De-Compartmentalizing Your Life

Today's episode focuses on breaking down the walls between areas of your life. Often we focus on bettering the parts of our life that have caused us pain first. Unfortunately it is impossible to truly separate who you are in one area from another.

Transcript

Welcome to Life,

Lessons and Laughter with your host,

Glenn Ambrose.

Hello.

Welcome to Life,

Lessons and Laughter with Glenn Ambrose.

How are you,

Ben?

I'm good.

How are you?

I'm ducky.

We did it.

We did it.

We nailed it.

Well,

Now we didn't.

So now we are talking about not compartmentalizing your life.

Living all areas of your life the same way,

Based in the type of person that you want to be.

So in 12-step programs,

They talk about practicing these principles in all your affairs,

Which is a nice way to say it,

Don't you think?

What if I've never had an affair?

That's wicked funny.

No,

It's not.

No,

It's not.

So,

Yeah,

We're talking about just living our lives from the principles of the type of person that we want to be.

Oftentimes,

When we start working on our lives,

Start looking for growth,

Start looking to make changes to better our lives,

It's because of some sort of pain that we're experiencing.

So if we're experiencing some pain in a relationship,

We'll tend to work on that area of our lives.

But what happens is sometimes we can enhance a certain area of our lives if we put some attention to it,

But where a whole being,

Like our life is one thing.

It's one thing.

So we can't compartmentalize it.

We can't say,

Okay,

In my relationships,

I'm going to communicate with honesty,

Love,

Self-love,

Self-respect,

And integrity.

And then in my business life,

I'm going to screw people over left and right.

You're going to feel that contrast within you.

You know what I'm saying?

Totally.

It reminds me,

When you brought up the idea of this,

It makes me think of something a little different in that you,

Like what you're talking about is mainly when you're trying to change yourself,

You need to open it up to all of the ways that you can do that and live your life in the same vein and in all of those ways.

But what it made me think of was a couple of months ago,

We were talking about something,

You and I were talking about something not on air,

And there was fear.

There was a little bit of fear with this problem that I was having.

And you said,

If you let fear control your life in this one aspect,

You can't compartmentalize your life.

You can't shut the floodgates at this part.

If you let fear control you in one area,

It's going to bleed in.

It kind of makes me think of Titanic when the iceberg hits and they're trying to shut those steel doors to stop the water.

What is this Titanic you speak of?

Very famous movie in 1997,

Leo DiCaprio.

Oh,

I thought it was a ship or something.

No,

No,

No,

No.

It's a movie.

It's a movie.

It's a movie based on a book,

I think.

Purely fiction.

Yeah.

So they're trying to shut these steel doors.

So they're trying to shut the steel doors,

But they can't.

The water just comes in too much and you can't stop it.

And it is.

That's a good visual of what happens.

You have one life.

You're experiencing one life.

So you can't act out of fear in one area of your life and then walk around filled with self-love.

You can't act from fear and feel love.

That's two different things.

So you can't do it.

That really gets to the core of it too,

Fear and love.

There's different terminology we can use and I'm sure we will as this podcast continues,

But when you really get down to it,

You're either acting from love or you're acting from fear.

All types of anger,

Frustration,

Sadness,

Worry,

All types of those types of things are all based in a fear of something.

All integrity,

Honesty,

Those types of things are all based in love.

So when you get down to it,

It's a really good way to monitor the way you're making decisions.

If you ask yourself,

Is this decision that I'm making,

Is this based out of fear or is this based out of love?

That's probably the biggest thing that I've taken away from the experience of doing this podcast for 18 months or whatever we've been doing it.

I never knew,

I never thought that those were the two core emotions before.

Love's the obvious one.

All good stuff comes from love.

But if you're angry,

You're going to find your solution a lot quicker if you're angry or when you're sad if you don't get caught up in the fact that you're feeling an emotion of anger or sadness.

And if you look underneath it and go,

Okay,

This must be based in some sort of fear,

What am I fearful of?

Understanding that all of that negativity,

That all of the negative emotions are rooted in fear.

That fear is the soil that grows these things.

It really allows you to stop and think and go,

Well,

This isn't really this,

What is it?

Right.

And then you can get to the business of becoming the person that you want to become.

Because until you understand that,

You're just using your brain to make decisions that you think are going to control outcomes in the future.

