God Speaks Daily

Fear of being alone keeps us in relationships we’ve outgrown.

Fear of rejection cause us to avoid meeting new people, drive people away or walk away from people before they can reject us. Then we judge them harshly so we can avoid being honest with ourselves.

Fear of responsibility leads us to keep jobs beneath our ability.

Fear of censure leads us to not standing up for ourselves and causes us to associate with people who aren’t really worth our time.

Fear of failure leads us to settle on lives that aren’t fulfilling.

To avoid exposing our fears, we blame others for our miserable boring lives.

Some of us avoid taking responsibility for our lives by giving “God” the role and then when we feel under-whelmed by our boring lives chalk it up to “God’s Will.”

When we attempt to settle in relationships, jobs, and our future, we are choosing a fear based life. Settling means choosing a fear based life.

The only way to overcome these fears is to walk through them. Define who we want to be and what kind of people we want in our lives and the walk through the fear to create the lives we want.

To create the lives we desire and deserve.

“Fire, ready, aim!”

This reminds me life’s about action.

Think about how in the war movies that we’ve all seen, how they fire their artillery. They’ve got the guy that crawls up there to the front with his binoculars, and he’s looking out with the radio and the binoculars, and he gives off some numbers and the people in the back with the cannon fire the thing.

The forward observer watches where it lands and says, “You want to move a little bit to the left, a little bit to the forward,” and gives them some more numbers.

They fire again. The forward observer looks out and says, “Fire for effect,” and then they just let the whole barrage go.

What they’re doing is they’re firing their cannons to aim their cannons. In the artillery, they have a whole line of those cannons back there. They’re not all firing for the observer to watch. It’s one cannon firing so the observer can see where the shells are landing.

While that’s happening, all of the other cannons are getting ready. Then once the first cannon knows where it’s aiming, all the other cannons aim, and then they all start firing.

It’s about going out and creating a mess, which I’m pretty good at, and then looking at the mess and saying, “How can I do this better?”

It’s about going out and taking action, then looking at what we’ve done, spending the time doing some introspection, taking aim, and then moving forward.

That is so powerful. I think that for many years I got caught up in everything had to be perfect before I could do anything, caught up in indecision.

With this model, the fire, ready, aim, I’m able to just go out, get something done, build up some momentum, and ride it to completion.

“In order to get anything done, you must overcome hurdles.”

Hurdles have been a major problem in my life. For many years, I got very little done. I realized this was because I looked at hurdles as insurmountable walls.

For example, on one of the first books I ever wrote, I was unable to visualize the entire book. And yet, I was able to visualize each chapter individually. I had no idea how they’d fit together, but could see them separately.

So, what I did was I set myself a goal that every day I’d write a chapter. Then after I had all of the chapters done, I’d figure out how to put them together.

This allowed me to get these books done without getting trapped by the hurdles.

Looking back, I think in a lot of cases I’d made these hurdles bigger than they really were, because I was afraid. I was afraid of finishing the book and putting it out there were people could see it. I was afraid of not living up to my standards or not being profound enough.

Hurdles allowed me to avoid risks.

Once I got to the point where I just worked my way around the problem areas, I found myself finishing projects

At that point, I no longer could hide. I needed to step up and say, “Hey, here this is,” and take responsibility.

“Does this activity move me towards my goal?”

In every situation, I need to ask myself, “Does this activity move me towards my goal? If not, why am I doing it?”

I’ve found this to be extremely important, because I am easily distracted. Maybe it would be a small project where I could make some money quickly, which doesn’t move me towards my goals but it does help me pay my bills, so it’s acceptable. Or maybe I would get caught up in something because a friend needed help. That’s also an okay thing for me to do.

I frequently found myself doing projects because they were impressive, because I wanted to show off, or because I was bored.

As I started asking myself would this help move me towards my goals and my future, I learned to focus on what was important, where the priorities are, and removed a lot of distractions and unproductive activities.

“It’s easier to give a compliment than receive one.”

Go out and compliment everyone you meet. Be sincere and watch their reactions. I had somebody suggest this to me a number of years ago, so I went out and started complimenting people.

“That’s a nice purse you have.”
“This is a great cup of coffee! Thanks for making this for me.”

By watching others I learned something very interesting. It’s very difficult for us to accept compliments.

As I thought about this deeper and I complimented more people, I realized that there might be two reasons for this.

First in the example I mentioned about the purse, the woman probably thought I wanted something from her. She might be thinking I am complimenting her in order to start a conversation. So, she’s not going to accept the compliment and she doesn’t see it as being sincere.

Secondly as seen in the other example, the nice cup of coffee, some people just aren’t able to accept compliments.

I need to look at what I’m doing when I am bestowing compliments. Compliments are not a way to manipulate people, like the woman with the purse. They’re a way to recognize people.

Once I started thinking about compliments in these terms, it changed the way I complimented people. And also, this is an odd result I wasn’t expecting, when people started complimenting me, the sincere ones felt better and I was more able to accept the compliment rather than defray them.

We’ve all heard people deflect compliments. “Oh, it wasn’t that big a deal.”

I learned to say, “Thank you. I worked very hard on that. “Thank you for recognizing me.”

This not only improved the way I interact with others, it helped me learn to enjoy praise.