Donald Miller's Blog, page 56

Your Feelings Are Not the Boss of Your Behavior

My daughter was having a bad day.

Rainy weather interrupted her soccer game. Her brother snubbed her by choosing his buddies over hanging out with her. Our well-intentioned toddler decided to help “organize” her room by pulling everything off her shelves. She was late for her flute lesson.

To add insult to injury, the family was headed to an event where there would be lots of adults and little kids, but no one her age.

The compounding effect of these little annoyances grew into honest frustration that bordered on anger. These emotions placed her on the precipice of a decision.

How would she respond?

With clinched fists and a stern expression my daughter told me that her brothers were annoying and she was so irritated that she did not want to go anywhere. Then she asked me the critical question:

“Do you have any idea what I am feeling?”

She meant it as a rhetorical question, but it presented an invitation I could not resist. I said, “Yes!” Then I went on to tell her about my frustrating week.

As she listened to my tale of woe, her focus shifted away from her frustrations and toward my situation. Empathy and self-pity cannot co-exist, so I knew good things were ahead.

I invited her into my world and asked her advice on how I should handle the things that had gone wrong during my week.

Her counsel was brilliant.

In her own way, she asked me to look at things with more perspective and be grateful for the things that were going well. She even suggested I extend forgiveness to others and bring in additional workers to help on a project.

This wasn’t some sort of parental Jedi-mind trick. Her wisdom was actually helpful to me. She essentially gave me a choice:

I could either act consistent with my temporary emotions or my long-held principles.

She reminded me of one of our family’s rules:

Feelings are not actions.

The idea behind this rule is that feelings are valuable and important, but we retain the choice to decide what actions we take.

Our honest, and even most intense emotions, should not determine our behavior.

Turning the conversation back to her frustration, I asked if she were directing a play about her life, how would she want the actress to handle the rest of her day. She liked the idea of being a Director.

*Photo Credit: Graham, Creative Commons

By participating in this imaginary game, her focus shifted from the frustration she was experiencing to how the day would unfold. The goal was not for her to pretend to be someone else but to direct how she could live through the challenges as the truest form of herself.

She thought about what it would look like if she allowed her frustration to ferment versus rising above it to rescue the remainder of the day. The imagined scenarios were clear in her mind.

And the best choice became obvious.

Without a single one of the offending circumstances having changed, this simple shift in perspective offered her hope for the rest of the day.

If only I had the presence of mind to engage in this exercise at each major decision point in the day, I think I would make better choices.

We may not get to choose our circumstances, the behavior of others, or even our emotions, but we possess agency to determine our responses.

What would it look like for you to view your life from a Director’s perspective? How would you want your character to handle the relationships, work, and challenges of today?

Your Feelings Are Not the Boss of Your Behavior is a post from: Storyline Blog

Your Story Is Not A Paint By Number

Still, well into adulthood, I find myself just wanting to fit in. It’s not in the same way as it was in high school of course. I’m not hoping to be invited to the right party or pretending to smoke a cigarette or claiming my drink in my plastic cup isn’t water.

This was how I “fit in” as a teen. Today, I want to fit in with a life that follows the appropriate succession of events.

I realized this over lunch with a friend.

We discussed how each life phase brings its own set of expectations. With college, a degree and a job. With a job, a spouse and a home. With a spouse and home, children.

That’s as far as we got because between the two of us, that’s as far as we’ve gotten. But I’m sure the expectations continue as your children grow and your career progresses. And I think we continue to live in a tension pulled on one side by fitting in and on the other side by wanting to be our own person. Rarely can we be both, but we always want both.

We’ve learned life’s paint-by-number.

We see the outline; we just don’t always have all the colors to fill it in. This can be irritating and disheartening and depressing and discouraging. We want all the colors.