And control is an illusion.

We don't have control over what life throws at us all the time,

And we do to some degree.

But there are different situations that will come to us and how we deal with them is what makes us.

There are so many people.

You take people who I've seen a lot of people who have lost their legs lately on TV.

The woman who was Olympic snowboarder and she was also on Dancing with the Stars.

I saw two or three of them on one of my son and I's favorite shows,

The American Ninja Warrior.

And they're doing these obstacle courses with one leg and a prosthetic.

I've seen a lot of examples and plus my friend Paul Maron who lost his leg and became a great disabled athlete.

It's not about losing the leg,

It's about what you do once you lose the leg.

Those are all examples of people who have used it to achieve something in their life.

There's plenty of other people who have lost limbs that have used it to hold themselves back.

So it's not necessarily what happens to us,

It's what we do once these things do happen to us.

We either are reacting out of fear or we're reacting out of love,

Love for ourselves.

That's how we need to start taking the responsibility of the person that we want to be.

Like there's an exercise that I recommended to somebody recently.

Just get out a piece of paper and write down all the characteristics of the person that you want to be.

If you want to be a person of integrity,

Write down the word integrity.

If you want to be a person that is honest,

Write down honest.

If you want to be a person that has lots of self-love,

Write self-love.

All the different characteristics that you want,

Design the person that you want to be on paper.

Then when it comes time to start making decisions,

You look at that list and go,

Okay,

What would this person do?

What would a person of integrity and honesty do in this situation?

Well,

They would do this.

Okay,

Well I was thinking about not doing that.

Why would I not do that?

Oh,

Well it's because of the fear I have.

Okay,

So now you understand that it's very clear that if you want to be a person with integrity and honesty,

You would make this choice.

If you want to be a person filled with fear,

You will make this choice.

And then you make your choice.

But even if you choose to go the route of fear,

You probably won't continue choosing fear for very long because you're doing it consciously.

And consciously,

It's not natural to walk away from the person that you want to be.

We walk away from the person that we want to be because we're not living consciously.

We're not making conscious decisions.

We're not really looking at it with this type of clarity.

When you're really clear on why you're making the decisions and where these decisions will lead you,

Then you'll start making the right choice.

A week ago today,

I saw a movie that I had no idea,

I had not seen a trailer for it.

I had absolutely no idea what it was.

But my friend said,

Hey,

We're going to this movie when you get out of work.

Meet us there.

I said,

Okay.

And I went and I barely even knew that it was an animated movie,

Honestly.

And I walked in and I'm so glad that I saw it now because it fits perfectly with what we were talking about today.

Do tell.

Do tell.

It's called Inside Out.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's the new Pixar movie that's out.

It's doing incredibly well,

But Jurassic Park or whatever it's called just crushed it.

So I don't think it's getting a lot of attention.

But I also could just be blind and not paying attention.

I heard something about it.

It is about a little girl and the emotions that control her.

And the emotions are all personified.

So they go in her head and there's a little control room and there's a little,

There's you know,

A character that is Joy.

She is Joy.

She's the personification of Joy.

There's five emotions that control her Joy,

Sadness,

Anger,

Fear,

And disgust.

And they all have these traits and that's all they are.

And at different points,

Different emotions control the control board.

That's how it's like when we're living unconsciously.

These emotions just kind of come in and rule our decision making and guide us into certain areas.

And all of a sudden we end up somewhere and we're like,

How did I get here?

I didn't like this.

Well because you weren't in control of your decision making process.

These random emotions were.

You were living unconsciously.

That's why we need to take control of it.

And yes,

I do believe that this earth is shifting and things are looking better and there's lots of people doing good and we're heading in the right direction and all that stuff.

I also understand that society as a whole still at this point has a lot of growth to do.

There's a lot of negativity out there.

We're being bombarded with it from all directions in our normal everyday lives.

Most of us more than me because of the nature of my business.

I don't get it that much but I still get it.

And if we're not living consciously,

All that negativity creeps in.

So we're acting from a place of negativity and then all of a sudden we end up with a negative life and we're like,

How the heck did I get here?

I didn't ask for this.

Well yeah you did.

You did ask for it because the decisions that you made were based out of fear,

Anger,

Frustration,

Negativity.

So you made decisions based on that.

Now it wasn't conscious.

