Join Bronson and Nate for an episode with Glenn Ambrose, spiritual teacher, life coach, and host of Life, Lessons, and Laughter. Glenn shares his transformation from a 20-year struggle with alcoholism to sobriety, sparked by his son’s birth and a commitment to the 12-step program, leading to profound spiritual awakenings. Learn how mindset shifts—moving from fear and lack to abundance and commitment—drive personal and financial success. Glenn offers practical steps for overcoming procrastination, building habits through small actions, and trusting intuition over emotions for decision-making.
Discover why financial freedom deepens spiritual growth, enabling a new paradigm of responsible wealth.
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Full Transcript:
Bronson Hill: Welcome to the Mailbox Money Show.
I am so excited to be here today. This is an amazing guest we have today and I’ve also got my co-host the amazing author of two best-selling books. Including his new book The 18 Laws of Leverage, Nate Hambrick. How are you today, brother?
Nate Hambrick: I’m doing well.
Bronson Hill: Awesome, man. Well, hey, I know we’re talking about spirituality today. We’re talking about things that are more important than money, right? A lot of times people can get into, like, you have all the money. But you don’t have a life that’s abundant, right? Maybe you don’t have the health, you’re not happy. You know, the person who’s unhappy feels like, well, how much more do you need to be happy? It’s like, just a little bit more, right?
And that’s the famous saying from John Rockefeller.
Why do people? Have all the stuff and yet feel unfulfilled inside.
Nate Hambrick: I think that, obviously there are a thousand answers to that question. But as an entrepreneur, knowing lots and lots of entrepreneurs. I’ve noticed a trend that probably about half of the ultra-successful people I know, stick their head in the sand for so long. That once they are successful, they do have the wealth. They continue to collect all the other things that matter. And wealth is obviously really important. Passive cash flow is super, super important so that you can live an incredible life. But if all you do is make money all day long, you’ll still be just as sad and unhappy. As you were before the wealth.
Bronson Hill: 100% yeah, it really is. I think the goal is not just more dollars in bank accounts, or more stuff, or more cars or houses. All those things are helpful, but it’s really about living a life that is full of purpose, full of meaning. I think that’s really a great way to look at spirituality. What am I here to do? What’s the reason that I’m here? One of my favorite proverbs is, “Without vision, people perish,” right?
So how do you create that bigger vision? Once I started creating a bigger vision for myself, my life began to take off. My net worth exploded, my relationships, my friendships, my traveling, all of it was just like, wow.
I love what I’m doing. No, it’s not every day I wake up happy or wake up with a smile on my face, but you can definitely practice that.
So, Glenn Ambrose, we’ve got you in the studio. I’m super excited for you to be here. I was on your podcast, which is called Life, Lessons, and Laughter. You’ve got your book Down to Earth. You call yourself a spiritual teacher, life coach, and author.
Welcome. How you doing, brother?
Glenn Ambrose: Doing wonderful. Good to be here. Thanks for having me
Bronson Hill: Good. I know you’re all the way in the Dominican Republic, which is something we admire, people who are living in a place that’s kind of a bucket list place for them, or who just made a shift and have been able to make that work. So tell us a little bit of your story, how you got started with this, and what got you to become a spiritual teacher and life coach.
Glenn Ambrose: Well, I was an alcoholic for 20 years, that’s the short story. I couldn’t get out of my own way. Then, after my son was born, there was a very strong pull. It was kind of the beginning of my end, where I spiraled for a while and then found my way out. I ended up getting sober, and for me, going through the 12 steps in AA actually induced spiritual awakenings, which is basically what the program is about.
I just started blowing open, spiritually. In three months, I basically did a 180. I just saw everything differently. I just changed. To me, a spiritual awakening is really just a change of perspective, a change of perception. I was looking at life one way, and then all of a sudden, through a series of spiritual awakenings, I was looking at life from a completely different direction — and different things made sense. That’s what really launched me off on this path.
Bronson Hill: It’s amazing how most people I know who have had some shift in their life, some kind of spiritual awakening, share a similar story. I remember when I was 16 years old, I had this experience where I just felt like I was drifting through life. God, or the Creator, was kind of out there, but I didn’t really have any connection. Then I had this real, profound spiritual experience where it felt like God was calling out to me, telling me to follow Him.