*Photo Credit: Katie Childs

In a few days my little sister will get married to the best guy. It will be beautiful, and I’ll cry “ICan’tBelieveMyLittleSisterHasGrownUp, She’sSoBeautiful, LookAtMyDadGivingHerAway” tears, like I did at my older sister’s wedding.

Yet, this has reminded me of a color I haven’t found. Barring a strange act of God, I’m not getting married in four weeks nor in four months. I’m looking for the instructions for my paint-by-number.

And I can’t find them.

Maybe your instructions appear to be missing, too.

Maybe something has not happened in your life succession you thought should have by now, or something happened too quickly and you weren’t ready for it and you’re still reeling. This can make us feel out of place. Like we’re doing something wrong. Like we don’t fit in.

Think about the words Paul uses to describe us in his letters: Aliens. Sojourners. Exiles. Strangers. These are the things we were before Christ. The words he uses to describe us after redemption?

Citizens. Saints. God’s people.

Members.

I like “members” best because it can so often feel we’re not a part of the club. We often find more comfort in the pieces fitting and societal norms than we do in our own salvation.

And the sad part is, when we make moves based on these expectations, we forget who we are. We forget the quirks and passions and dreams that make us us and we turn them over to what make us feel a part. We forgot that we already are a part.

We forgot that we “are no longer strangers and aliens, but…fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God” (Eph. 2:19).

Your Story Is Not A Paint By Number is a post from: Storyline Blog

Do You Think Your Story Matters Less Because You’re a Woman?

By now you know we love Shauna Niequist here at Storyline. She’s an incredible mother, wife, speaker and writer. We love the boldness of her femininity and the beauty of her intense intellect.

We’re proud to have her keynote and host the Storyline Conference in Chicago.

In this talk, delivered at the Q conference in Nashville, she opens up about her relationship with her mother, co-founder of the phenomenally successful Willow Creek Community Church in Chicago. As you watch the video, we’re hoping you’ll spend time thinking about your passions, too.

We’re hoping you’ll think about your dreams.

We’re hoping you’ll think about your visions and goals and passions as a woman and realize that unless you act on those visions, the world won’t be as complete as it could be.

As Shauna reflects on her mother, she declares her mother “knows firsthand how painful life is when you’re not living out of your passions.” She says of her mother that she raised her kids and supported her husband’s dreams and is only now discovering she could have accomplished her dreams too, even while raising children and being faithful to her husband.

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And yet she hit pause on many of those dreams and didn’t hit play again until her forties and fifties.

Sound familiar? Sound like your life?

In an age when women are finally awakening to all the importance of their impact, Shauna Niequist boldly and beautifully speaks to what could be. And she does so by honoring her father and husband and especially, her amazing mother.

As a mother, wife and daughter of Christ, what is possible for you?

These are the important questions we want to ask and begin to answer at the Storyline Conference. Your passions matter. Your vision matters. Certainly we all sacrifice for the benefit and beauty of the whole, but what about the beauty you’re supposed to bring to the world? What of you is moving forward and impacting the world around you?

Could you be living a better story than you currently are?

And why should you live less of an impactful story than a man?

Shauna says it this way:

Everyone benefits when women tap into the passions and use the gifts God has given them. The church benefits. Families benefit. Businesses and non-profits benefit. Everyone benefits when women discover the gifts and passions that God has given them.

We love this talk by Shauna and are proud to have her hosting the Storyline Conference at Willow Creek. Here she is in all her boldness:

If you register for Storyline before September 18th, you’ll get a physical copy of Donald Miller’s new book Scary Close three months before the public release date*. You’ll also be invited to attend the wrap party where he’ll sign it upon your request. Register today. Seats are limited.

*register as Experience + or Experience Pro to qualify

Do You Think Your Story Matters Less Because You’re a Woman? is a post from: Storyline Blog

How Your Decisions Will Uncover Your Calling

Nicaragua was our family’s haven for a two month sabbatical. Twice a week we rented bikes from a social enterprise that was employing men coming out of addiction recovery programs or jail.