You didn't sit there and say,

I am going to destroy my life.

I am going to walk towards unhappiness.

No you didn't consciously choose it but unconsciously you did choose it.

If you walk in a direction of negativity,

You're going to find negativity and it doesn't matter if you have a blindfold on.

It doesn't matter if you don't know that you're walking down a dark road.

You're still walking down a dark road and you're still going to end up in darkness.

If you're walking down a light road,

You're going to end up in lightness and it doesn't matter if you've got a blindfold on there either.

This world is run by spiritual laws and the law is when you walk in a positive direction,

You end up in a positive place.

When you walk in a negative direction,

You end up in a negative place and it doesn't matter if you believe in it or you don't believe in it.

That's what's going to happen.

Another thing that's great about that movie is that the little girl who up until the point that the movie becomes interesting has never had any real horrible experiences.

Joy is her chief emotion,

Runs all of the other emotions.

But then there are parts in the movie where it goes quickly inside of her mom's head and her dad's head.

Mom's chief emotion is sadness.

Dad's chief emotion is anger.

You can see the paths that those two people have walked down and they've gotten to this point in their life.

There's a reason why that is the chief emotion of dad who's trying to start a business and moved his family and is frustrated with everything and why mom is sad trying to keep everything apart.

This little girl,

Joy,

Is trying to hold on and not let other things go.

And that's exactly what happens.

Because everybody is subconsciously doing all of this stuff,

Then things just happen because everybody's living unconsciously.

That's a really good example.

I can't believe that's a children's movie,

First of all.

It was way too deep for little kids.

The kids get this,

Though.

I talk to little kids about this stuff regularly and they get it.

Because they're not so.

.

.

See,

That's really interesting because I thought,

Wow,

I'm not old enough to see this movie.

Oh no,

They get it completely.

Know why?

Because they're functioning more consciously than we are.

They're functioning out of joy,

Which is their normal state.

The only time negativity becomes the major component of somebody is the longer they live life on this planet with all the problems and all the negativity around them,

And there's so much negativity around,

They start thinking that the negativity is normal and that becomes their predominant emotion.

Children aren't like that.

You can talk to kids about truth and simplicity and they get it.

It's harder to talk to adults about it because they've built up these walls against all this stuff and they've created.

.

.

They're sitting there walking around in anger and for them to actually say.

.

.

Part of these anger and sadness is that you have to believe that it's not your fault.

Yes.

You have to.

You have to be a victim of everything else.

It can't be your fault that you're angry or sad.

You have to be a victim.

That victimization is a part of it.

For an adult to break through that barrier,

They have to go,

My natural state is joy and I must have made some decisions and walked down this road for a while to have ended up here.

That sucks,

But it's also empowering because now that I know I have the choice,

I can walk in the opposite direction and find all the happiness and joy that I want.

You have to get through that barrier with adults.

Kids you go,

Do you want to be happy?

They're like,

Yeah.

Okay.

Do you want a lollipop?

It's that simple.

You just really opened my mind into where the next part of this conversation should go.

As we get older,

We put up these walls.

You said a couple of minutes ago.

We put up the walls because we want to compartmentalize.

We want to be different.

We talked a little bit in our last podcast about the culture of business.

We want to be in control.

The workplace.

Yeah,

We want to be in control.

So we want to be,

To the extent we want to be a little bit of a hard ass at work sometimes.

We want to be a little bit stern in this or a strict parent maybe and then soft in this area and loving in this area.

We want to be two people.

We want to be someone different at home than we are at work and someone different with our friends.

Right,

Because we feel that we need to be.

We feel that because we don't understand how to be strong in love.

We don't understand that strength,

True strength comes from love and vulnerability.

When you know that nobody can hurt you,

Nobody can hurt you.

If you think you can be hurt,

Then you can be hurt,

Emotionally anyway.

The truth is we can't actually be hurt.

It's where spiritual beings having a human experience.

We can't actually be hurt.

Our core is our soul is always going to be.

It can't be hurt.

That's where true strength comes from.

But we think that if we act kind and loving,

I talked about this in the last podcast too I believe.

We have a skewed version or vision of what kindness is.

We think kindness is allowing people to walk over us and it's not.

We can be loving,

Kind,

Firm in business.

I do it in my business.

I can stand there.

You know what?