For many of us, and for you in your life, it was like one day you hit rock bottom and said, “No more. I’m not gonna have any more drinks. I’m not gonna do this.” Maybe you shared a little bit of that, but was there something that went through your mind, that moment of “never again”? Like, “I never want to do that. I don’t want to feel this way. I never want to walk down this path again.”
Glenn Ambrose: Yeah, and I think that’s an important point because a lot of people think of hitting bottom as this event, something bad really happens. And although sometimes that can induce it, I believe it’s more of an emotional bottom. You just get to that point. Sometimes it’s as simple as just making a decision, or making a decision because of an event.
For me, it was when my son was born. Things started to change. I just knew, I felt it inside, I felt him, I felt his presence, I felt a connection, and life without that wasn’t an option. It wasn’t something I debated it was just very matter-of-fact and calm.
To me, that’s a very good hint that something is spiritual — when it’s calm, and it’s more like a knowingness than a belief or something you’re reaching for. I just knew I was going to be with him if I was on this planet. So I was in Florida, and his mom moved up to Rhode Island with him. I was 1,400 miles away.
So I wasn’t with him, and it got to the point where it was time to die or try something. Try getting sober, try living a life that I actually wanted to live. There was no middle ground left.
The decision-making point for me came when I was contemplating it one day. My roommate at the time, I was sleeping on the couch and said, “Hey, it’s been a while now. You’re just drinking. I’m trying to help you, and you’re not helping yourself. You’ve got to do something, or you’re going to have to move out.”
I was always very self-sufficient, even as an alcoholic. I didn’t make a lot of excuses for my behavior I owned them. So I said, “Okay.” Then I really started thinking about just killing myself, honestly.
When it really came down to it, part of living a dysfunctional lifestyle is rationalizing why it’s not your fault. I was pretty good at rationalizing actually, very good. But if I couldn’t rationalize something, I had my go-to: I didn’t ask to be born. I didn’t ask to be here. That would be my fallback if I was backed into a corner.
So I went to that fallback again, and then I thought, Wait, if that’s true for me, then it’s also true for my son. He didn’t ask to be here. He’s here because of the decisions that I made. So now he’s going to have to live a life without a father, for his entire life and not have that support system, not have anything a father can bring. Because of the decision I’m making to end my life.
And I couldn’t make that okay in my head. I couldn’t figure out why it was okay for him to suffer because of my choices. That was really what that launched me on.
Bronson Hill: I want to jump in because this is super powerful, and I want to get Nate involved here too. Thank you for sharing that story, because I think for a lot of us, we’ve felt that, we’ve felt at the end of a rope, like, “What am I doing here? What’s the point of all this?”
And yet, you realize how our lives impact others. I want to actually ask Nate about this. How do we, maybe, I’m sure you’ve had some rock-bottom experiences as well, Nate, but how does somebody leverage a rock-bottom experience like this?
Nate Hambrick: Yeah, that’s a tough one. I’ve actually been thinking a lot about that, because one of the things that’s most important to me is creating a better, easier life for my son and future kids. And yet, at the same time, it’s the rock-bottom moments that make us tenacious enough to be able to do amazing things, right?
Yeah, I’ve had a lot of rock-bottom experiences. When I first got into sales, I was door knocking for 90-plus hours a week, working 125 hours a week. It was horrible, absolutely horrible. I probably had PTSD for a long time after that, but it is fuel. It’s fuel to figure stuff out, to go make the world a better place.
So, in answer to your question on leveraging rock bottom, I think we all need to go through hardship to be healthier on the other side, so that we can help more people. I wish it wasn’t the case, but I definitely think it is.
So, I was going to ask you, Glenn, since my understanding is you coach people through change in their life and change is really, really hard, especially for people who wouldn’t say they have that internal motivation. In your experience of coaching lots and lots of people through changing some of the core beliefs in their life, and the core habits in their life, what have you noticed are the key factors that actually help people pull that 180 off?
Glenn Ambrose: Commitment. Which is what we’re talking about, often induced by that rock bottom. Oftentimes, you can draw a line from the commitment level to the rock bottom, because that’s the thing with extreme circumstances, they tend to simplify things. We overthink things, and when you’re at the extreme, when you don’t know whether you’re going to live or die, then all of a sudden whether the cable bill is two days late doesn’t really matter anymore.
It just simplifies everything. And that was really, as Bronson started saying this, I was laughing because I’m like, that’s exactly how it was for me. How it motivated me was, I went and I said, “Okay, I can’t understand how my son has to suffer because of my choices.” So I said, “Okay, I’m going to try the 12 steps and getting sober,” because that was the only thing I could think to do.