We were the first customers at the bike shop to request a child seat. Our daughter was nearly two so we needed a way to include her in our bicycle excursions. They unburied a child seat from storage that someone had donated.

They welded the seat to a bike for us to use.

Jada was tied in with a rope that was interwoven through the seat and double knotted. We learned not all countries are quite as child-safety oriented as the USA.

Our path was a five-mile road that would dead-end at Lake Nicaragua. I resonate with what Ernest Hemingway once shared, “It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them.” Seeing the culture while on two wheels is what allowed us to experience real people and what made us love this place.

Every ride, we passed the Coconut Guy on the way to the dock.

I never knew his name.

Yet he and his coconut stand profoundly shaped the way I think about what I am designed to do in life. He gave me a metaphor for understanding the process of calling.

He had a four-foot square plywood board propped up on top of a paint bucket, balanced just perfectly to not fall off one side or the other. Taped to the front of the bucket was a piece of white computer paper with a sharpie message that simply communicated “$1” with an arrow pointing up. Following the direction of the arrow up, you realized that he was sitting under a coconut tree.

I love simple signs like this.

They require just enough imagination to get your attention. You handed him a dollar and he shimmied up the tree, picked a green coconut from the tree, and brought it back down.

*Photo Credit: Melissa Galvez, Creative Commons

He would then set the coconut on his perfectly balanced plywood and bucket table and with a machete start methodically carving the sides of the green coconut until the white heart of the fruit appeared. It took him only a minute to shape it into a cup-like design, puncture the top, stick a straw inside, and hand it over to the paying customer.

Voilà!

A fresh coconut drink made right in front of your eyes.

What we may visually see on the outside does not always match the intended purpose or design that is within each of us. Every time I saw this process, it made me question my unique design. As I watched the Coconut Guy carve off the edges with each whack of the machete, I thought of all the work I have tried over the years that has not matched my intention or ambitions.

Some work seemed like a good fit but didn’t quite match my abilities and loves. Carve it off. I like doing one thing, but fail miserably when I try something else. Whack.

Each life experience, each decision I make, each time I succeed or fail sheds off another dirty edge and moves me closer to the best part:

My place of true purpose.

Just another step in the process of finding the tasty, milky core – our intended design.

Our bike rides in Nicaragua gave me a lot of time to think about what I needed to shed on my pursuit to discovering life purpose. These decisions that define purpose separate their decision makers from everyone else. If we want clarity in what we are intended to do, we must release and clearly say no to the things that we know are not a match for our calling and say yes to what we are made to do.

What do you need to quit today, so you can pursue what you are created to do tomorrow?

How Your Decisions Will Uncover Your Calling is a post from: Storyline Blog

What Self Pity is Costing You

I have a confession. I’m given to self pity. I hate it and I don’t want it in my life anymore. It’s costing me.

In the past month or so I’ve been studying Richard Nixon. We just passed the 40th anniversary of his impeachment and resignation, so interviews and articles have been floating around the internet.

Nixon lived in a bit of an ethical fog.

But in my opinion his ethics problems weren’t his primary flaw. His primary flaw was he felt sorry for himself.

Whether it was constantly comparing himself to the Kennedys or wishing the press would cut him a break, Nixon’s default mode was to shirk responsibility for his actions by blaming his problems on other people.

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Remarkably, self pity is often the default mode of the bully. Why? Because it’s just another way of playing the bully. Every victim needs an oppressor, and people don’t like oppressors so the bully often flops to play the victim as a way of making their enemies look bad. It’s just more manipulation.

To be sure, there are real victims in the world.

Henry Cloud says a victim is somebody who is truly hopeless. But Nixon was never hopeless.

In leadership, playing the victim backfires. When Nixon lost his bid for governor of California he gave a press conference in which he scolded the media for their constant criticism, saying this would be his last press conference and that they wouldn’t have “Nixon to kick around anymore.” The press conference made him a laughing stock and it was the primary obstacle he had to overcome as he continued his political career. Even today it’s considered his second biggest mistake, after Watergate, of course.

