Talk Notes
Transcript
Hello, and welcome to The Overflow Podcast. My name is Craig Booker. The title of this episode is You In Ten. A lot of the material for this week’s episode was inspired by Pastor Craig Groeshel’s book The Power to Change Mastering the Habits That Matter Most.
Note: I will talk a lot about mental health, but please note this is not a substitute for therapy or mental health care I am not a counselor or a physician if you need help with mental health challenges, please find a qualified mental health professional.
The title of this episode is You in Ten. In this section of the book Craig Groeschel starts off the book asking some questions so he says what if you had met Elon Musk in 1995 when he left Stanford University to start his first software company? What if you met Simone Biles when she was 14 years old, competing in her first classic gymnastics event in her hometown of Houston, Texas? Would you have been able to spot something different in either of these examples of 10-plus years ago? Today these individuals are very well known in their respective fields. But would you been able to spot something different in them 10 years ago when they weren’t so well known. He asked the question, “What if I told you I could predict what your life would be like in 10 years?” What if I could tell you whether you’ll be better off financially, closer to God, healthier more together than ever, happier or in a circle of good friends. “The life you are living right now is shaping the life you will live tomorrow” that’s from Craig Groeschel. How? Like how is he he gonna figure this out? He says, “because your habits today are telegraphing your future.” The life you are living right now is shaping the life you will live tomorrow. We all have the best intentions but intentions don’t determine direction. Actions do. We all have hopes, but hopes for a different future doesn’t lead to a different future. Hope doesn’t change your life. Habits do.
So if you keep doing what you’ve been doing, you’ll keep getting what you’ve been getting. The life you’re living today is shaping the life you’ll live tomorrow. The life you want can be the life you’re living in 10 years but you will not get there because of your intentions, your hopes, or a few lucky breaks. In this section of the book, Craig Groeschel talks about how he used to view famous people or people that were real well off and maybe that they just got there because, you know, they were lucky or the right place at the right time. Maybe they had some good connections with family? He’s really changed his perspective on how he views successful people and that they get there because of their habits. So in this section, he’s talking about how he could predict where these people could be or where certain people could be by looking at their habits and their routines.
He goes into two, what he calls, two essential components. He says, let’s focus on two essential components you’ll need to become the you that you want to be. The first one that he speaks of, is what we’ll call small. He says the first component is small, remember the Small Things no one sees can lead to the big results everyone wants. The issue with small things is that they’re so easy to do or not to do. They never seem significant and ignoring or skipping them always feels acceptable. But you sculpt your life with the small stuff. The second category that he talks about is consistent. The second component is consistently doing the small thing. Once is insignificant, but doing the right small things over and over has a magnitude you cannot measure. There is a quote he says, “Getting the life you want, will be the result of countless seemingly small decisions done consistently over time”.
We have these two pieces. One being doing these small things and then the second part doing them consistently. This leads us to the story of Nehemiah. Nehemiah was the cup bearer of artist Xerxes the King of Persia. The Babylonians invaded Jerusalem during Daniel’s time and that was some 70 years before Nehemiah and the Babylonians destroyed the city and took most of the people. Some Jews remained in Jerusalem and when Nehemiah heard how bad Jerusalem was, it it says in Nehemiah 1:4 that “He sat down and wept”. It wrecked Nehemiah to hear the condition of Jerusalem. Nehemiah believed he could make a difference. So he took responsibility. Nehemiah 1:4 it says, “For some days I’ve mourned and fasted and prayed before the God of Heaven”. Nehemiah began with prayer, which is the right place to start when you don’t know what to do. Go to the one who does. Nehemiah was strategic in getting permission from the King to leave and rebuild the wall and Nehemiah told the people of Jerusalem about his plan. When he arrived, there he told him about this plan and he passionately convinced the people they had to do something. So he told this story of his plan. He must have been a good speaker or at least pretty convincing and passionate about what he wanted to achieve because he went about convincing people to help rebuild this wall. And so it says, just as Nehemiah rebuilt the wall, we will change our lives one small habit at a time. “Remember getting the life you want will be the result of countless seemingly small decisions done consistently over time.” And that’s Craig Groeschel. Nehemiah slowly built up momentum. Optimism began to grow as well and much like Nehemiah faced resistance from Sanballat and Tobiah, we will face resistance. You might hear whispers when you’re trying to do something to change your life. Some of these whispers might say, what are you doing, will you really restore this part of your life, do you think you can accomplish this in a day, that part of your life is dead, you think you can bring it back to life? So you may hear these whispers in your head of doubt and resistance. You’re likely to find yourself at the same place. It usually happens like this, you begin by defining your win. You know we’ve talked about habits and the person we want to be. We did go into details about defining what our win would be, so you begin by defining your win. You make some progress and feel good about it and you realize you still have a long way to go. There’s a good chance after you make some headway you’ll discover the journey is longer and harder than you first imagine. At this point you might think to yourself that you thought you would be further along by now. It will be tempting to quit here. You know recently, I got to this point in my own personal journey of trying to eat healthier and lose weight. I had a goal of losing a certain amount of pounds and I was right at halfway. I was at 50 percent, I had made it half way to my goal. I was excited because I had seen so much progress. So I’ve seen this personally in what I’m doing in the last week or so and so I really related to this statement of making it halfway and how Nehemiah made it halfway about rebuilding the wall.
