Keep Paddling!!!

Sometimes life can become challenging! Sometimes things just come up without little or no notice at all. Sometimes life can be like a White Water Rafting Trip!

Many years ago I joined several other men on a trip to attend a Promise Keepers event in Indianapolis Indiana. On the way, we stopped in Tennessee to go White Water Rafting on the Ocoee River. I had never been before and like everyone else I was excited about doing something adventurous with some of my best friends.

The River Guide told us everything we needed to know before we entered the water. He explained how we would sit on the raft and he even gave us a detail of each section or the river and more importantly the rapids we would face together.

Rapids named ….Broken Nose, Flipper and Tablesaw easily cause your imagination to start seeing scenes from some Hollywood movie of people being tossed into a raging river!

The map showed all the rapids in succession, with the worst rapid at the very end. That rapid was called “Hell’s Hole”. Our guide made that one seem like some people didn’t make it out on his last trip down. Believe me he had our attention as he trained and entertained us.

The one thing I really remember that he kept saying again and again was “Whatever you do, Keep Paddling!” “When the water gets rough, don’t stop paddling or we will get sucked into the rapid and we could get turned over.”

I can still hear him saying those words even now.

If life can be like a river, where calm water can quickly become a rough series of rapids, then maybe we need to navigate life like we would navigate a challenging river? Just like that journey on the Ocoee River, when things start to get rough, that’s probably the time to paddle harder and it’s definitely the time to Keep Paddling Through. Sadly we have all seen someone who quit paddling along the way of life. The succession of rapids eventually caused them to quit and just accept was happening to them. Their stories can range from a failed marriage, a failed business to a dream career path that was eventually given up on.

I have heard it said that “Life can happen to us or we can happen to life, That you can ride the waves or the waves can ride you.” 

At the Ocoee River they name their rapids with names that describe the experience of going through them. What are the rapids we encounter on the river of life and how can do more than survive them, how can we paddle through them and master them?

• Rapids of Delay. This set of rapids just tries to make you think it is never ever going to happen. You were hoping that the house would sell in 90 days, but now it has been two years. Will you give up on selling your current home and building that dream home one day, or will you keep the dream alive? It could be that you are dreaming of having a child one day and it’s now been 10 years with no signs of hope. Will you keep the dream alive despite the delay? Ask yourself if it’s worth it, if it’s worth the delay and if it is worth it then you must Keep Paddling despite the delay.
• Rapids of Detour. This set of rapids takes you in a direction that you did not want to go. You were set on a career in sports but an injury ended that path and started a brand new one. You had a desire for something in life, but you were moved in another direction that seems to be taking you away from your dream, not towards it! Detours happen and they ultimately are either God’s hand directing us to a new dream that were not aware of yet, or they are a test on the way to the original dream. Either way, the best way to move forward and away from the point of the detour is to Keep Paddling. Who knows, your detour today may be saving you from a really bad decision but at the same time it actually delivers you to the dream you originally had in the first place. Just because you don’t get the dream today, doesn’t mean that you will not get it tomorrow.
• Rapids of Discouragement. These rapids just try to wear you down over time. To get through these rapids we need to remind ourselves that they will not last forever. If we Keep Paddling, they will eventually end and the water will become like glass once again. We also need others to help us fight through and master these rapids. Like my trip on the Ocoee River, you can not go down the river alone. Like that trip, there are times that you can’t paddle and you will need someone to paddle for you. Likewise, you will need to paddle when someone else just can’t. The way we get through the Rapids of Discouragement, is to Keep Paddling and Keep Paddling With Others!

Keep Paddling

Coach Don

What if you knew that………..

What if you knew that….

• Your best job or a new promotion was just around the corner.
• You were finally going to be able to lose weight and get into better shape.
• The breakthrough you have prayed for has already begun and you are about to see it take place.
• Your about to experience joy so deep that its actually going to make you laugh out loud.
• Your about to receive a sum money that you were never expecting or counting on.
• You are about to find your one true love after searching for many years.

Its amazing how much time we spend imagining what will go wrong in our lives instead of what will go right. Just Imagine if we spent the same amount time imagining what will go “Right” as we do on what will go wrong. The Bible talks a lot about our thoughts and words and how they either lead us into life or death. Into the life we want to live or into the death or destruction of the life we are meant to live.

If you could imagine your future into existence what would you choose to imagine? 

Here are three things you should do to change your thinking to think about the right things.

