If you’ve been following this series of articles, we’ve done A LOT of deep thinking and soul searching. While the application steps to this point may have involved a decent amount of thinking and writing, this next step in moving towards a thriving life is most critical. It’s important because it has to do with the question of how to translate theory into action, or beliefs into reality, if you will.
In each article, I contrast what I call a Thriving Life Belief (a belief that brings thriving into life), or TLB, with a Languishing Life Lie, or LLL (a belief that leads to languishing in life –> the opposite of thriving). Here’s today’s set of contrasting beliefs to consider:
TLB #6: Once a person discovers who he or she is and what his or her values are, he or she must take action steps to reinforce and solidify beliefs about him or herself and his or her values.
LLL #6: A person who knows who they are and what their values are will automatically be able to live out these beliefs in their lives aka “head knowledge” automatically equates to “heart knowledge.”
So, here’s my all-important question for today: what steps are you taking to live out who you are in life?
Have you ever heard the idiom “All talk and no action” ?
Or what about any of these similarly creative expressions?
“actions speak louder than words” “talk is cheap,” “you’re full of hot air,” “you’re just paying lip service,” “all talk and no cider,” “all bark and no bite,” “all wax and no wick,” or – for my fellow Texans – “all hat and no cattle” – and my personal newfound favorite – “all sizzle and no steak” :)=
While this is an entertaining list and may be fun to remember for your next get-together or party, all of these idioms basically have to do with describing a person who talks about something but fails to take action on it.
To expand on this and make this personal, let me get back to my personal journey. As I mentioned in the last article, one of the exercises my first men’s mentor/coach had me do was write a list of my personal core values.
While it took some time, reflection, and prayer to come up with this list, I found that this was the easy part. What I had done is established a clear standard or expectation for myself.
But then came the hard part.
My mentor/coach and the community of men I became involved with began to challenge me to live UP to these values or standards. I probably had an internal thought like “Darn! You mean, I can’t just say stuff and talk about stuff and not do it?” Funny, right?
One example of this was when I came up with the personal value of seeking to be “a man of my word.” Would I just write this down as a personal value? Or live this out? That was the question I had to contend with.
What began to happen is that life presented me with plenty of opportunities to decide if I was going to stick with being a “man of my word.” When unexpected events happened, the queston was: am I going to forego my personal self-commitment to be a man of my word, or am I going to follow through on my word?
If I didn’t follow through, I’d feel a twinge of guilt, knowing I didn’t adhere to the standard I’d called myself to. And this, by the way, was what I call healthy guilt, not shame. I distinguish healthy guilt from what I call unhealthy guilt aka shame (healthy guilt = I don’t feel right because I did something wrong vs. shame = I feel bad because I am something wrong)
If I did follow through, I’d feel peace internally and aligned with my personal values. It felt great!
Now, while I’m by no means perfectly consistent at being a “man of my word,” I believe I’ve been more aware of this value and have sought to live this out with more vigor in my life due to the challenge of taking action on this value.
Question:
Is there an area of life where your walk isn’t matching your talk? Do you practice what you preach?
Application Challenge:
1. Take time to write out areas where you have a belief about yourself and your personal values that doesn’t match with how you are living out your life.
2. Challenge yourself by picking one of these gaps, or areas of discrepancy, between your talk and your walk and get to walking!
If this is challenging or you’d like to learn more about this, reach out to me and set up a discovery call. Let’s see what we can discover that will help you get unstuck and move forward so you can move towards thriving in your life!