All right, so you know you might get to this point where you’re halfway there and think you would be further along by now and it’s really tempting just to quit at this point, halfway, like Nehemiah. When we get discouraged it’s a sign that we need to go to God In prayer. It’s recognizing that we maybe don’t have the power we need to complete and successfully do these habits over and over again. We need strength from the Holy Spirit. So Nehemiah went to God In prayer. Nehemiah knew a truth we need to understand. We cannot consistently do the right things over the long haul in our own power. We need power that we don’t possess. We need God’s power and here’s another huge truth for us to learn. We must value progress over perfection. You’re gonna trip, you’re gonna mess up, you’re gonna fail. Your journey won’t be perfect, but keep moving in the right direction. Your goal is not to do this perfectly, it’s progress. So it says in Nehemiah 6:15 New Living Translation, “So on October 2nd the wall was finished – just 52 days after they had begun”. For 140 years the people lived in danger without a wall and this change only took 52 days, less than two months. Craig Groeschel poses the question again, what strategic habit do you need to start? Maybe this is spending 10 minutes a day in prayer, maybe it’s limiting your time on Instagram the 30 minutes or less a day, or walking a mile after dinner each night, writing three things you’re thankful for in a gratitude journal at the end of every day, taking the first 10 minutes of each day to prioritize and plan your time. Maybe it’s planning a weekly date with your spouse or kid, or tithing to help you grow your trust in God. All of these habits are easy to do. The thing about strategic habits is that they’re easy to do and easy not to do. Knowing the impact that your strategic habit might have on your life is essential to consistently doing your habit. We’ve got to realize the impact that these habits are going to have in the long term in order for us to keep going. It says for years psychologists told us that a habit could be formed in just 21 days. Recent studies have refuted that finding, reporting that on for the average person it takes 66 days to create a lasting habit. So again. asking the question, what habit do you need to strategically stop? You know we’ve talked about starting habits but we need we also need to look at habits that we want to stop to become the person we’re trying to become. So maybe this is using a credit card if you’re trying to get out of debt, maybe it’s you know you need to stop raising your voice in anger, maybe you need to stop hanging out with friends who have a negative influence on you, watching a certain TV show, spending money on things like cable TV, Netflix, Starbucks, eating out for lunch that keep you from paying off debt? Here’s what we know, each day the effect will seem inconsequential. You may not see any difference at first, but change is happening. You are changing your life.
We have an exercise this week and to start, the first question is, “what area of your life is not what it was or what it should be?”. So we’re trying to identify a particular part of our life that we want to change. Begin with prayer, ask God to help you develop a strategy. List a few bricks you can focus on in the next few days to take small and consistent steps. So the idea here is to reflect on your life, identify an area that you want to improve, go to God in prayer, and then identify small steps or bricks that you can take in the next few days that you can be consistent in. Alright, we have a principal for this week and it says, we need a power we don’t possess. We also need the value “progress over perfection”. Nehemiah 1:5-6 says “Lord, the God of Heaven, the great and awesome God who keeps this covenant of love with those who love him and keep his commandments. Let your ear be attentive and your eyes open to hear the prayer your servant is praying before you day and night”.
That’s all for this episode thank you for watching. If you like the video, give us a thumbs up and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss out on future episodes.