When I did that, one of the things that’s very important that applies to this, is one of the sayings in AA: half measures avail us nothing. If you do things halfway, it doesn’t mean you get half the results. If you do things 90 percent of the way, you don’t get 90 percent of the results, you get zero.
So I internalized that. When I started doing the 12 steps, the reason I think they blew me open so wide, and were so successful and so helpful to me, was because of my commitment level for that reason. I looked at it and you know, I grew up playing sports, I knew what it was like to give 110 percent on the field. So whenever I needed to do something during the 12 steps that I didn’t want to do, and I wanted to balk at or do half-ass, or something like that.
I just projected into the future and said, “Okay, Glenn, you’re going to take three months or six months, whatever it is, you’re going to go through this. You’re not going to do it all the way. You can’t lie to yourself. So then it’s not going to work. You’re going to want to kill yourself, but you’re not going to be able to do that, because you won’t have a clear conscience, knowing you only gave it 80 percent or 90 percent. Then you’re going to have to start the process all over again from the beginning.”
And I didn’t have the emotional capability for that. I just needed to either get better or die, those were my only two options. When I made it that simple and that clear, whenever something was difficult for me to do, I just said, “You’ve got to dig deep and do it at 110 percent.”
I didn’t care if it worked. And I was okay with either solution, dying or succeeding. I didn’t actually think it was going to work, but I knew the commitment level, and I wanted to give it that one huge push to see if it worked. And it did.
Bronson Hill: You know, I really feel like the enemy… I feel like we have an enemy, and we have enemies, whether, in the Christian context, it’d be the devil, or in the world, it could just be things that keep us from where we’re meant to go. But I love what you shared, because what it talks about is this: if I just halfway commit to different things, you never get anywhere.
It’s only when people make a decision that like, “Never again am I going to have a drink. Never again am I going to be this person. Never again am I going to lose.”
I had a point in my life, in one of my rock-bottom moments, when I got fired from a job as a youth pastor at a large church. Had a house, I was wondering, “What am I going to do?” I came from a place of being scared. Later, I went through divorce, which was incredibly challenging for me personally, as you can imagine.
But it brought me to a place where I asked, “Okay, what is my life really about?” And I think that’s where you have to get back to your purpose and why you’re here. When I said, “Okay, I’m going to leave my job within three years,” right? “I’m going to lose 30 pounds.” I did those things, because I created them and fully committed.
In one way, it doesn’t matter how long it takes once you fully commit, right? But a lot of us don’t commit. I was going to ask you about commitment like what is it that keeps some people from truly committing? You can’t commit to everything. I think you can only really be good at a few things.
There are three things for me: I want to be great at what we do in our business. I want to be a great dad. And I want to be in great physical shape. Those are the three things I try to focus on. I travel and do other things, but those are the things I want to be great at.
What else gets in the way of somebody truly committing to being their best?
Glenn Ambrose: I think it’s just, I think we have a tendency in society to try to see how things are going to play out before we take the first step. And I think it’s unrealistic. People will be like, “Oh well, why should I bother going back to school or learning this or trying this? Because like, I don’t even know how I’m going to take step five. Like, I can’t see the solution in step five, so why take step one?”
So, we want to have this confidence that what we’re doing is going to work out before we start walking. And I don’t think people realize that that’s not how life works. When you take step one, you become a different person—literally. Not only scientifically, with your cells regenerating and all this, that mentality from a physical standpoint but mentally, emotionally, experientially. The experiences we have to lean back on, those are all things that change about us and how we interact with life, and they make us more capable. So when, after I take step one, I have learned something. I’ve had a small victory.
I pat myself on the back. My confidence is a little higher now. All of a sudden, I’m a different person when I’m going to take step two. So when you do that in succession, and you’re at step eight, you are a completely different person than you were at step one as step eight. And then, of course, also, life changes.
So as you’re walking—one, two, three, four, five, six, seven—life is bringing in circumstances, God bringing in circumstances, that you need at that time, not that you’re going to need twenty years from now at that time. So just because you can’t see how you’re going to take step seven or eight when you’re standing at one, doesn’t mean you don’t start. You change along the way, and you become more capable as you go.
