The Secret Dangers Of Segmenting Your Life
How It Can Prevent Your Success And Cause You To Struggle More Than Is Necessary
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The Secret Dangers Of Segmenting Your Life
How It Can Prevent Your Success And Cause You To Struggle More Than Is Necessary
You hear it all the time in Business...
Keep Your Home Life at Home and Focus on Your Work.
This is a Version of Segmenting Your Life.
You Have a "Home Life" and a "Work Life"...
And Segmenting Your Life can be done in All Sorts of Ways, including within Different Aspects of "Work" or "Home" and Any Other Form of Identity We Have.
Now, I Understand "Why" things like this are Said.
Sometimes, We Have to Get Results.
Work has to get Done.
We Can't Hyperfocus on the Problems of Our Lives All the Time.
We Need to Be Strong for Our Families at Certain Times.
We Must Understand the Current Context We are In with Certain Behaviors or Mannerisms that are Societally Acceptable or Unacceptable at those Times.
It is Generally Frowned Upon to Loudly Complain about Your Boss in the Middle of a Religious Service.
At the Same Time...
Purposefully Segmenting Your Life can have Consequences...
Some of which can become Harmful to Your Wellbeing.
So, what are Some of these Dangers?
The first comes with the Idea that By Segmenting Your Life...
You Begin to, often Unintentionally, Create a Split Personality.
It is Not as Extreme as the Psychological Disorder of Dissociative Personality Disorder...
But it Does have Consequences Involved.
You have a "Version" of "You" that You Become at Work and a "Different Version" of "You" that You Become at Home...
Or Switch and/or Add Any Number of Other "Versions" of "You".
Each Place begins to have Different "Personalities" that You Must Become that is Created with this Segmentation...
And this Forces You to, Psychologically, Use More Energy (Mg-ATP) to Maintain Each of these Different Segmented Personalities.
Now, We as Humans can Only Produce So Much Energy (Mg-ATP) at Any Given Time...
So through Segmenting Your Life into these Different Personalities...
You begin to Waste a Lot of Energy (Mg-ATP) attempting to "Keep" all of these Personalities Separate.
This can Create Two New Challenges in Your Life.
The First is Conflicting Values.
Within One Personality, a Certain Behavior May be Considered Acceptable...
Or Even Necessary.
Within Another Personality, that Behavior May be Considered Completely Unacceptable.
But Whenever You Engage in that Behavior...
Your Different Personalities begin to Go To War with Each Other.
One Says that You Did the Right Thing...
The Other Chastises You for Doing the Wrong Thing.
To these Segmented Personalities and their Values...
Context Does Not Matter.
Only Behavior.
So, even if the "Context Based" Rules were Correct...
These Identities will Argue about whether the Behavior was Right or Wrong...
This can Further Become Problematic when You, Inevitably, have "Personality Bleeding".
With all of the Energy (Mg-ATP) being Expended to Keep these Personalities "Separate"...
You have Less Energy (Mg-ATP) to Do other things in Your Life...
But there Will be Days...
Where You Will "Need" to Use More Energy (Mg-ATP) to Accomplish Other Things...
Which Means...
The Walls You Created will Become Weaker...
Something Will Happen...
And Some Behavior that One Personality says is Acceptable will "Bleed" into a Context where that Behavior is Considered Unacceptable.
You Frequently Hear about this with Business Leaders and their Children.
The Leader had a Very Difficult Day at Work...
Their Child Asks a Relatively Harmless Question, but at the Wrong Time...
At Work, The Leader has a Rule where it is Acceptable to Yell at People for Dumb or Bad Questions...
But that is Deemed "Unacceptable" at Home...
Except because their Work Day was Very Difficult...
Their Personality Walls are Weakened...
And their Work Personality "Bleeds" into their Home Life...
Where they Yell at their Child.
Usually, this Leads to Instant Regret...
Aka, the Home Personality Chastising Us and Telling Us "This" is Why this Behavior is Unacceptable...
But the Work Personality Still Says "We Did Nothing Wrong, the Question was Dumb".
The Damage is Done...
The Child is Hurt and Sees Their Parent in a New Light (Unless the Personality Bleeding is Recurrent)...
The Leader is Still Attempting to "Mend" the Weakened Wall...
Requiring "More" Energy (Mg-ATP) to Accomplish...
But the Issue Still Remains.
Inevitably, this becomes Repeated, and Different Breaches between these Personalities will Occur.
But there are Other Dangers Too.
Another is Stressor Misattribution.
You See this Commonly when People are Considering Job Changess.
They Dispise their Jobs because they are Constantly in Dis-Stress...
So they Consider Getting a Different Job...
