

Go to bed and nothing ever happens in your life.

It's just that's not how life is.

And I mean honestly it'd be really,

Really boring if it did.

What kind of life would that be?

But it doesn't matter.

It doesn't happen anyway.

So we don't want to fall into the habit of trying to keep everything perfectly balanced.

With everything changing,

Life is more like a dance.

It's constantly moving,

Constantly evolving and changing and shifting.

And it's not that we can't have a go-to point or a settling point that's like 33% of three things.

We can get back to that when we can.

It's just expecting it to stay there isn't going to happen.

So there might be times when you might have to go on a business trip.

Well work's going to obviously take up more of your time on something like that than family is for that week.

It's just going to happen.

And sometimes there's an emergency in your life with your family.

And then everything else gets dropped.

You might have to miss work completely that day or that week.

Things in life happen and we need to be able to shift and move with them.

And then get back to our balance,

Our go-to,

Back to the 33% of three things once things level back out.

The two things that people often do is when work starts taking too much of their time,

They'll just continue to go with that and never get back to spending more time with the family.

That's when the problems come in is when either we don't let work ever take up more than a certain period of our time.

If it never takes up,

Sometimes work needs a little bit more attention,

Just a little.

Then we can get back and get back to our balance.

Sometimes family does but a lot of times people will start going in the direction of their business and also next thing you know five years goes by and they look and they haven't spent hardly any time with their family.

How did I get here?

Well your balance shifted over to the work and you never shifted it back.

You have to look at that big picture and shift it back once the situation is over.

So does balancing look a lot less like a straight line and more like juggling?

It's kind of like juggling.

I'm careful about that reference just because.

.

.

Balancing has a bad connotation to it,

Like you're trying to do too many things,

Keeping too many balls in the air.

Exactly.

It's so much work.

It's more like skiing and going back and forth.

It can be dancing.

You know what?

I think I heard a smart man say that balance was like a dance.

Kind of.

I don't remember his name.

What's his middle name?

Eloishia.

Eloishia?

No,

Not really.

We promised that this week we would find out Glenn's middle name.

Yes,

And it is not Eloishia.

But we will know by the end of the.

.

.

Stay tuned for the entire half hour.

We will find out by the end.

What a teaser.

That's what you do.

That's how you keep them rolling.

What if I spoil it right now by just saying it?

Don't do it.

Oh,

Come on.

I want to so bad.

No,

You can't.

We have to build the tension.

Oh,

You're right.

I'll try to do it your way.

I'm not a producer.

All right.

So juggling,

Bad.

No,

Bad.

Bad.

Bad juggling.

Bad.

Dancing.

Dancing.

Dancing is not very balanced for me.

It can be.

Just shifting your weight side by side.

Just going with the flow.

It's a lot more like that.

We have to make sure that we're not trying to maintain this perfect order in our lives because we're never going to do that.

But when we do shift out of it,

We need to be able to get back to a little bit more balanced life.

I was just going to say on a serious note,

I feel like the big thing about balance is not.

.

.

A lot of times we do feel like we're juggling and that we're trying to make everything a straight line and keep it good.

But in reality,

If you are trying to balance everything and you fall a little bit towards one side,

All you have to do is just concentrate on making sure that you go back a little bit more to the left side.

You know?

That's it.

That's it.

And the part of it is knowing that it's going to happen.

It's this unrealistic expectation that life is going to be perfect.

That's where a lot of our suffering comes in.

It's like when we get a flat tire,

It's this feeling that it shouldn't have happened.

Oh my God.

It's just wrecked my day and wrecked my week and I got this flat.

That's life.

I mean,

Why shouldn't it have happened?

Sometimes there are sharp things in the road and you hit them with your tire.

Things like that happen.

Sometimes somebody has an accident.

One thing we do very well is when there's an emergency,

We're usually a little bit better at it because we're not thinking so much.

You know,

Our thinking is the thing that screws everything up.

It's that damn mind that gets in the way.

But when the thinking gets suspended and we just need to react,

We usually do a better job.

If there's some emergency with your family,

You drop everything and run to the hospital.

Boom.

You just do it.

You don't think about it.

Then once it's taken care of,

You might go back to work either that day or the next day or whatever.

You do what you need to and then you get back into your routine.

And that is what life looks like.

A lot of the suffering comes with thinking that it's not supposed to look like that.

Like there are never supposed to be accidents.

There's never supposed to be anything that's going to take us away from our routine.

This induced suffering that we put on ourselves thinking that everything is supposed to stay perfect.