Nate Hambrick: You got to take those little baby steps, and 100%, you never know exactly where you’re going to end up. Obviously, you have your long-term vision, your long-term goals, but in between, you just have to start getting going. And so, I was going to ask you with that, Glenn. What are some of the mild steps, or what are some of those baby steps that you walk people through to go from where they’re at, to living with freedom inside of their heads, to investing, to building passive cash flow? Like, what are some of those easy steps that people can take when they can’t see step seven, step eight?
Glenn Ambrose: Well, I guess there’s two things that come to mind. One is how to identify what an easy step actually is. You know, like that’s another thing—people procrastinate due to overwhelm. Overwhelm and procrastination are really just a result of something being too big. It’s that simple.
Like, so what people do is they sit on the couch and they go, “I should be able to go to the gym three times a week. I should be able to start my own business. I should be able to do this, I should be able to do that.” But then they say, “But I can’t, so I won’t.” And they just stay there.
You know, if you have something that you’re trying to work towards and you’re not… like, you know, I was a personal trainer for many years, so one of the examples I use is going to the gym. A lot of people will be like, “Oh, I’m going to go to the gym three times next week.” And then they don’t, and they beat themselves up. So they feel worse about themselves, their energy is lower, and they’re less likely to have that stick-to-it-iveness to move forward.
So if you can’t go to the gym three times a week, people will beat themselves up for that and stay stuck. It’s like, then go twice a week. Then go once a week. It doesn’t matter. Put your sneakers by the door. Can you put your sneakers by the door?
Can you just do that? Yes? Okay then put your sneakers by the door. How do you know if that’s small enough for you?
Well, because it happened. You did it. If it didn’t happen, then putting your sneakers by the door is too big of a step. So maybe you should sit down and figure out which sneakers you want to take first. Like, do not be afraid to keep cutting whatever bite you need to take into a smaller bite.
And then you take that step. And then also, like I said, you’re a little bit more confident, you get a victory under your belt. You know, then you get the gym bag and you put that by the door too. You know? And then, and you just keep building off it. It doesn’t matter how big or I should say how small the bite is. Keep cutting it down until you take it. Yeah. Instead of judging yourself for not taking it.
Bronson Hill: That’s the whole thing like yeah, it all begins with the smallest step you can. They say like, don’t just say, “Hey, I’m gonna go climb a mountain,” and that’s great, that’s motivating but it could be like, “Hey, I’m gonna go walk to the stop sign and back from my house.” It’s like, I’m just literally gonna get out of my house. Or like you said, put the clothes by the door.
And then the more you take some action, you can build on it, right? You can just keep going, and you keep building, and you keep building.
Nate, I want to ask you too as well, as far as habits, what are some things you’ve noticed about habits that are hard to kind of get started?
Nate Hambrick: Yeah, well, I’ve learned the hard way that I am horrible at changing habits unless I just create some really good boundaries for myself. That’s actually the reason I wrote my first book Pressure Kryptonite is I really suck at change without boundaries.
And so, like, to your earlier example, Glenn, one of my big hacks for going to the gym is taking my sneakers and putting my cell phone in one of the shoes. So when the alarm goes off, I have to put on the shoes. One shoe has the phone, one shoe has the keys, and I’m out the door. So, making your life, make the habits, really, really easy for yourself.
And another good one is social media. If I get on Facebook so, you know, I have no social media except for Facebook. And even Facebook is a challenge because you get into those reels and those clips, and you can waste 45 minutes to an hour like that.
So what do I do? I have multiple time blockers on my computer that shut me down after 15 minutes, because I know I have about this much willpower to shut it down myself. So I don’t even try. I just set up a boundary once, and it makes my life so much easier. And it’s amazing how much you can accomplish when you just, like you said, you take a step back, you make it really, really easy for yourself, and then you can go a lot further.
And so, I’ll throw it right back at you, Bronson, because I see you as a very disciplined person. You’re doing massive things that some people could look up at you and think, like, “How could I ever pull off what Bronson’s pulling off?” So what are some of your hacks, Bronson, or things that you do to make habits easy?
Bronson Hill: Yeah, I think that it’s challenging. I think one big thing is priming. If you’re familiar with Tony Robbins, or if listeners search Tony Robbins priming or tonyrobbins.com/priming, there’s a 15-minute video that I do every morning where you enter into gratitude. You actually enter into it as if you’re reliving these moments.
