Donald Miller's Blog, page 75

Why Dramatic People Are Secretly Driving You Crazy

I’ve a friend who is a bit dramatic. Well, not a friend, exactly, but somebody I have to deal with. I won’t get into it. Ever since I met this person their default mode has been drama.

If I don’t do something about that noise, my car was going to break down…If I don’t call this person right away I’ll lose this great opportunity…If I don’t leave my faucet running my pipes will freeze…and on and on.

*Photo Credit: photoloni, Creative Commons

To be honest, I fell for it the first few times. Suddenly I was worried about things I never worried about before. I felt anxious and tense and it bothered me. So I decided to count the costs a bit. What if my car broke down? Well, I guess I’d get it fixed. And what if my pipes broke? Well, I guess I’d call a plumber. But none of that happened. I didn’t call the friend because we all miss opportunities all the time and it didn’t seem like an opportunity I was really interested in anyway. I didn’t let a faucet drip and my pipes didn’t freeze. My car still makes a slight noise that I may or may not have a mechanic look at when I have time. Everything is the same as it was before.

I learned something from this interaction, though. I learned some people live a life of unnecessary drama. Mostly, I think people live in drama to pull attention into themselves. The sad thing about this, though, is they’re pulling attention into themselves at the cost of your peace and sanity. It’s rather selfish, isn’t it?

These days, I rather enjoy ignoring all the drama.

I mean it. I can hardly stand to watch cable news anymore. I have a friend who does little but complain about the direction the country is going, how we’re becoming communists and slaves to the government. I wonder what it’s costing his physical health to worry all the time like that? If our taxes get raised, it would cost him about $500 more per year. But what will a heart attack cost him? Or all the relationships he’s losing because people get tired of all the bitter tribal banter?

Lately I like it when I get the dramatic text baiting me into a life of worry because I no longer buy into it. Ignoring the drama makes me feel superior and smart, to be honest. And maybe that’s selfish but it’s great for my self esteem. What’s the worse that could happen, after all? And if the worst does happen, can’t I just fix it?

I refuse to worry about hypothetical situations anymore.

So the choice became clear:

I could live in constant drama about what might happen, or live in peace till something actually does. (tweet this)

And even if it does, there’s rarely a reason for drama anyway. If the pipes burst I will turn off the water to the house and call a plumber. If I miss an opportunity I can catch the next one. If my car breaks down I can call a tow truck. What’s so dramatic about any of that? That’s just life.

All that to say, lets choose peace. No drama. #nodrama

Why Dramatic People Are Secretly Driving You Crazy is a post from: Storyline Blog

Why Your Past Shouldn’t Control Your Future

A few weeks ago Donald Miller talked about the most important question you can ask yourself: What if?

It is an encouraging and forward-thinking question. It got me thinking what if I asked that question more often and asked this one less: What could have been? It’s the question that turns your head back to look at your past. To re-think it, to wonder what would have been different had you… What could have been better had you… Where you would be living now if you had just… Who you would be with if you hadn’t…

*Photo Credit: Vinoth Chandar, Creative Commons

The What Could Have Been is a pit, and it can get deep fast if you’re not careful. I spent a lot of 2013 asking myself what could have been. I felt regret and sadness over a broken relationship and re-ran scenarios in my head, conversations. You know the drill.

What-could-have-been can make a person crazy.

So why do we ask the question so much? I think because it’s easier to look behind than it is to look ahead. The past is comfortable. You know what happens there because it, well, already happened. It’s illuminated. The past is the easiest place for your mind to find but the hardest to leave. You can get trapped there.

The future on the other hand has no lit path. It looks dark ahead of you. You don’t know what’s there and stepping into it can feel impossible. Even if you think you know what 2014 holds and you’re looking at your to-do list and reading this and telling yourself, “I’m not scared. I know exactly what I’m doing this year.” You don’t. You can’t. His ways are higher than ours; his thoughts above ours (Isaiah 55:9).

• • •

I believe January is a good time to reflect on the year prior, but if the reflection turns to regret, guilt or anxiety, maybe it has gone too far. Maybe you’re getting too comfy in the past and need to turn your head around and look forward.