Pat Buchanan says self pity is the nail in the coffin of any political career, but I suggest it’s much more than a political career that gets hurt by self pity. I think as wives, husbands, fathers, mothers, teachers, pastors and just about any other leadership role we play, self pity is intuitively seen by others as a weakness and it makes people not want to follow us.

If we need to ask for help, that’s great.

We can confide in friends, see a counselor or even publicly ask for help, but playing the victim isn’t that. Playing the victim is accusing other people of oppressing us in a dramaticized fashion. Self pity is emotional exaggeration as a way of blaming our problems on others.

Preaching to myself, I know. But hopefully I’ll be taking some folks with me. No more self pity. Let’s move up and on.

The world needs us to lead, not to lick our wounds.

What Self Pity is Costing You is a post from: Storyline Blog

What Your Instagram Feed is Keeping You From

I could theorize and offer scientific evidence all day long. I can give you source after source, anecdote after anecdote on why our obsession with our phones is killing us.

But here’s the real truth: Your fixation with your phone is killing your ability to do work that matters.

While your phone harbors many tools for good, when you get caught in its tractor beam, you’re in for a swamp of time sucking molasses.

I come to you as a fellow addict.

And trust me, I’m in deep. Like a wi-fi enabled lab rat, I’m obsessed with the Pavlovian rush I get from a text message or a Facebook like. On countless late nights, my wife will turn over in bed to see the glow of a screen illuminating my face.

Wife: “What are you doing? What time is it?”

Me: “I’m taking a Buzzfeed quiz to see which Friends character I am. It’s super important. Go back to sleep.”

If you’re an addict like me…

You know deep down that your obsession with the small, insignificant things is destroying your ability to tackle the stuff that really matters.

Now I’m not advocating for cutting yourself off from 21st century technology. If that’s your path, I commend you, although it won’t be mine.

*Photo Credit: Thom Weerd, Unsplash

What I am advocating for is technological self-awareness.

I call it Mobile Mindfulness.

Mobile Mindfulness is the art of deliberately tempering your relationship with technology. Mobile Mindfulness is using technology for its benefits and then stopping – relishing in your ability to thwart addiction.

Mobile Mindfulness is challenging yourself to resist technology in the moments where you know it’s teetering on becoming a vice.

Use technology. Milk it for all it’s worth. Then learn to put it down, cultivate real human relationships, and get to work.

What Your Instagram Feed is Keeping You From is a post from: Storyline Blog

Put Your Pain into Perspective

We’ve all experienced moments of feeling like our pain is being “put into perspective.”

Whether it comes from witnessing horrible tragedies on the news or walking with our friends through unimaginable circumstances, you’ve probably, like me, sighed in the heaviness of it all and said something along the lines of, “man, the stuff I go through is so petty in comparison to this.”

The sentiment is common.

For years, I’ve heard myself and other Christians make similar comments over and over again when discussing news stories, social injustices and the burdens of the poor and hurting.

This way of processing tragedy isn’t exactly wrong. There’s no denying God uses external tragedies to give us inner perspective. But pain is pain. And I have a hard time believing God ever intended for us to go so far as to let others’ pain shame us into believing our pain is a “petty” problem unworthy of God’s attention.

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This idea came up last week when I got a call from my friend Jamie. I was telling him about the teen mom I mentor, Emilia, who had just opened up about years of sexual and physical abuse.

I was telling Jamie how petty the relational hardships I’d endured seemed in light of Emilia’s, how she’d really shifted my perspective, how I’d wasted so much time mourning heartache that wasn’t even close to what Emilia’s heartache must be like.

But before I could continue, he cut me off.

“Yeah, but that stuff matters too, Cadence.”