We’re so impacted by things in the world, but if we can just get centered correctly, that’s the biggest thing. And then I think it’s really creating, What do I want? What do I really want? Am I really reading my goals every time? Am I clear on what I want? Because if you don’t create that, you’re just simply going to get what you’ve always gotten, right?
And I think that’s the biggest thing. You’ve got to want to have the change more than you want what you’ve had. And as I got to be approaching 40, I was like, I want something different. I’ve got to create it. So this is what it is.
I wanted to ask you as well, Glenn, this kind of ties in but you know Tony Robbins says 80 percent of success in life is just having the right psychology, the right mindset. What mindset would you say separates people that are stuck in fear, or investors particularly that are stuck in fear, and people that create confident cash flow, or they create things in their life, in business, in wealth, with confidence versus those that are stuck in fear?
Glenn Ambrose: Yeah, I think the answer is kind of built into the question. It’s fear. It’s lack. I guess specifically in this case, the version of fear would be lack. It’s a lack mentality. Whether they think that there’s not enough out there, or they think that they don’t deserve it. And those are very often put in place at a very early age.
All our belief systems our. Our unconscious belief systems our. And that’s what actually drives us, not our intellect. This is why people think, you know, they’re like, oh, we’re taught that in school. Like if you can retain it intellectually and regurgitate it back, especially in your own words, then you got it. You learned it. Congratulations. And that’s, we’re more complex than that.
I believe that there are three parts of actually changing who you are, and that’s intellectual, conceptual, and physical. And they can happen in any order. Most often, it happens intellectual first. Somebody explains something, we understand it, and then, you ever have that feeling where somebody else says something or you hear the same thing and then all of a sudden you go, oh—like now I really get it.
If you pay attention, that’s more of a body sensation. It’s conceptual, which is anchored in the body. So now, all of a sudden, we get it conceptually at a deeper level. Now, usually what happens within a couple of weeks, God gives us an opportunity to take our intellectual and conceptual understanding and implement it into a physical opportunity. Usually, it’s within two weeks. And because we’re being supported by something a heck of a lot smarter than us, an opportunity comes up for us to behave in the way that we’re trying to behave.
Like, if we’re trying to take on an abundance mindset, a physical opportunity will come up, like somebody would be like, “Hey, do you want to do this for money?”
And we have to choose how we’re going to react to that situation and stand in it. Sometimes it’s saying, “Yes, I’m interested.” Sometimes that’s enough, and other times it’s about literally going somewhere or taking action.
We’re physical beings with energy bodies that have a vibrational rate, that’s our physical makeup. So we don’t actually change who we are or how we interact with the world until we change the rate at which we’re vibrating.
If we’re vibrating at the rate of lack, we interact with life through lack. If we vibrate at the rate of abundance, we interact with life through abundance. To change that, we need the intellectual, conceptual, and physical aspects to align so that we become a different person vibrationally.
Nate Hambrick: You brought up a great point earlier, Glenn, where you’re talking about, you’ve heard something. And then you hear another person say the exact same thing, and it radically changes your life. I was thinking about that. I flew home from California yesterday, and I was thinking about that with regards to books, because I’ve read some of the summary books. So, like, I read the summary for The Four Hour Work Week by Tim Ferris, and it was completely unhelpful, because all the summary did was say, here’s a fact, here’s something Tim believes, here’s a fact, fact, fact, fact, fact, and I implemented nothing, because I didn’t have the power of Tim Ferris’s stories.
So, it didn’t resonate on a heart level. Intellectually, I could probably regurgitate the facts of what he believes on how he builds companies, so he doesn’t become a workaholic. But nothing changed in my life, because there’s something, I can’t even fully explain it—but there’s something about the power of story that really helps us apply that fact, and also just hearing it again and again and again and again and again.
And so, I’m curious, actually, on that note, Glenn, are there any, you know, favorite books that have been changing your life? Are there any, you know, stories that have been changing your habits recently that you want to share?
Glenn Ambrose: Yeah, when I first woke up, I woke up conceptually. I just kind of understood for lack of a better explanation—the mind of God, almost like just how the dynamics of life interacted with itself, and it was pretty cool, right? However, I didn’t understand a lot of it intellectually, and I needed to learn how to stand in it physically to really make it part of me. I went off for about six years, devouring spiritual teachings everything I could get my hands on. One of the biggest ones was Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now, The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz was very impactful. The Untethered Soul by Michael Singer, huge. Those are probably my top three that have impacted me the most.