What happens is if you're not careful with this mindset,

Like this mindset as I'm saying it,

I can kind of get the feeling that people might be like,

Yeah,

I kind of get what he's saying.

It's not that big of a deal.

But if you walk around living like that and then five years,

10 years later,

You look back on your life,

You're unhappy a lot of the time because every time life happens,

Which is a lot,

You think that it shouldn't be happening.

So you have resistance to life happening.

You know what this sounds like to me a lot is improv.

When I took improv class at school in New York,

They really taught a little bit about that the style of improvisation for actors is basically just mimicking life and that it helps you a great deal in life because it's just dealing with things as they come.

A classically trained actor,

As most people start out as when they get into it,

Is all about the lines and trying to make everything perfect and knowing that this is how this is supposed to be and this is it.

Then when you walk into improv,

It switches your mind around because they're like,

Everything is supposed to happen.

You have to accept it and deal with it and move on.

Balance,

What you're saying is balance sounds a lot like that,

Which I think is why so many people now in America,

So many big businesses now have improv classes and improv teachers that are actors come in to teach people how to deal with life or business in a way of like,

It's going to happen and you need to not expect that it's the most awful,

Horrible thing in the world.

And that's a big point,

Correct me if I'm wrong,

But I believe the first thing that they teach you in those classes or one of the first things is that the answer is always yes.

There is no no.

So that's exactly what we need to do when we're coming at life.

I touched on this in other podcasts.

Yeah,

It was a couple of podcasts ago.

There's always going to be overlaps like this with the podcast,

But that's it.

It's always saying yes to life.

It doesn't mean that you need to be happy about an accident happening or your priorities getting pulled away from your family to into your business.

Sometimes that's going to happen.

It's not like you have to say,

Oh,

Yes,

I like it when this happens.

You know,

It goes back to that getting back on track as soon as it's over.

But it's saying yes to it,

Dealing with it and then getting back to to your routine.

Yeah,

Absolutely.

Because it's it's the the similarities in the acting class of like if you and I are improvising a scene together and we've not talked about it at all beforehand and we're kind of like this.

Right.

And we've gotten one and we've got one direction of it,

Which is that it takes place at a restaurant.

And I say like,

Oh,

I like the calamari here.

You have to accept you can't go.

You're wrong.

Right.

Yes,

Calamari is good.

No one else is good.

Right.

You know,

To keep it going.

And vice versa.

If you say this is where the flat tire situation comes in,

Because that's you're at a restaurant.

Cool.

Like you're at a restaurant.

I say there's calamari.

That's what you expect me to say.

You expect me to say something that makes sense.

When we balance our lives,

We expect things to happen in a way that makes sense.

When the person across from me,

However,

I say,

Calamari is great here.

And you say,

Yeah,

I wonder how they transported it here to the moon,

Which is the thing that everybody always goes straight for the moon.

My response to that has to accept that you just said that we're on the moon.

Right.

The moon is a flat tire.

Exactly.

It's somebody throwing a monkey wrench into what you had as this nice,

Perfect little scene.

Yes.

And when you throw that monkey wrench in,

You have to go with it.

Yes.

Because it stops you dead in your tracks.

If I say,

No,

This isn't the moon.

And that's exactly what happens in life.

So it's confronting your.

.

.

Yeah,

You've got two choices.

You either go with life or you build up resistance to it.

You put a block up against life.

You know,

And that's exactly what you were talking about.

You know,

Whether you're talking about the improv of life,

It is.

You're right.

It's exactly the same thing.

If I go with it,

Then I'm going with life.

If I resist it,

Then I'm putting up a block and I'm stopping it.

So which,

Well,

I'm trying like hell to stop it.

What happens is it just gets real ugly.

But you can't because it's already there.

It's already out there.

It's already out there.

It's already happened.

It's already resistance and this is resistance to what is.

What's more futile than that?

Resisting something that already is.

It is.

So you need to go with it.

And so you go with it.

But we always and I'm going to reference like 62 different podcasts,

Even though we don't have that many.

I think this is like 12.

Yeah,

I think we're fine.

Yeah.

It's,

You know,

Resisting what is,

Is having false expectations of your life.

It's,

You know,

It's all this stuff that.

That's why I want to do a podcast on this balance because it shows.

It can affect your life in so many different ways.

If you are resisting what is.

Well,

Changes are going to happen.

You need to be able to go with them and expect them and not judge them as bad every time they happen because you're going to be miserable if you're doing that.

You know,

Just go with it.