I paused. “Yeah, I know…”

Truthfully, I was kind of annoyed. Yeah, yeah I get it, my stuff matters but it doesn’t really matter. Not as much as Emilia’s stuff. I shouldn’t be mourning my stuff when there’s more important stuff to be mourning in the world.

Our conversation continued and I didn’t think much else about it.

But my friend’s words came back to haunt me a few days later. I got an email from an ex that was hard to swallow and as I started to tell myself you shouldn’t be upset about this, I immediately remembered my friends words: That stuff matters too.

All of a sudden those four words I’d found slightly annoying and uncomfortable a few days earlier felt like a breath of fresh air.

They actually felt true.

And even healing.

I slowly began realizing how years of belittling my pain in the face of others’ pain had only been filling me up with shame. You shouldn’t care so much about this. Just think of what so-and-so’s been through!

What my friend Jamie taught me in that moment, without realizing it, came directly from working with thousands of hurting people over the years who’d been held back from healing because they were carrying so much shame about their pain.

Your stuff matters too.

We need to stop shaming ourselves about our pain and instead acknowledge that we are all fragile humans who are trying to figure this life thing out. We need to remind one another our pain matters, even when it feels petty.

And especially when we’re tempted to compare and conceal it.

Let’s practice more compassion without comparison. Let’s gain more eternal perspective while giving ourselves permission to mourn our worldly losses.

Your pain is not a problem.

Put Your Pain into Perspective is a post from: Storyline Blog

Can “Vulnerable” Be a Way of Life?

At this year’s Storyline Conference, we’ve brought in speakers who tell the truth. You know how it is. So many speakers make us feel like our lives are “less than” rather than works in progress.

But what does life really look like for the average person? It turns out we all have more in common than you’d think. But we only realize it when we tell each other the truth.

We are honored to have Glennon Melton keynote for us at the Chicago Storyline conference. Glennon started a blog called Momastery that has grown to reach millions.

She’s a wife, mom, recovering addict, and truth teller.

She’s the woman you’ve always wanted as your best friend, mainly because she’s willing to tell you who she really is which gives you the feeling you can tell her who you really are in return.

The least meaningful life any of us could live is one in which we play a dishonest role.

It’s true actors tell stories, but the sad thing is they tell somebody else’s story. They tell the story their parents wanted them to tell. They tell the story religious legalism wanted them to tell. They tell the story their spouse wanted them to tell. They tell every story except the story that is truly theirs. And the only story that captures their genius is the one that’s true.

We believe you’ll be inspired by Glennon’s incredible courage to tell the truth and to trust the world can deal with the impact of who she really is.

Storyline aims to be a Christian conference like no other.

We believe in a life of meaning. And we believe in telling the truth, not just the philosophical or theological truth, but the truth about who we really are. We think you are a work of art and all your insecurities are just a bunch of stuff covering up who you really are.

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Here’s a great clip from Glennon speaking at a TED conference. We’ve asked her to expound upon her message of brutal, raw honesty. And we’ve asked her to help us find the courage to be ourselves.

If you register for Storyline before September 18th, you’ll get a physical copy of Donald Miller’s new book Scary Close three months before the public release date*. You’ll also be invited to attend the wrap party where he’ll sign it upon your request. Register today. Seats are limited.

*register as Experience + or Experience Pro to qualify

Can “Vulnerable” Be a Way of Life? is a post from: Storyline Blog

Conquer Your Fear of Private Speaking

In an age where public speaking has traded its milk crates and street pulpits for faceless, anonymous, internet comments, it can be easy to forget the importance of private speaking.

When I was six years old, my grandma took me to vacation bible school at her church. Our class of first graders chose a bubbly, eager girl with pigtails and me to share in front of the whole church what we’d learned.

I was given the mic first.

Pews, staring eyes, plus the feedback from the old church PA system jumbled my memory of the lesson.

