Tag: leadership

3 Ways Your Lazier than You Think

Are you a lazy person? If someone were to ask us this question we would answer an automatic, and defiant NO! With a closer look at ourselves and how we live our lives, we are lazier than we think we are. Can this be fixed? Absolutely it can, but we first must recognize it. Laziness is more about our habits and attitudes than about our DNA.

My Experience

Tell me if you’ve had this experience: I was walking behind someone. I wasn’t right up on them, but a decent way behind. As we’re approaching the door to this building, I see them reach over and press the handicap button and wait for the doors to open. This seemed so odd and lazy to me. The person wasn’t handicapped, didn’t have a lot of things they were carrying. It just seemed like they preferred to push the handicap button and not open the door with their hands.

In full transparency, I have my four-year old son push the handicap button on doors to open them. I’m also teaching him to open doors for his mother and little sister. Some doors are still a little heavy for him to open by himself, so he will “push the button,” as he likes to call it.

Watching this person, this able-bodied, healthy, person push the handicap button to open a door made me question myself and others. Are we lazier than we think we are. I believe that we are and that we’ve accepted some aspects of laziness into our lives and chalk them up to us “being the way we are.” Here are three ways that we are lazier than we think.

Don’t be THAT person

  • Not planning ahead. Most of us don’t plan ahead. Really plan ahead. We don’t plan our day-to-day. We tend to just have a mental rolodex of things we need to get done. This is lazy because there always seems to be something more important,  that we need to take care of right away. If we would plan our day the night before then, we would know what things are vitally important and what can be delegated or can accomplished later.

 

  • Waiting to do the hardest things. Whether at work or in our lives, the things that tend to cause us to be uncomfortable and are the hardest to accomplish we put off until the last moment. Lazy people do this. We want to tackle these things head on. Successful people aren’t afraid to ask for help or guidance along the way either.

 

  • Not investing in yourself. Lazy people settle for the way things are. They settle for being in a unfulfilling marriage, they settle with being unhealthy, they settle with having a mediocre job. Successful people invest in themselves. They want to be the best versions of themselves. The main reason behind it is because they want to do it for themselves. They’re not looking to impress others, but they want to get the most out of life.

 

In what ways have you been lazy and what are going to do to change that behavior?

 

Mentor & Mentee

       There is a misconception in the world today. If you’re like me then you may not even be aware or even thought  about it. What misconception am I referring to? Mentors & Mentee relationships. We need to have both in our lives. There is so much information around us, on the internet, and in textbooks that there isn’t possibly a way for us to know or even be proficient in it all. In pursuing the dreams that we have, going after the callings or things that God has placed in our hearts, we have a need for mentors. People who have traveled the road before us.

The dictionary defines a mentor as an experienced and trusted advisor. A mentee is a person who is advised, trained, or counseled. I’ve found that there are times when I have been the mentor and times when I’m the mentee. As of  recent this year I found myself in a mentee position. Every Sunday morning when I get to church there was another man who would come up to me and adjust my tie. Fix the knot or just straighten it up.

This may not seem like a big deal, but it meant a lot to me. I like to be at my best on Sundays and for someone to notice and then help me in just sharpening or tightening up my tie is awesome. This same man would later show me how to shine my shoes. Again, that might not seem like a big deal to everyone, but in that moment I needed someone to show me something that I didn’t know. That’s what a mentor does.

They don’t have to be at the final destination of where you want to go, they just have to be further along the journey than you are. We all can’t have Bill Gates be our financial advisor. What we can do is have a mentor that has; a successful marriage that’s been married longer than you, own their home, started a successful business, and so on and so on. We may not want to be a millionaire, but we desire to be successful in our relationships.  Our mentors can be many people along the way from where we are to that final destination.

While we’re forging our path to new places and destinations, we also should have someone coming behind us who could use our advice and experience to help them. Someone who struggles with what we used to struggle with. Relationships are not about being selfish. It’s not always what we can get from them. They have to flow back and forth. There is a free flow of giving and receiving.

So we have to be open to developing relationships at every level. It may be someone who needs to be mentored. There are benefits to being a mentor. Being able to help someone fulfill their dreams is one of the best feelings in the world.

We don’t get to our destinations by ourselves. The journey is great when we can see someone further ahead than were we are and it’s a beautiful thing to help someone  coming up behind us.

 

It’s Time to Assess Life

Life Assessment

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.