Even as long as I've been doing it,

It still feels a little risky when I do it.

I had somebody just recently ask me for something in my business.

I wasn't sure how I felt about it.

I'd like this person.

It was nothing against them,

But I just wasn't sure of the dynamic if it was right for my business at that time.

I had to,

They were like,

Tell me your thoughts.

I had to go out there and say,

Okay,

This is how I feel.

I'm just not comfortable with it right at this particular time.

It doesn't have anything to do with you per se.

I was really risking that I could offend them from my perspective.

I had to risk it and say,

Well,

I need to be honest and I need to talk from integrity and all these spiritual principles that I live my life.

I have to apply it to this conversation too because this is the man that I choose to be.

Regardless of the outcome,

Now to me,

I thought about it and I said,

Okay,

This person could read this.

They could take it personally and they could say,

You know what?

Screw Glenn.

He's being a jerk.

Or they could say,

Thank you for being honest.

I can completely understand and let's move forward the way you suggested.

Those were basically the two options.

Either one was fine with me because if they got all upset with me for speaking my truth and being honest with them,

Then I don't need to have a business relationship with them.

Maybe right at that particular time,

They had something that they needed to work through and then months later,

They'd come back and they'd be like,

Okay,

Glenn,

I understand where you were coming from.

At that particular time,

You were just being honest and truthful to yourself.

Could we do business?

Then we do business when they're in that energy.

I had to risk that and I did.

Fortunately,

Which happens a lot of times in my area of business and who I choose to do business with,

They received it wonderfully.

They said,

Thank you very much for being honest and blah,

Blah,

Blah.

It doesn't always work that way.

I've had people walk away from me and say,

Yeah,

Well screw you.

I've had it happen.

Okay,

My life is fine.

It's not that I don't have people to do business with.

Back to the topic of this podcast,

It's in all areas of our life.

That's a business example.

I do the same thing in my friendships.

I do the same thing in my romantic relationships when I'm in one.

I do the same thing when I'm parenting my son.

I do the same thing with social interactions with my son's soccer leagues.

There's no area of my life that I don't do my best to come from a place of integrity,

Honesty and love.

As a result,

I have more honesty,

Integrity and love in my life.

The people that I associate with are very much the same way.

I think it's just as simple as like,

No matter how much you want it to be,

Your life is not a hallway with a bunch of closed doors and you can choose to go into one room or another.

It's an open field and everything is out there.

There might be flowers over here and other stuff over here,

But everything is out in the open.

When the rain comes,

It makes everything wet.

I think it might.

.

.

I'm kind of getting a vision too.

I kind of see it is like a hallway with a bunch of doors but maybe no roof because what's going on up in the sky does affect everything equally.

But you have the ability to open up a door and say,

Oh,

Is this the direction I want to go?

No,

And then shut the door and choose a different one.

That's kind of how I was visualizing it.

That makes perfect sense.

That makes perfect sense.

As long as you agree.

I have no integrity and I will change my story if you don't agree with it.

As you should.

But yeah,

It goes right back to the simplicity of it all.

If you want a life of integrity and you want to like who you are,

Then make decisions based in a way that you're going to like that person.

A lot of things are very clear when you get your emotions out of it.

So that's why that little exercise of writing down the characteristics of who you want to be,

Design the person you want to be,

And then when you're making decisions,

Go,

What would that person choose?

What decision would they make?

Then make your decision based on that.

And then next thing you know,

A year or two down the road,

You're looking and you're like,

Wow,

I really like myself.

How the heck did I get here?

I really embody all the characteristics that are on that list.

How did I get here?

By making a series of small correct decisions based on the type of person that you want to be and not compartmentalizing your life.

Not going,

Okay,

Well,

I'll treat my family with respect but when it comes to business,

I'm going to screw everybody over.

Usually a lot of times it's the opposite,

Like people will be a certain type of person in a lot of ways but then when it comes to romance,

There's such an emotional tug to it.

They'll try to control it.

They try to control that other person,

Try to control the relationship.

Instead of building a loving relationship with them,

They try to control it and make sure they try to steer it in certain ways and it just doesn't work.

Do you have a quote?

If you could,

Could you pull up a quote for us?

Could you do that now,

Please?

From quite early on,

I had this idea of,

Wow,

I've been saying this word all day.