We just came out of season in which we commemorated Christ’s birth. And what was Christ’s birth a symbol of? Hope for mankind.

There is no hope in your past so stop trying to find it there. (tweet this).

Hope is ahead of you. Light is at the end of the tunnel, right?

So may this be the year the “what could have beens” cease and the “what ifs” come to life.

Why Your Past Shouldn’t Control Your Future is a post from: Storyline Blog

How 20-Something Entitlement Nearly Ruined My Marriage

Our first year of marriage was really hard. 

In one sense, you might have looked at our first year of marriage and wondered how we couldn’t have been blissfully happy.  

We were living on the twenty-first floor of a beautiful condo building overlooking the ocean in sunny south Florida. Our wall-sized sliding glass doors opened to a balcony where we could watch the sunrise every morning. Any time we wanted, we could wander downstairs with coffee and books—to our private beach—and dig our toes into the sand. 

*Photo Credit: Mark A. Vargas, Creative Commons

But there were also a few outside circumstances that made our otherwise luxurious surroundings less-than-comfortable. First of all, we got married pretty quickly. Only four months passed from the day we met to the day we got married. Then, nine days after our wedding, I moved from Portland, Oregon (where I was from) to South Florida, where my husband was living and working at the time. 

In the blink of an eye, my whole life changed. My city, my family, my friend group, my church, my job, my last name. Everything. It felt like my entire identity had been stripped away in the blink of an eye.  

We fought about everything. Stupid stuff, mostly. How the dishes really should be loaded in the dishwasher. If the clothes should be divided in the washing machine. Whether a kitchen garbage can belonged under the sink or out in the open. We had conversation after conversation, working hard to find our balance, hoping that we would someday figure out a solution to (at least) live peaceably together. 

But for reasons that had nothing to do with the washing machine, dish washer or garbage can, I would always walk away from our arguments, seething, thinking the same seven words to myself: 

“I don’t deserve to be treated like this!”

Those words became like a mantra for me, like a fixture in my brain, almost like an obsession. The sentiment they represented was, in my opinion, the obstacle, the enemy, the problem that needed to be fixed. How could I get my husband to treat me the way I deserved to be treated? What I didn’t realize was that while the words were the obstacle, it wasn’t in the way I assumed. 

It wasn’t marriage advice that changed my mind about those toxic 7 words. It was business advice. My husband and I had, together, started a small online magazine and I was determined to find a way to make managing the publication my full time job. I hadn’t ever really aspired to be a business owner, but since I really wanted to work from home, doing what I loved, I started devouring business books. 

I had to figure out a way to make this work.

One of the books I read during that process offered this interesting sentiment: Too many small business owners who can’t get their products to sell think the customer (or the market, or the law, or the “overhead” or whatever) is the problem. A lack of personal accountability, this author argued, was tearing businesses down before they could even be built up. 

This idea really struck me.

Could my lack of personal accountability, in my marriage, be tearing my marriage down before it even had the opportunity to be built up? Could the seven words I thought pointed to the problem I was facing actually be the problem themselves? 

So I decided to try something different. I asked my husband a dangerous question. I said, “are there ways you wished I treated you differently?” In other words, I wanted to know if (and how) he felt he deserved to be treated better. He hesitated, waiting to make sure I was serious about asking. 

Then, carefully revealed several ways he wished I would treat him differently.

At first, honestly, I wanted to protest. He would say something I said or did felt disrespectful, and I would think to myself, “You’re just being too sensitive.” Or, “That’s totally jumping to conclusions! I didn’t mean that the way you think.” But the more I tried to silence my defense to hear his case, the more I realized I could do a much better job of treating my husband the way he “deserved.” 

And, in that sense, I suppose I didn’t “deserve” as great of treatment as I thought I did from my husband. After all, I hadn’t offered him the simple thing I was longing for myself. But since the day we had that conversation, we’ve made a truce to treat each other not the way we deserve, but better than we deserve. 

Our marriage isn’t perfect, but I can safely say it’s one of the best things that has ever happened to me. Rethinking those 7 words has made all the difference.

