I mentor people whenever possible because I personally reaped the rewards of being mentored, benefiting greatly due to their efforts. My mentors all had one thing in common, they all believed in the same learning structure: “Keeping It Simple!” That is one reason why, to this day, I like learning things, then grounding them with the eternal truths. The Natural Laws or the eternal truths, never ever change. This is why I can say, without question, we live is a three-dimensional world. It is a Law; it has to happen.
For every earthly species, these dimensions take on many common characteristics. Consider our human person; it has a body, mind and a soul. Thus, we live our life addressing every aspect presented to us on a physical, mental and spiritual level. Our approach to these aspects will be made personally, professionally, and spiritually. Yes, Mr. or Mrs. Sceptic, this applies to you as well. People have no say in this, we cannot discard or add to these personas and each of us must learn to accept, understand, and thrive within the confines of these realities. It is only when we accomplish this central task well, we are said to be at peace. Finding “balance” in our life, we will be generally viewed as someone who has their life “all together”. Success!!
Many people strive for this nirvana their entire life and are never able to reach this place of “all togetherness”. They are good, hardworking, educated, and focused people but their “oneness” seems to fracture and ultimately fail. This main hurtle can only be overcome by simply learning, then professing and finally living the truth. For example, we pick and choose when we will hide, disown, or ignore one or more of our three personas. We chose to be a different person at church than we are at the office or on the golf course. We rarely intentionally bring all three personas together as one. In other words, we go through life denying our true self, who we really are in respect to one of more of our personas. This denial causes us to live a lie. I’ll share a secret you might want to write down, long term success can never be reached through falsehoods we convince ourselves to be true. As my mom use to say, “The truth will always be revealed.”
These natural personas are not man-made; we were created with all three and we will die with all three. Humankind cannot change these to suit our own desires; they are part of the natural laws that we have to live with. As with all-natural laws, they are all true but not all people like the truth. Some spend their life in a state of internal conflict fighting a battle that they can never win. During these skirmishes, three common strategies are used.
The most common is when we try to compartmentalize the three personas. It goes something like this; “When we work; we work, when we play; we play and when we pray; we pray”. Thanks to our crazy litigious society, human resource departments struggle with this model. It might satisfy the attorneys but, in reality, the natural truth will always be revealed. Our business culture tries to keep the three completely separate, professionally appropriate, and legally tidy. It is like “trying to satisfy a three-headed beast.” This plan never works long term because one or more of the three will eventually cross the imaginary line; we were not wired to be only one persona at a time. The unity of the three make us who we are.
Our second most common plan is for the person to try to intentionally remove, extinguish, or ignore one or more of their personas. The deleted persona of choice is routinely their spiritual nature. We live in a secular culture that promotes disagreeing, discrediting, and disavowing any spirituality. To fit in one might choose to deny this persona, making us one of the cool kids. Picture your body represented as our three-triangle circle above; if you remove one of the triangles everyone can tell something is missing.
The last arrangement is where we spend all of our time focusing on only one persona. This is the technique we use in the attempt to “get ahead” in business. We rationalize that we will spend all of our time, talents, and treasures on our professional nature which will make us successful, then, once the business is up and running, we will have more time for family, friends, and God. All I can say is, good luck with that one. What generally happens, in this scenario, when the businessperson finally gets around to doing the same for their other two personas, they find that the people who are touched by those parts of their life are no longer emotionally there.
The truth is, we cannot successfully separate and then balance the three personas; our nature does not work well in this fragmented way. The winning formula is to use the truth completely and in unity for each persona. We must be deliberate in doing the right things; this requires learning, professing and living the truth while striving to do our very best and always treat others how we would want to be treated.
The triangle that assures that we can do all of this with a pure mission is the hierarchy of Love. Once again, we must do this in unity and without segregation of choice. We are called to love our Creator, our neighbor and our self as one. When I am spending time with my family and friends; I am also benefiting my work life by relaxing and the activities that I am doing should also be pleasing to my God. When I am working I do so to benefit my family and my God. When I am being spiritual it is to bring me to a closer relationship with my God, my spouse, my parents, siblings, friends, co-workers, and supervisors. Victory can only be obtained by our ability to combine the three personas into a single cohesive unit: one well-rounded successfully unified trinity of a person.
Once more, consider the diagram. Notice how it starts with us in the center. With the expansion of each concentric ring, we impact more and more people. The first ring begins by loving the God who made you to learn the truth and to use that truth to do the right things. In ring two our love expands to others as we do our best to teach them the truth. Ring three requires we love our selves, living the truth while treating others the way we wish to be treated. God’s mission for each of us, starts with us becoming a loving, caring, and successful purveyor of the truth.
If this is my last post, I want all to know there was only one purpose for all that I have written; to have made a positive difference in the lives of others.
Anthony “Tony” Boquet, the author of “The Bloodline of Wisdom, The Awakening of a Modern Solutionary” and Vice President, Business Development at The American College of Financial Services