Bronson Hill: That’s huge, I think, and we’re a bit, we’re both Nate, and I read it’s on a books. We’re always interested to learn and grow, and I think I did read, I don’t know if I read the entire book but The Power of Now. It’s just amazing, the idea of just being present and just really taking things. And I think one thing I remember from that book specifically was when the information or your mind is saying everything looks good, but your gut is saying something is off. Your gut is always right.
And it was kind of like a lot of we get information, and even there’s a book by Malcolm Gladwell called Blink. And it says, in just a millisecond, you get so much information from a picture. They literally showed a video of a teacher who was presenting for 30 seconds, and you could tell the quality of the teaching. You could tell how engaged the students were. You could rate the teacher based on 30. It wasn’t even like—there was no sound to it. You could just watch them, and it basically came back identically to people that were actually in the class and rating the teacher.
So, it’s just amazing how our mind and our body and our spirit pick up things so quickly, based on, like—I guess the question really is, how do we tap into more of that? How do we tap into more of that gut and trust our gut when it doesn’t quite always make sense in our mind?
Glenn Ambrose: Well, I think probably one of the biggest blocks to that is people think that their gut and their emotions are the same thing. People have a tendency to say, “Well, I feel this way. I feel that I should do this, so I’m gonna follow my gut.” It’s like, whoa, whoa, whoa — your emotions are not your gut. And not only that, but they’re about as far from your gut as you can get because they make horrible decisions. Emotional decisions are the worst decisions ever.
Emotions are wonderful, and they’re an excellent, amazing part of our lives, but if you’re using them to make decisions, you are going to make a lot of horrible decisions. So, like my father, my father kind of simplified it and had his own little theory on how he does it, and he’s done very well in business and life. He said, “What I do is I research. I look at both ends of everything and I figure it all out. Now, if there’s a clear winner, then that’s what I’m doing.”
He said, “But once I’m done with my research and it gets down to about 50/50 or even 60/40, what I do then is I take all the facts, put them aside, and I do whatever the hell I want. Then I bring in my emotion, because why not? I’m a human being. I should do what I want sometimes, and I let that guide me.”
He said, “The way I look at it is, even if it’s 60/40, that’s a 20% gap. So if I have a 20% negative outcome, I can navigate that. That’s not that big of a deal. If it’s 40 good, 20 harder than the other side, I’m intelligent enough, I’m capable, I’ll navigate that. And I went with it, and I was doing what I wanted.”
So that was kind of fun anyway. I think that’s kind of like yourself.
Bronson Hill: You let yourself be on that adventure. You get to walk through it, and you get to say, hey, I’m committed to this — and then you have some flexibility on how that works out.
Glenn Ambrose: Yeah, so you can bring in a little bit of emotion at certain times if it’s close, but just looking at something and saying, I’m going to do that because that’s what I want it’s, you know, no. God gave us a brain and emotions. The brain is for making decisions; the emotions are not.
So yeah, separating that, I think, is important. And it’s just, I think, like you were talking — I think you kind of dangle the breadcrumb about how do you find your gut. I think we all read energy way better than we realize we do. And so like with that 30-second clip, figuring out what type of teacher that person was like, we can do that all the time. We have to be relaxed to do it. And we have to be open, and we have to be unattached to an outcome, because that’s what relaxes our energy.
Then we just practice it paying attention to what that still, small voice of God, that whisper, paying attention to that. Because most times, people want their gut answer in an extreme situation, they’re like, I’m in trouble. I don’t know what to do. What’s my gut say? Please, intuition, please come to me, whisper God, whisper — and God’s like, I’ve been whispering to you for the last ten years. And you haven’t listened, you haven’t participated, you haven’t practiced, and now you don’t know how to hear me. Because I am whispering, but you don’t know how to hear my whisper.
So, like, I think we need to practice that intuition development that listening to the whisper through our daily life and make it part of how we interact with life in general. Then when we’re used to it, then we can use it in extreme situations.
Nate Hambrick: And it reminds me, I was going to jump in there real quick. It reminds me of a really good book called Time Machine by Chris Cron, and he talks about, basically, it’s kind of like a Buy Back Your Time book. But he talks about life through the lens of a phoropter, right?
So, if you’ve ever gone to an eye doctor, they put the different phoropters on you until you see the map clearly. And the final phoropter, he makes a distinction between intuition and a gut feeling. And I’m not gonna, you know, I don’t have a fully formed opinion on it, but Chris’s opinion is that your gut often misleads you, it’s your intuition that leads you to doing the right thing.