But when they Change Jobs...
They are Still in Dis-Stress, and they then Blame their New Job.
The Issue here is that All Stress Adds.
So, was the Person Experiencing the Highest Levels of Dis-Stress at Work?
Yes...
But...
The Stressors from Work were Simply the Straw that Broke their Back.
In Reality...
It could be that in their "Home" Life, they have Accumulated an Extremely High Level of Base Stressors...
Through Lack of Sleep...
Poor Nutrition...
Challenges with Significant Others and/or Children...
Quality of the Environment...
All of these Add Together, and "Directly" Impact Every Part of Our Lives...
"Despite" the Segmentation We Attempt to Create.
The Result?
When the Straw Breaks at Work...
We "Attribute" the Primary Stressor to be "Work"...
But the Real Problem may be Your Baseline Stressors from Every Other Aspect of Your Life.
The Result is that we Create More Psychological Stress at Work by "Blaming" and "Hating" Our Work...
Which makes Us Perform Worse at Work...
Adding More Stressors...
And if We Attempt to "Change" the Work Environment...
It Fails because the Work Stressors were Minimal compared to Other Life Stressors.
But We Fail to "See" that Because We are Trying to Keep these Areas of Our Lives "Separate".
Which leads us to Another Danger...
A Subconscious Forcing of Choices between Different "Parts" of Our Lives.
When We Segment Our Lives...
We Begin to Psychologically Tell Ourselves that They are Not "Allowed" to Mix.
Very Frequently, Life becomes Challenging with all the Obstacles, Challenges, and Unforeseen Events that Begin to Occur.
So what Happens when We Tell Ourselves that these Different Parts of Ourselves Must Be "Separate"?
They Often Begin to "Compete" for Time and Energy (Mg-ATP).
So if you Decide to Spend Time and Energy in One Place...
The Other "Areas" Begin to Try to Compete, or Subconsciously tell us How Things are Unfair.
Now, it is True that Sometimes, as Humans, We Must Counterbalance Our Priorities at Any Given Time...
There will be Time where We Must Prioritize Work, or Family, or Something Else.
That is Not the Problem
The "Problem" is the Infighting that Happens from the Segmented Parts of Our Lives.
This is Where it Begins to Become Dangerous.
As they Compete, they May Attempt to Force Us to Choose...
Whether or Not that there is Truly a Need to Decided Between Things.
You See this with Careers Often.
People See Different "Parts" of their Career as "Separate"...
But in the Long Term this can Lead to them "Competeting" Against Each Other Subconsciously...
Instead of them Trying to Work Together Toward Something Greater.
It can Become a Self-Limitatation that is Not Necessary.
Which Leads us into the Final Danger...
Missing Opportuities to Integrate Different Parts of Our Lives.
When you Look at the Highest Levels of Peak Performance, Discovery, and Innovation...
They Typically are Achieved when Individuals Integrate Different Aspects of their Life or Knowledge.
It is often called the Cross-Pollination of Ideas.
Some of the Greatest Lessons in Business came from Parents Interacting with their Children.
John Maxwell, considered the Godfather of Modern Business Leadership Practices, has often talked about Most of his Business Lessons come from Biblical Teachings.
My Progress with Developing Teams and Helping Businesses Overcome Burnout has come from Learning How Our Psychophysiology Works as Humans.
Or My Insights on the Why Today's Business Models Fail, which actually Came from Learning How Ecosystems in Nature Function.
Think of it like this...
Different Areas of Our Lives have Puzzle Pieces...
Sometimes, to Complete the Puzzle, you have to Connect the Puzzle Pieces from those Different Areas.
But...
What Happens when we Purposefully Segment Aspects of Our Lives?
Subconsciously, we are Creating a Barrier between the Different Parts of Our Lives.
This means that We Create a Wall Between these Puzzle Pieces which may Never Allow them to Connect.
Our Brains will say "This" Puzzle Piece Must Remain Here...
And "That" Puzzle Piece Must Remain There...
Never Try to Combine Them!
But this is a Recipe to Miss Out on some of the Most Fascinating Ideas and Greatest Potentials to Innovate Entire Industries.
If you think about How Much Change the World Needs...
There is a Great Danger is Allowing Things to Remain the Same...
Especially when We May Already Have All the Answers We're Looking For.
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Now, here’s the Interesting Question…
How do we “Have” Different Parts of Our Lives…
With Different Rules and Contexts…
But Simultaneously “Avoid” the Problem of Segmenting Our Lives?
This is where Identity Psychology becomes Important.
How Our Identities are Created…
How they Interact…
And How to Make Sure that They Work Together Instead of Against Each Other.
Let’s Dive In…
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