Your Giving Out Advice Nobody Wants to Hear

Negative Advice Givers.

You know these people.

A lot of their sentences start with the phrase, 

“You know… there’s a better way to do that.”

They might start with good intentions, but it always comes out like criticism.

Many of these negative people actually have good ideas and could be extremely helpful, it’s just that no one wants to listen to them because they’re just…

Well they’re just negative.

“Here - you’re doing it wrong. Let me show you the most effective way.”

Negative advice givers come in all forms.

            - Parents

            - Friends

            - Bosses

These people violate two cardinal rules for teaching or mentoring

1) A NEGATIVE ADVICE GIVER MAY HAVE MISJUDGED YOUR DESIRE FOR ADVICE.

They forget that you may actually want to try it your way first. Trial and error is one of the most concrete ways to pick up new skills. They’re giving you good information and are actually looking out for your best interest, trying to save you from error. But they are forgetting that the very reason they know the lesson so well is that it was them had to learn it through trial and error in the first place. Trial and error is not always a bad thing. Once burned, twice shy.

2) NOT EVERYONE IS WELL POSITIONED TO GIVE OUT ADVICE TO EVERYONE ELSE.

If a negative person is constantly criticizing you, it’s highly unlikely that you’re looking to them when you want help. People seek out those that believe in them, that respect them, and that focus on problem solving rather than pointing out error. This makes it tough for a negative person to help be part of the solution even when they have the best advice or solution.

Proverbs 11:10 said it this way:, “When good people succeed,the city is happy. When evil people die, there are shouts of joy.

We all fall into this trap at times. We see someone doing something wrong, that we know how to do right, but we just blow it when it comes to lending a hand.

Instead of starting off by saying, “I love helping with home projects, can you tell me a little about what your doing here?” we go in pig headed and say “I’m really good at home projects, can I show you a few things you’re doing wrong?

One is an invitation to let the person explain what they know, and might be followed by a question help.

The other tells the person they suck and you don’t. Which person would you rather work with.

Listen, we all know you are smart, skilled and ready to help.

Let’s just all try to find a better way of offering our expertise to the world.

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Renewing Your Mind

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Renewing the Mind PT 1

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Does Everything Happen for a Reason

They say everything happens for a reason.

But what if it doesn’t?

We humans are creatures that like to be able to give purpose to every event, but I’m not so sure life works that way.

Yes - I think we can learn something from everything we experience good or bad. We grow, become more mature. But did it always happen for a reason? I don’t think so.

To say that God willfully controls all these bad things that happen in our lives paints a very different picture of God than I know. We live in a broken world where sin results in broken beings doing broken things to each other. Our bodies break down, selfishness leads to broken relationships and broken dreams. I can’t say that all this brokenness happens for a purpose.

I can say that I have a relationship with a loving God that uses brokenness to draw me closer to Him. To give me cause to trust Him more. To help me continually anticipate a day when there will be no more sin, pain and brokenness. He may work every situation that I experience for good (Rom 8:28), but not every situation is good.

It’s only human for us to want to have good reason for why we experience the painful situation we did.

It gives us a sense of control. A sense of order.

But the story of humanity is one that lost control when it sought to gain it.

I just believe in a God big enough to allow bad things to happen outside of his perfect will for our lives, and still trust that he has perfection waiting for me on the other side.

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The Lie of the Guidance Counselor

Life is never as straightforward as we would like it to be.
It's funny how the older as person gets, the more we realize that we cannot control our future. There are times that we point ourselves in a certain direction, but the place we end up is somewhere quite different, and you look back and feel "well how the  heck did I end up here?"

Remember doing aptitude testing in grade school? You sit down with a counselor and answer 25 questions and BAM - they gave you a list of 10 occupations perfectly suited for you. You could be a pilot, an entertainer or a mailman. You were to choose these courses in high school and all the guess work  was now taken out of play. Life was under control and you were on your way.

Obviously it never ends up that way. If averages hold true, most of us will work in  7-10 different career fields over the course of our lives. We'll have major transitions in what our personal life. We'll live in different cities (or countries) and experience things we never dreamed of nor planned for. I'm 34 and have worked in 4 or 5 different career fields, changed from a fast-food eating machine at 20 to a vegetable smoothie lover at 30. I spent three years pursuing a masters degree that I only spent 1 year utilizing in that specific career field. Really I blame my guidance counselor. His computer program was obviously faulty. It said pilot.