1. Read the Bible. God’s word is full of what God thinks about you and your future. Just read Jeremiah 29:11 For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, says the Lord, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope. God thinks great thoughts about you and you can read them everyday.
2. Write it down. Take 10 minutes today and write down all the wonderful things you would like to become or do. Have a positive goal sheet and revisit it often. While it doesn’t mean everything on it will become reality, it does mean that your life will be heading into the right direction. Write it down and revisit it often. Make changes as goals and dreams change over time.
3. Talk to yourself. What are you currently saying to yourself? Is it something that you would say to your best friend or to someone you really believe in and admire? You need to be your own greatest cheerleader! Do you know how you can overcome a negative thought that you can’t stop thinking about? Talk out loud to yourself! Your tongue will overrule your mind every single time. Even if it takes several times you can win this battle when you speak positive life giving words to yourself. Your mind has to listen when you speak!

Choose today to start thinking great and mighty thoughts about yourself. God does, and He is always right!

Coach Don

Patience! A powerful key to real success

In life we often look for the keys that will ultimately help us to succeed. Sometimes they are hidden and sometimes they are right before us in plain view. Things like….

• Commitment
• Desire
• Consistency
• Hard Work
• Integrity
• Humility

These stand out as needful and being necessary components if we are going to develop a life that is meaningful and successful. While there is no one that is perfect in obtaining all of these  virtues listed above, they clearly should be the targets we are all shooting for.

While the list stands out as items we should all work on, there are also a few that get overlooked. Many times they get overlooked simply because they don’t give us the same feeling as words like Passion, Drive and Commitment.

One of those overlooked and sometimes hidden keys is Patience. See, even now, as I even say it, it does not bring a feeling of being a true building block to providing me the ability to slay dragons and conquer worlds. While we all know that everyone really needs to work on being more patient, It may not be clear as to how patience is really a key to success?

First let’s look at what Patience really means. Patience is best described as the ability to remain calm and not become annoyed when dealing with problems or with difficult people. It can also be described as an ability to wait on something a long time without losing your cool and becoming upset.

Three reasons patience is a key to victory in life.

1. Learning patience and becoming more patient makes us better people. We do all kinds of things to improve ourselves and make our life better. We work out, we read great books, we learn new skills and all of that helps us to develop into a better person. Did you ever think of learning to be patient as something that would greatly change your own life? In James 1:4 it states “But let patience have its perfect work, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing.”  What is it that happens when someone grows in the gift of patience? They become more like the one who created it in the first place, they become more like God. Can you imagine lacking nothing!  
2. Learning patience increases your level of commitment. The world is full of people that can stay committed to something worthwhile for a few days. Growing in patience increases your ability to stay committed longer. While there are times no one should “Patiently Endure” something, there are a lot more times when a little more patience with a person or process would have yielded more desirable results than just bailing out.
3. Learning Patience is really the key to longterm success. Many times we feel that difficult situations become more than we can bear or carry. God promises that he will never give us more than we can bear with his help. So that means in most cases when it comes to overcoming in life “It’s not about the Weight, it’s about the WAIT!  Just ask yourself this question? How many people ultimately succeeded in life because they simply would not quit. Think of people like Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Edison and even C.S. Lewis. Each of them had a journey that was difficult but not impossible. They simply had what I like to call “Active Waiting.” The journey to eventual success was not too heavy for them to lift, but they had to have patience. It took a long time to get there. Every great journey is going to try your patience and when you succeed, you will find that your patience has actually grown more simply because it had to. Most great mountains are not conquered by the strong, but rather by the patient.

If Patience is a real key to success, then the question has to be this. How does one actually obtain and grow in the gift of patience?

• Submit your life to God. One of the nine fruits of the Spirit is Patience. Our ability to be patient comes from God Himself.
• View things from another person’s point of view. You will have more patience for people when you take this view.
• Work to eliminate hurry from your life. Jesus was busy but he was never in a hurry. Many times our lack of patience comes from the busyness of our generation. Take time to think of nothing at all.
• Allow Trials to be your Teachers! In Romans 5:3, The Message, the passage states^{– “}There’s more to come: We continue to shout our praise even when we’re hemmed in with troubles, because we know how troubles can develop passionate patience in us, and how that patience in turn forges the tempered steel of virtue, keeping us alert for whatever God will do next. In alert expectancy such as this, we’re never left feeling shortchanged. Quite the contrary—we can’t round up enough containers to hold everything God generously pours into our lives through the Holy Spirit!”

May we all grow in Patience

Coach Don

Are You A Stalled Dreamer? How you can overcome the trap of unfinished goals!

Have you ever planned out your week by setting goals to eventually see those goals stall out or get derailed? If that sounds familiar to you then you may be part of the group that I like to call “Stalled Dreamers”. To be fully honest with you, I find myself in that group more often then I would like to be.