How 20-Something Entitlement Nearly Ruined My Marriage is a post from: Storyline Blog

Great Leaders Aren’t Afraid to Love Their Teams

As football season comes to a close, we see the same interviews with coaches who seem to say the same thing over and over. If they lose, they thank and compliment their team, and if they win, they celebrate their team’s work ethic, brotherhood and character. It’s like they’re all reading from the same script.

What could easily get lost in all that is a leadership principle I’ve come to believe is true: Great leaders actually love their teams more than they love themselves.

You don’t hear the word “love” often when you talk about coaches, but the truth is men who play football have hearts and if you can capture their hearts, they’ll fight for you and for each other.

*Photo Credit: MattUrsua, Creative Commons

How do we capture the hearts of our team members? Well, we can’t fake it. We actually have to love them. I say have to like it’s a tough thing. The truth is we get to love them. A team is nothing more than a community.

Other than getting married last year, the greatest thing that has happened to me is the growth of the Storyline team.

We are five employees strong now and the word love is used consistently. We’re just not afraid to say it. In fact, one of the core values of our company is that it exists to make the employees’ dreams come true, and we do that by serving our clients faithfully.

Did you catch the twist in the core value? Many companies would start out by saying they exist to serve the customer. And of course we do, but our first priority is to build a company that helps our own team members operate within their skill set, establish themselves as a critical part of a team, affirm our team members as God’s children, give them ownership of our shared efforts and celebrate the lives we get to change together. In other words, the company exists to create a healthy, growing, healing and restorative community of professionals operating in excellence.

What happened when we operated out of those values surprised me.

I started to love my guys. I mean I started to daydream about their success, not just my own. And they do the same for me.

Storyline tripled in size in the last 18 months and we are forecasting tripling again in 2014. Those are amazing numbers, if you think about it. I can’t help but wonder if the secret ingredient isn’t, well, love.

Love is quite scary, though. Love doesn’t give you complete control over people. Love means you can’t disrespect them when you’re frustrated. Love means you really understand that people aren’t just a cog in a wheel. Love means you have to allow people to hurt you and let you down, and they will, just as you will them. But love also means you forgive, you don’t keep score, you show grace and you protect each other at all costs.

Sadly, protecting each other at all costs means sometimes you have to let people go.

It means not allowing the team to be disrespected or taken advantage of. But I see that more as an employee who doesn’t want to be with us more than us not wanting them around. If they’re taking advantage of us, they’re opting out of our system. We can throw a couple ropes, but at some point we have to move on because they’re deciding to swim it alone.

Since I started this company, I’ve kept two rules, and I think they’ve made all the difference and even created an atmosphere where love could grow. They’ll seem trivial and slight, but they’ve worked for me.

Here they are:

Hire people who are better, smarter and faster than you.





Never mess with their hearts. (The actual rule is slightly more colorful but my guys didn’t want me to say it in a blog!)

Those two rules have served me well. I think they will serve you, too.

Great Leaders Aren’t Afraid to Love Their Teams is a post from: Storyline Blog

Sunday Morning Sermon — Put Yourself Where Your Heart Wants To Be

Steven Pressfield is one of the great thinkers about creativity in this generation. No matter what creative endeavor you might be pursuing, if you haven’t read his book The War of Art, get yourself a copy.

Read it, and bring a pen for underlining and taking notes if that’s your thing. You’ll thank me later.

In this particular segment, Pressfield addresses one of the more obvious (but overlooked) pieces of advice when it comes to chasing our dreams. It’s simple, really. Put yourself where your heart wants to be.

I think often we don’t allow ourselves to know what our heart really wants. For most of my life, I lived under the mantra that I only wanted to do what God wanted me to do. But the longer I waited for God to show me what He wanted from me, the more I heard him ask, “What do you want?”

The more I experience God, the more I am learning that He is the one who puts desires in my heart. As I uncover my deepest desires, I become connected with the One who put them there. This short and simple video has a profound bit of truth that I think it an important reminder: our callings are much simpler to follow then we often understand.

We just have to put ourselves where our heart wants to be.

This week, go where you heart is. Find your identity in that place. Move yourself where your heart wants to be, and see what happens.