Ms. Eager Pigtails jumped her own personal version of double dutch next to me, the answers bubbling out of her. But I held on to that microphone until my jumbled thoughts straightened themselves, stood in a line, and made a sentence. My grandmother said she knew I would be a speaker because of the way I refused to relinquish that microphone.

Since that day I have loved public speaking.

But if I’m honest, it’s many of the private speaking moments that have shaped who I am. There was a time when I was in a relationship that was ending, and I decided to write the guy a letter, telling him my feelings anyway. I walked away as single as ever, but that moment of speaking the truth in private helped teach me that I could love and be loved.

When I was leading an artistic event at my church in my early 20s, one of the artists on my team told me a serious struggle they were having.

I quoted scripture and clichés to them.

I did that because I had become so consumed with the event that I had disconnected from the part of leading that means being willing to step away from logistics and details and connect person-to-person, in private, even when it’s difficult or messy.

After realizing years later how I could have handled that moment differently, I faced my fear of private speaking and had a chance to tell them I was sorry. I also listened to how much my lack of compassion and not walking through the hard time with them made them feel.

They needed to say how much they were hurt.

And I needed to own up to how much I hurt them.

Public speaking is the thing most people fear, but it hasn’t been a fear of mine since I held that mic in vacation bible school. It’s easy to spew opinions or judgments when we have screen names to hide behind.

*Photo Credit: Pete, Creative Commons

But to speak in private—to look each other in the eyes and ask forgiveness, share our feelings, or be vulnerable—that takes courage.

I love connecting with an audience.

But my hope and prayer is that my ability to speak publicly is always balanced by how I handle the moments that require me to speak privately.

Sometimes we need to step away from our pulpit, turn off our microphone, put our screens away, step down from our soapbox and practice being good private speakers.

Conquer Your Fear of Private Speaking is a post from: Storyline Blog

How Fantasy Ruins Your Creative Imagination

I’m getting into some debatable vocabulary here, but I want to point out a stark difference between imagination and fantasy. I’m hoping a simple dileniation might help those of you with active imaginations.

I’m capable of living almost exclusively in my mind.

I can walk and daydream for hours.

But some of these daydreams haven’t proved helpful. And the ones that aren’t helpful are daydreams about my own glory.

C.S. Lewis delineated between the two in his book Surprised by Joy. In the book, he talks about his early days imagining “Animal Land” which was a world he made up with his older brother. The time he spent imagining Animal Land, he noted, was great practice for becoming a writer. But fantasies about his own glory, he noted, (he would often spend time fantasizing about being a good dancer) was only practice for becoming a fool.

Gulp.

If I’m daydreaming about where a chapter might go, or an idea for a future book, it’s a good thing to let my mind run wild. But If I’m daydreaming about winning a Pulitzer prize, well, that’s of no use to anybody.

*Photo Credit: Andrew Nguyen, CutandSow

Writers who achieve literary glory are often professionals who have fallen in love with the writing process rather than their own words.

And I think the same is true of any other professional pursuit.

When you think about the over a hundred books produced by G.K Chesterton, or the dozens produced by C.S. Lewis, both insanely imaginative writers, the only explanation for the volume of their production is a delightful commitment to their craft. I doubt either were given to distracting fantasies about their own greatness.

But how do we overcome the temptation of fantasies?

The trick is to become more distracted by something healthy than we are by something unhealthy.

In other words, when a writer falls in love with the process itself, he or she more easily lets go of the longing for self glory. Looking in a mirror and telling ourselves we won’t think about ourselves so much will never work. We are, as a matter of fact, looking at ourselves as we try the trick.

And in that truth there is a gentle conundrum: To be great, we have to stop caring about being great.

What we should care about is the work.

And the more we care about the work, and the more we lose ourselves in the work, the greater our work will become and the more glory we will receive that, in turn, we honestly don’t care about. Ah, the rub.

And yet it’s an evolution of thought I hope to attain more and more as the years pass through me.

How Fantasy Ruins Your Creative Imagination is a post from: Storyline Blog