Many times It just seems that I start each month or week out with a list of clearly written goals that looks somewhat like a list of directions on how to bake a boxed cake mix. They seem simple, clear and obtainable but somewhere I find my goals end up as a half baked cake that is missing some key ingredients. On paper it should work but something gets missed or left out along the way.

The difficulty with setting and missing goals over and over again is that you can get “Goal Fatigued”. When your journal or notepad starts looking like the same list repeated over and over again with little result you can get discouraged. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think we should resign from goal setting just because we have failed or fallen short of meeting our own expectations. I just think there might be a better way of seeing our goals become reality.

To really understand what is happening to our well planned goals and why they may stall out, let’s look at the places most goal setters fail.

1. They Set Too Many Goals. Have you ever listed everything you currently wanted to change or do in your life, to only find in the end that you made very little progress except for the list? This is common for most goal setters as they have to learn which goal or goals they should concentrate on first. They miss the power of finishing one goal and that slowly eats away at the excitement of making progress. I am really bad at this that as I find myself trying to do too many things at once. In fact I am trying to read two or three books at this very moment. If you add to that the issue that when I get bored with one goal, then I am going to bounce to another goal. The more I bounce, the less I finish.
2. Their Goals Are Too Big. You have done it again, you have gone and set your sights on the goal of trying to climb Mt Everest once again. The last time you set this goal you spent hours researching it and even marked a date on your calendar. All that work just to wake up to the knowledge that you didn’t do it. But this time will be different! You are inspired and ready to focus one of the biggest things on your lifelong bucket list. While that is probably not you, are their goals you have set that are just a little extreme or hard? The problem that we all have in goal setting is that we want to set the goal on what inspires us the most. We do that when many times what we need to do is set simpler goals that can ultimately move us closer to those bigger goals. Everyone started working out after the movie “Rocky” came out in the Seventies, but only a few continued to live the dream of being in the shape that Rocky Balboa was in. Have the big goals in mind, but plan with smaller goals that will move you closer and closer to where you want to be. “Momentum is built by one small movement repeated over and over again”. Also “Little wins can really add up into big victories”. 
3. Their Goals Get Interrupted. Simply put this is what derails most of my personal goal setting ventures. Life is going to happen and what we do when life happens will really determine what we will eventually do with the plan we’ve made. The car breaks down and the next thing you know you have missed a week of workouts. You get the flu and now it’s been two weeks since you worked on writing your book. Clearly you must give room for the interruptions that are unavoidable and for those that really matter, like going to your daughter’s dance recital. But there are those interruptions, like looking at facebook every ten minutes or surfing the internet, that are not always necessary. You must decide which ones count and which ones don’t. Lastly if you want to get to your goal despite the interruptions you can’t or don’t want to avoid, then you must do something! Even if you only workout at home for fifteen minutes or write for only ten minutes in your book, the action will keep you from stalling out.

Happy Goal Setting

Coach Don Newman

Three Questions to Make Your Day Awesome!

1) How do I know that I am really winning in life?

One sign that you are winning in life is the fact that you got up this morning and went to work—really! Many times we feel like we are losing simply because we don’t believe that we are winning. Belief controls so many things. Find the places that you are getting things done and celebrate each and every one as a win. You will then find that winning begets winning, and as the scripture states in Psalms 23:7: “For as he thinketh within himself, so is he.”

2) What do a Christian and the Tin Man have in common?

Both the Tin Man and a follower of Christ need the exact same thing today. They both need fresh oil! If the Tin Man fails get a fresh squirt of oil in his joints and his mouth, he will be stuck! If a follower of Christ does not have a fresh experience with Christ through His word, His presence or worship and prayer, he also will become stuck and a little rusty. God’s flow of oil is continual and it never runs out. It comes as we simply focus on Him. A simple way to receive fresh oil is to just think about God! Turn the radio down for a few minutes while you are driving into work and just think about how great He is. Little squirts of oil go a long way for the Christian and the Tin Man!

3) How can I live a carefree life?

While we will always have to deal with worry, God gave us a way to live more carefree! Care more for others than you do for yourself! As you focus on giving encouragement, praise or even financial help to others, you will find that the cares that have weighed you down will become distant and lose their power. Jesus told us to cast every care upon Him. If we are going to help carry someone else’s burden, someone has to take our cares. Jesus is waiting to take them so you and I can help someone else. Amazingly, we usually find the burdens of others don’t weigh us down; it’s only our own that discourage and destroy us. Caring for other people’s worries can actually even encourage us! Live carefree today and be encouraged!

 

Be sure to subscribe to the blog in the upper right-hand corner, follow me on Twitter at @DonLNewman and like the 365to50 Facebook page!

What is 365to50?