2017 Archives - Leonard McElveen

3 Ways Not to Drift in Your Marriage

New Year = New You = New Marriage

This New Year means a chance to start some new habits. The beginning of each year marks a time where we can start fresh. It’s the perfect time to ignite a flame that may have died down in your marriage. It’s the best time to get your mind wrapped around having the best marriage possible.

One of the biggest attacks to our marriages isn’t an outside person or something like that. We could protect our marriages better if we didn’t get lazy in them.

Threats To Marriage

[ctt template=”8″ link=”Xgmxo” via=”no” ]Complacency and laziness are the biggest threats to marriages.[/ctt]

Complacency and laziness are the biggest threats to marriages.

Part of the definition of complacency is to be content. Our lives, children, work and marriages should have points of accomplishment and pride. However there is a difference between taking pride in your accomplishments and not striving for anything else.

Complacency to the point that we no longer strive for self improvement is unsatisfactory. We can only contribute to our marriages with what we have on the inside of us. If we are no longer depositing into ourselves then at some point, our well will run dry of what we can put into the relationship.

Marriage requires work. Work on yourself first. For me it all starts with my relationship with God. As my relationship with Him grows and I learn more about Him, I find myself wanting to grow in other areas of my life. It is the desire for God first, hat creates a desire which spills into other areas and pushes me to pursue my dreams and goals.

It’s time to Plan Ahead. I wrote an article to help you Plan Ahead.

Combat Laziness

I’m a firm believer in dreaming big and setting big goals. I always want something out in front of me that I am pursuing. It’s the pursuit that doesn’t allow me to settle for complacency. While our lives may be good according to some, we aren’t looking around us but looking forward to what’s ahead.

Laziness works very much the same way. Laziness is like the brother of complacency. It is the next rung on the ladder to nowhere. Once we reach complacency and we entertain it, the next step down the rabbit hole is laziness.

Laziness can take over a marriage and ultimately destroy it. When we are unwilling to work or put forth the energy into our marriages laziness will take over.

We have to actively fight laziness. Make sure to take the steps to combat laziness and build strong healthy marriages.

Here are three ways to fight complacency and laziness:

Self improvement: personal development is the key to making deposits into yourself. We should be well-rounded people. We have to have more to contribute to the marriage than our paychecks. Our lives have to be more than what we happened at work today.

Have A Goal: There is a difference between goals and habits. The idea that I want to get across is that we need something to strive for. Set a goal or a habit that you want to accomplish.

Pursue Your Spouse: I’m a big proponent of the idea of dating your spouse. For many couples the dating process was where we tried to impress the other person. We look for ways to get to know them better, or ways to get close to them. There’s no reason that this shouldn’t carry on when we get married. It may require more working around schedules, but it can be done.

Let’s fight complacency and laziness 2018.

It’s Time to Assess Life

The End of 2017

The end of the year will be here before you know it. This past year I can honestly say that I set some goals and I accomplished some of them. Although I didn’t cross everything off my list, the progress I have made thus far has me exicted for 2018 and what that will bring. What will your 2018 look like? The great thing about answering that question is that you are in control of what it looks like.

For this month I’ll be writing to help us prepare for 2018. We’ll look at this past year with open eyes to where we can look at ourselves, our spouses, and our marriages and begin to make plans for the upcoming year.

December is a great time to reflect on the past year and get prepared for 2018. Many may call it a life assessment or a time or reflection. No matter what it is called the main idea behind it is still the same; we want to look at the past year to see what things worked, what didn’t work, where could we be better in life, and so on. Before we look around us, we need to look within.

Self-Assessment

Who are you? Do you really know who you are? Most people don’t. So many of us hide behind the false selves of achievement and status, because we are afraid for the world to truly see us for who we are. If they saw us then they might not like us.

If we know who we are, then we’ll know what we’re called to do.

There is a gap between who we present ourselves to be and who we truly are. Our goal is to bridge that gap. To be a person of constant character.

How do we bridge this gap? There are plenty of tools that are online that can help with that. One that I like to use is here.

[ctt template=”8″ link=”80k62″ via=”no” ]Growth is intentional[/ctt]

A tool is only as good as you use it. What I’m saying that it doesn’t matter what tool you use if you never take any steps you gain from the insights. We all have blindspots in our lives. We can’t ignore them and expect to get the best out of life.

This is intentional growth. We aiming to be better people with better marriages.

All of this starts with us first.

What do you want the next year of your life to look like? What blind spots are you going to tackle?

Comment below, there’s isn’t a better accountability than to tell someone else.

Happy 4th of July!!

It’s July 4th. Happy Independence Day! I pray that you are celebrating safely with your family and friends. We’re now more than half way through 2017. This year seems to be going by very fast.

Where Has the Time Gone

If you’re like me, at the beginning of the year you set goals of things that you want to accomplish this year. Maybe you are better than I am and you have already accomplished everything that you set out to do this year. You could be on the other end of the spectrum and you realize that it’s July 4th and you can’t even remember what your goals were. This year, I’m somewhere in the middle. I haven’t accomplished everything that I set out to do this year, but I have accomplished more this year than I have in years past.

This Year Can Still be Awesome!! Click To Tweet

So how do you get the most out of the rest of this year? Can your goals still be accomplished this year? The easy answer is yes, but the more complicated answer is that the rest of this year is dependent upon you. This year can still be great but it must come with some reflection.

What Is Holding You Back?

What has kept us back so far this year? Has it been laziness, busyness, or any number of other things that will try to creep up on our priority list. There must be a time of self reflection where we can see what is holding us back.

As we celebrate America’s Independence Day today, let’s set the rest of our year to make the best of it. Let’s have a time of reflection and then have a plan. We can’t just wish that things will be different, we have to plan to do better. Plan for the things that will try to hold us back and how we can overcome them.

Plan For Better

This can still be an awesome year! What has been holding you back this year? What’s your plan to overcome your setbacks? We can still accomplish so much this year. Let’s get to work!