Do what you need to do and get back on track as soon as you can.

Yeah.

You know,

But huge.

It is huge.

It's,

It's going with the flow of life as opposed to,

You know,

The getting the ducks in a row.

And it's,

I always,

You know,

I like,

I like funny visuals.

It's like you get your ducks in a row.

They're never going to stay there.

If you're lucky enough to actually get them in a row,

You know,

One of them is going to keel over.

Somebody is going to kick one over.

It's just not going to,

They're not going to stay in a row.

It's just not going to happen.

Once you get them in a row,

You can never just turn around and lead them and not look back.

Something,

No something,

You know,

One of them is going to,

Their attention is going to get grabbed because of a piece of food on the ground or something.

These damn ducks.

You can't trust them.

You can't trust a duck.

No,

You should never trust a duck.

You shouldn't trust anything that waddles like a duck that has webbed feet and beak.

How can you trust something?

What are we talking about?

I don't know.

I just had to break left,

Man.

It was just too serious.

Give a duck's name.

Give the name of a duck.

Quacker.

I was hoping you were just going to say your middle name.

Well,

See,

You just resisted what I did right there.

Why didn't you go with it?

So you want to do an improv exercise?

No,

I don't want to do that because I will lose and this is my podcast and that's not fair.

There are no winners or losers,

Glenn.

We're a team.

We're working together.

Yeah,

So as long as we stay on not doing an improv.

I was just trying to get you to say your middle name,

Which we will get to before the end of the half hour.

Glenn Ambrose's middle name on this episode.

And I bet you're all on the edge of your seats with that one.

I mean,

How can you just stand it?

You know what it is?

Last week's episode,

Or two weeks ago's episode,

We were so far over into the life and lessons side of it when we were talking about fear that we needed to add a little bit of balance and bring some laughter back into the podcast.

I see what you did there.

I see what you did there.

You brought in this episode.

Does that make sense?

Yeah,

Kind of.

I'm going to give it to you.

Thank you.

You're welcome.

It works.

Yeah.

You know what it is also?

Just I'm going to pull back the curtain a little bit here.

Uh-oh.

But we usually record two episodes at a time.

I know.

It's okay.

It's okay for them to find out.

They see the wizard.

It doesn't happen on Sunday morning.

We usually record two episodes at a time.

Second episode,

Always goofier.

Yeah.

Always.

Loosen up.

First episode,

We're always like,

And then this happens,

And then this happens,

And then this is the answer to your problems.

We're going to have to release them in reverse sometimes every once in a while.

Yeah,

We're going to have to.

I think we do.

Maybe we do.

But.

I have some pretty good producers,

So they probably think that out.

The other,

No.

You have one good producer,

And you have one me.

That's compliments for Dave DeAngelis.

He shrugged.

He's resisting what is,

Which is that he's talented.

All right.

What about the control freaks?

What about the people that are anal retentive and OCD,

And damn it,

They're going to get those ducks in a row.

Yeah.

You know,

The more people I work with,

The more I see the OCD thing.

So many people have at least a portion of that.

I'm starting to think it's almost a norm,

To be honest with you.

I think that people have,

I mean,

I've seen it in myself,

And what I've done with it that I've seen work for myself and others is when you see yourself behaving in some OCD ways,

Just simply try not to do that.

If you notice you're checking the door three times to see if it's locked,

Or just say when you notice yourself doing that,

Be like,

I'm going to make myself not do that because I don't want to fall into the pattern.

Then just apply some effort and then stop yourself from doing that.

You know what?

It works amazingly.

I've seen it work with tons of people.

Just little things like that.

We don't fall into that pattern.

It's where I see it become a problem is where people just allow themselves to do that,

And then another thing creeps up,

And then they feel that they have to,

And then they do that.

Then another thing,

Next thing you know,

Five,

10 years goes by and everything's OCD.

I think we all have that aspect of us.

Control makes us feel safe,

So we give ourselves the illusion of control.

That's really what we're talking about here is control is an illusion.

We don't have it.

We can't control life.

Life is going to flow,

And we need to flow with it.

If we think that we're in control of life,

Life's going to set us straight.

Reviews

Wow! Crammed with good points! I especially liked the duck part!! Thanks gentlemen 💜 x

Great convo guys! I love your eirk

Wonderful, thank you!

I’m binge listening to these!

Fun! Great wisdom imparted with much laughter! Just what my inner doctor prescribed.

Glenn always mindful guidance in plain English 🙏🏻 ❤and your full name is kinda a tongue twister...hehe🦋🌸