Hello beautiful people!
Let’s talk about lumpers and splitters.
Listen on in!
Okay, so the reason it’s important to start identifying when you’re lumping and when you’re splitting is because there’s very little value to doing one when the other is the more liberating choice. And this will vary!
We tend to do the thing that we’re most practiced at especially when doing that thing helps us tell the “bories” that we keep telling ourselves. When lumping gives us permission to beat ourselves up about something we want to pick on ourselves about anyway, we lump away!
And when we don’t want a solution that lumping would illuminate, we’ll split for days! It just gets easier to justify our stuckness when we use the split-up information. So, when we’re not paying attention to how we’re navigating the data that comes into our lives, we’ll often stack it up in ways that provide backup for the “bories” we need, never realizing we could rewrite our whole narrative just by trying lumping or splitting when it’s the opposite of what we’d usually do.
Today’s work: Start labeling your lumps and your splits. If you can label yourself as a lumper or a splitter outright, share what your default mode is. And each time you start assigning motives to someone else’s actions, try switching up your opinion of what is going on (go from lumping to splitting or vice-versa) to see if it frees up that unhealthy attachment.
Try it with what you say to yourself about what’s happening for you in casting offices, at agencies, with fellow actors, with writers, with directors, with showrunners, with producers, with managers, with your survival job cohorts, with people in your personal life, you name it! Learn where you idle and see what leaning toward the alternative does to open up your communication, your self-talk, and your relationship with everyone you do business with!
’til tomorrow… stay ninja!