I go to read it and I screw up.

From quite early on,

I had this idea of compartmentalized personalities,

Identities.

This is how you are when you're with your mom and this is how you are when you're with your dad.

So,

It seemed like I could never absolutely be myself and the image of myself as compromised and inconsistent made me want to withdraw from the world even further.

I had a sense of formulating a papier-mâché version of myself to send out in the world while I sat controlling it remotely in some smug suburban barracks.

Truth!

Truth!

Russell Brand.

Who is known for being very authentically himself to a fault.

Well now.

Now.

Yeah.

Because early in his career,

He was just being who people wanted him to be or who he thought they wanted him to be.

It's so true and this is a good way to kind of wrap it up too.

It's that being who you think other people want you to be,

It just doesn't work.

It feels like that illusion of control and all that stuff,

Just be you.

Everybody else is taken and who you think other people.

.

.

Sometimes people can try to control us as well.

So,

We feel these pressures from other people that are saying,

Glenn,

I want you to be this way.

No,

I really want you to be this way.

I want you to be this way.

And the only reason that they feel that they want me to be that way is because of their own confusion and their own illusion of control.

They think that they can control and design the world to look the way they want it and they're going to try to impose that on me.

But they can't.

And they really don't want me to be somebody other than myself because they're only getting a half-assed version of that person.

So,

Let's just put it in a job situation.

If some boss is saying,

Glenn,

I need you to be this,

I need you to be this,

And I go,

Okay,

I'll try to be that.

And I try,

But it's not me,

Then I'm really going to be only so good of a worker at that job.

But if I go,

No,

I'm going to be authentic and that's not me,

Then the boss might momentarily get irritated and say,

Well,

Glenn,

Then you're fired.

Now,

That would be the best thing for both of us because one,

It gets me out of a situation that I shouldn't be in in the first place and I can go off somewhere and be myself and really be good at it.

And then two,

He has the ability to hire somebody else that actually that is them.

That's who they are.

And they are going to be so much of a better worker at that job than I would be.

So it's being a different version of yourself that's not true.

Momentarily,

We think that it's the right thing to do sometimes,

But it never is.

Only being true to yourself and becoming the person that you want to be in all areas of your life is the direction we need to go in.

The Manhattan Project,

Which was the thing that built the first atomic bomb,

That is where compartmentalization comes from.

That's where that theory of so many people doing little things that nobody knows what the big thing is,

Is where that comes from.

The whole point of compartmentalizing something is so that nobody knows what's really going on.

Right.

Don't compartmentalize your life,

Because you need to know who you are.

You need to know what's going on.

This is probably the biggest thing that I say,

And there's a lot of big things,

But if you want to get to the truth,

Simplify.

If you want to get away from the truth,

Complicate.

It's that easy.

Simplify.

Don't compartmentalize.

Be you.

And if people won't help?

They can call me.

I don't even know my business line offhand,

So don't call me.

You can look up my business line on my email.

What is it called?

A website?

Oh my God.

My brain just completely shut off,

Man.

It's like this podcast is already over.

My website is life-enhancement-services.

Com.

Just go there,

Okay?

I'm done.

Over and out.

See ya.

This podcast is presented by New Shore Productions,

Executive producers,

Glenn Ambrose,

Benjamin Barber,

And David DeAngelis.

Reviews

Very thought provoking, thanks lads 💜 x

Thank you. It is really a good take away piece of talk. I never have this thought of compartmentize or decompartmentize my life. But I do see quite a number of examples of people compartmentize their life. I am happy that i am not living such a complicated life and see I must live different lifes. This talk does increase my awareness or even acknowledgement I am doing it fine. It is important to me as there seem increasing pressure from our new boss that we must do this and that. The next time I make my decision, I will be able to do it more conscious. Thank you so much. 😊

This is life changing. Thank you for sharing your knowledge, experiences and advice with the world! 🙇

Profound, eye-opening and funny. It made my day. 😊

Would you do a podcast on your spiritual truths? You mention them frequently but haven't defined them. Thanks!

This is fantastic and eye opening

I really liked it 😊

So much GREAT stuff in this one❤️Thank you!

I enjoyed that. Thank you.

Always a joy! Thanks guys 🙏🏼

Excellent points in this podcast. Gonna check out the movie Inside Out as well. 💙💚💛💜