So one of the examples he used is somebody’s about to make an investment, they’re about to buy an asset or do something that’s big and scary. And more often than not, their gut tells them, “Don’t do it,” because it’s coming from a place of fear. Versus their intuition, and the facts might lead them very differently. And listening to that, I listened to the audiobook of the book, and it definitely brought up more questions than answers. But I think there is a distinction sometimes, because a lot of times our gut leads us astray but at the same time, we do have to trust it, because you’re right.
Sometimes all the numbers on paper look perfect, but you just don’t feel right about the person. There’s something you can’t quite put into words that tells you. And yet on the flip side, how many times, I ask myself this all the time. How many times have I not done something because of my gut that I probably should have done? And so it’s a complicated thing to think through. I won’t pretend to be an expert on it.
Actually, Bronson, let me ask you because you’ve done more deals than most people combined. What are your thoughts on intuition versus gut? How do you decide when to trust your gut and when not to?
Bronson Hill: Yeah, that’s good. It’s a good question. I talk about this in Fire Yourself, my book, and you know, it’s interesting. You call it the gut, you call it the intuition, your mind, your emotions—there’s lots of pieces here. And I think it’s a muscle. It’s a skill, right? You have to discern what is working, and it’s like life is a series of inputs and outputs, right? We take this action, we get this result, and when we do it, it goes well. Sometimes the learning happens when things don’t go well, because then as things go well—
All of a sudden, like, I had, for example, an options trading strategy I was doing. I talked about this in my book as well, where I made $20,000 over a period of four or five months, and I thought, great. My net worth was a couple hundred K’s. This is a big game. It’s great.
Well, I ended up losing $70,000 in one day, right? And so there’s this learning that can happen, and it was painful. Again, it was over a third of my net worth. It was really challenging.
But on the other hand, I learned, okay, I’m not a good options trader. That’s not the best seat on the bus for me. I’m not the engineer mind to go do it. I love looking at a deal, trying to make sense of it, looking at the numbers, but somebody who’s actively doing this type of strategy is not as good for me. So, I think life is also a teacher for that kind of thing.
I actually wanted to ask you, Glenn, and we have a couple more minutes. I want to lead people to your podcast, your book, and things you’re doing, but let’s talk about this. Can financial freedom, as we talk a little about financial freedom here, everybody wants financial freedom, it’s really like people just want time freedom, right? But if I have enough time, if I have money, if I have more than enough money, does it deepen or distract from spiritual growth if you have financial freedom?
Glenn Ambrose: I think it deepens. I think it deepens without a doubt. I think it deepens just because of the way we live. What are the—spirituality? There’s so many ways to look at it, right? But if we look at it and go, okay, what are the qualities of God that we want to become closer to, or emulate, or embody, or whatever. You know, and it’s love, abundance.
Look around, if we don’t think that we live in an abundant world, go count the blades of grass. I mean, there’s abundance around us everywhere, and it’s God’s good grace to give us the keys of the kingdom. And so, if that’s part of spirituality—that’s abundance.
Thankfully, I think we’ve got out of this probably about 20 years ago. Now I see patterns in the evolution of spiritual teachings. Before 20 years ago, you couldn’t have any money and be spiritual, right? That was contradictory. And then now we’ve gotten to understanding, thank God—that no, it’s part of it. And you know what? Once we understand abundance is part of our spiritual life, and look at all the good that we can usher into this, I believe we’re creating a new paradigm.
The way we used to live, based in greed, doesn’t work anymore. So we need responsible people with good moral values and a spiritual connection to be abundant, because it’s going to take money to create a new paradigm. You know, it’s just part of it.
So, I think it helps the spiritual movement altogether on a grand scale, and I think it’s just a natural part of our evolution as spiritual beings having a human experience.
Bronson Hill: I love it. I think that’s great. Well, I’m really excited to have you here. You know, Glenn, you have done very well in your life. You’ve faced some rock-bottom things, and you’ve been able to bounce back from those, which I love. We always see people that struggle, and they never bounce back, and I love the work that you’re doing with people. You help people on this journey.
Obviously, you’ve shared a lot of things that are very common sense, and that’s why we wanted to have you on here as well. Because when I was on your show, I thought, man, this guy knows what he’s talking about. He’s really found a way to turn obstacles into things to grow from—those stumbling blocks into stepping stones.