I think the coolest thing about it all is that God knew and made sure we were ready. While we thought we were preparing for one thing, he was really just using that phase of life to help us gain skills to succeed in the next. I suppose the biggest learning is that what we are doing is not as important as learning while we are doing it. Every phase of life seems to offer us a chance to learn about ourselves, our strengths and our growth areas. It gives us an opportunity to acquire a new skill or a new perspective on life. We may think that we have the next step all figured out, but then things change or God speaks, and life moves you in a brand new direction.

And that's OK. The next change is really nothing more than a new opportunity to grow - a chance to experience life in a brand new way

Love to hear your responses - and maybe a place or a job you never dreamed you would be in.

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Self Control

I’ve worked with teenagers for more than 10 years and any story you can imagine I’ve heard, witnessed or experienced. They light themselves on fire with hairspray, shoot fireworks at each other in a tag game, surf on the back of moving vehicles, put icy/hot rub in places that should never be “icy-hotted” and and and. Self control is not exactly the cornerstone of life for teenagers.

 

This past week I read a few articles in SI about what happens when athletes start to get out of control. Murder charges, failed marriages, PED allegations or even just professional extortion as they vie for a bigger contract from another team in their free agent years.

 

Then this morning I open up the book of Titus and it reads as follows:

 

Titus 2: 6:7

“Similarly, encourage the young men to be self-controlled. ⁷ In everything set them an example by doing what is good.”

 

The Bible is always so simple, yet so counter-intuitive to how we live. We feel big when we tell stories of all the crazy things we did/experienced over the weekend, but here we are encouraged to make our younger years be marked by wisdom and self control

 

Which takes more strength – going along with the crowd when something is going down, or having the will power to say no because you want to live wisely?

To stand up for what is right, or to give in to temptation?

 

Great reminder today from the scripture about self control. I guess I’m coming to the cusp of no longer being in “my younger years”, but I don’t ever want to come to the place where someone could say that I had lost control.

 

My prayer for today and for life – Lord help me live large and love life, without ever losing control.

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Real men Fall... & get back up again

For Father's Day this year I decided to run a triathlon. For me, 51.5 km of swimming, biking and running beats the heck out of watching golf on the couch any day.

Well most days.

Today it was 15 degrees and raining with a chance of thunderstorms. Not exactly a morning I wanted to be outside. Yesterday all day I tried to create a decent excuse for why I didn't need to go. I couldn't ABANDON my family like that. Surely they would want me around for those 3 hrs. Or maybe the lightning was just too unsafe. Can't take a risk like that. Despite my best efforts, I couldn't come up with anything that sounded legitimate so off I went at 7:00 AM this morning.

When I got there it was only raining lightly, so I set up my bike and running gear and dressed for the swim. The skies opened up & we had a good 1/2 hr soaking just before it was time to get into the water (fitting). However once the  gun went and we all dashed into the lake all was forgotten. The cold, the rain, my fake excuses all gone. I was doing what I wanted to do for Father's Day and it was going to be OK.

A triathlon is 1.5 in the water, 40 KM on the bike, concluded with a 10 km run. The worst part by far is the first few km's of running. Your exhausted, you've been racing for an hour and a half and your legs  jus don't feel like working anymore. Once you get into the rhythm of running it's OK, but there sure is a mental block when you first get off the bike and start to run.

This was far from a perfect race day, but I was making the best of it between short storms and muddy conditions. Then things really got awesome at the 23 KM mark of the bike.  My pedal fell off.
It's hard to bike without pedals.
So now I am wet, tired 17 KM from the race site and I have a bike without a pedal

Happy Father's Day.

It was one of those defining moments for me. I had a choice. I could sit there and wait for a race vehicle to find me, have pity of me and carry my sorry self and broken bike back home.  Or I could grab the bike by the bars and do what I came here to do - swim bike & run. Remember that even on a nice day when your bike is working fine, this is hardest part - moving from biking to running. But as i said, I really felt like this was one of those moments for me. Am I am quitter or a warrior? Do I pack it  in when things look hard or do I persevere?

So I ran with my broken bike for 7 KM when eventually a someone found me. (The police marshals apparently had called the race officials and told them about some crazy man running with his bike). I was still 10 KM from home. I was wet and disappointed that I wouldn't get an official finish on this race. However I handed the man my bike and said thanks but no thanks. I ran my way back home and finished 41.5 KM of the triathlon (They didn't let me go back out onto the 10 KM run course) in an unofficial wristwatch time of 2:59:32.

Real men fall, but real men get back up and keep going.
On Father's Day I want my daughter to see that finishing on your  own terms, even after a fall is sometimes more satisfying than finishing 1st when no adversity comes your way.

This is the man and father I want to keep being.

And yes... I went to to the Taylor Swift concert on Friday and loved it.  Real men can like country pop apparently as well.

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