So, well done for that. I just want to celebrate you for that. How can people reach out to you, connect with you, find out what you’re doing, and follow your podcast, your book, everything you’re doing?
Glenn Ambrose: Yes, thank you very much. I felt the same way about you guys when we met. You’re really living it, and that’s what it comes down to. It’s one thing to talk about it, but it’s another to actually walk the walk.
The best way to find me is to Google my name — Glenn with two N’s, Ambrose. That’s also my website: glennambrose.com, which has everything in one place.
My podcast is on every platform out there Life, Lessons, and Laughter with Glenn Ambros. I even tell people, just go to your podcast platform and search Glenn Ambros instead of Life, Lessons, and Laughter—that’s a lot of typing, and Glenn Ambros is quicker.
So yeah, just google my name, or go to my website by my name, or anything with my name, and I’m going to be popping up all over the place. I’ve been doing this for a long time, so you can’t get away from me.
Bronson Hill: We’ve got to hopefully find time to meet up, or when I can get to the Dominican Republic, I’ve never been out there. I’d love to come out sometime. We’ll hang out at some point. But I appreciate you, Nate Hambrick, as well. Thanks for being here, and I look forward to having you on a future show or connecting more in the future.
Glenn Ambrose: Absolutely. Thanks for having me.
Bronson Hill: All right. Well, that was a power-packed episode, man. I really enjoyed Glenn just the energy, and just the way that there’s a lot of similarities, right? How do you use a challenge or rock-bottom moment to really make it work for you? And again, I’ve had multiple moments like that, where in those moments I make a decision, right?
And I didn’t know the tiny promise quote: it’s in your moments of decision that your destiny is shaped. Right? When I decided I was going to leave my job in three years, I didn’t know how I was going to do that, but I knew I was going to do it in three years to the month, just about I did. I left just under three years.
So, Nate, what were some takeaways from you from this episode?
Nate Hambrick: Yeah, Glenn said something really, really profound that I need to meditate on for weeks to come. He said that half efforts don’t get half results.
One of the things that Alex Hermozi says all the time is that the ultra-wealthy, the deck of millionaires, the billionaires, are really, really, really, really good about saying no to almost everything.
And I think those two concepts go hand in hand, because the only way that you can give a hundred percent effort on a given task to get a hundred percent result is to have enough energy, time, and willpower to give a hundred percent.
And so, saying no to most things so that you can give a hundred percent effort to get the hundred percent result, I think, is really, really, really powerful and also convicting.
So, I’m going to put a little reminder on my calendar to ask myself, “Hey, are you giving 90 percent? Are you giving a hundred? And if the answer isn’t a hundred, what can you cut from your life to make sure you have enough effort to really make it count?”
Bronson Hill: You know, I think it’s so true, and we talk about this as a wealth show, but so much of it’s mindset. And like, if you’re listening and you’re not really—you’re not doing mindset work, you’re not into things like Tony Robbins or another group like Landmark Education, or some sort of whisperings or affirmations, these things are absolutely life changing.
They literally change the way that you show up and the way people see you.
And so, in the Christian background, we call it meditation. You meditate on the things that are true, right? So a lot of times we’ll have people, I know I’m loved, I know God has a plan for my life, I know this stuff, and I know it in my head, but I don’t feel it in my heart. So the way you get it is you’ve got to meditate it. You’ve got to see it there.
And then, the biggest takeaway from this episode is you have to commit. If you commit, if you, there’s a book called The Miracle Equation by Hal Elrod, who wrote The Miracle Morning, and he says, the miracle equation is, you know, it’s commitment. I’m going to get this slightly wrong, but it’s basically you have unwavering commitment with unstoppable effort.
And then it doesn’t matter if it takes you a week or it takes you ten years. You have committed, and you’re going to do whatever it takes, right? So it’s people that really have that level of commitment. It’s the extreme ownership of saying, “I want this, and I’ll do whatever it takes.”
There’s no timeline on it. I’m just going to do it and become the best that I possibly can be. So that’s what we hope for you, friend that you are becoming the best version of yourself.
Nate and I just had an awesome event in LA or in Orange County this weekend—with about 25 amazing people in the Wealth Forum. We have some new things coming out with that, so stay tuned.
But Nate, thanks for being here, and thanks to our audience as well.
Appreciate you all and thanks for joining this episode of The Mailbox Money Show
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