Sunday Morning Sermon — Put Yourself Where Your Heart Wants To Be is a post from: Storyline Blog

The Best Viral Videos We Found This Week

Last week, most of you voted for the man who “stole” doughnuts. What about this week? Vote for your favorite below in the comments.

The Best Viral Videos We Found This Week is a post from: Storyline Blog

Create a Vision Filter – A Week of Free Life Coaching – Day Five

From January 6th through the 10th I’ll be taking Storyline readers through a life-coaching experience. Each day I’ll offer exercises that will give you clarity and direction. Let’s pretend you’ve decided to spend a week in my office, organizing your life. This process will prove more effective than New Year’s Resolutions, I assure you. If you want more, either pick up the Storyline book or attend one of our conferences.

On Day Four we made a plan and established actionable steps to achieve your goals. Today we will dive into creating a vision filter.

When I was in high school I sat down and wrote out all the goals I wanted to accomplish. I wanted to be a NYT bestselling author, be worth more than a million dollars, live in Oregon by a river with a dog. And I wanted to do it all before I turned 35, which is when I’d allow myself to get married.

Amazingly, I forgot about that list of goals. And yet, when I was in my mid-thirties a friend called. She’d found my list in a box of letters she’d kept from her childhood and everything on the list had come true. For whatever reason, I’d made it all happen.

*Photo Credit: ell brown, Creative Commons

I can’t say exactly why or how it all happened, but my guess is early in life I’d created a vision and that vision helped me make decisions during the early years of my professional career (not to mention I was blessed with great mentors and no small amount of kindness from God.) There’s nothing magic about it, really. Having a vision is just like making a big to-do list, only it’s not for the day, it’s for your life. Once you do that, you have clarity about what you should say yes to and what you say no to. If you want to be a professional triathlete, you begin to say yes to opportunities to meet with people and run in certain races and over dinner you mention your vision and somebody at the table happens to be looking to sponsor somebody and so on. It just kind of happens, not for the use of pixie dust but because you’ve clarified what you want. Nobody can help you unless they know what you want.

These days, I want to grow a large business that creates jobs and when I hit retirement age I want to serve my state through some sort of civil service. And having that vision dictates how I live. I try not to say stupid things because somebody who says stupid things isn’t likely to get elected. And when there’s an opportunity to meet with somebody involved in politics I say yes and learn all I can. My vision has created a filter for what I will and won’t do.

Keeping a moral code without a personal end in mind is nearly impossible. There has to be a reason behind our behavior or we can’t change.

So on our last day of life coaching, our goal will be to set a vision for your life. I want to know what kind of man or woman you want to be. I want to know where you’ll live, what sort of relationships you’ll have, what you’ll be doing to earn a living and what other people will say about you. Only I don’t want to know what you want that to be for today or tomorrow, I want to know what you want that to be when you are 65-years old. (If you’re older than 65 now, we’d decide what you want ten years from now.)

Once you really have that vision in your brain, you’d be amazed at how much easier it is to do your work, to hold your tongue and to operate with integrity.

So here’s our final assignment. On a sheet of paper, write down as succinctly as possible an answer to the following questions.

When You’re 65



What will you be doing for a living?





Describe what your closest love relationship feels like:





If you had children, how do you want them to describe you?





How much money do you have in savings or investments?





What does your relationship with God feel like?

From here, I’d help you edit these down so they are as brief as possible. Then, we’d go for a walk and talk through them. I’d want to get our bodies moving to get us out of our minds a bit. We’d walk and I’d interview you as though you were 65. I’d ask you about your children, about your spouse and about your work. I’d ask specific questions about how you created such a loving marriage or what you did to make your kids have so much love and respect for you. After our walk, we’d likely throw a baseball in the field behind my house and I’d keep talking to you about how you became so awesome by the time you turned 65. The point is, of course, to lock this in as a vision.

This is the vision you’ve set for your life.

Hopefully, all the goals you set for each of the roles you play in life are heading toward this vision becoming true. Again, there’s nothing magic about this process. It’s all about goal-setting and creating and keeping a plan.

Once we were all done, I’d transfer your vision to a small card, about the size of a credit card, so you could pull it from your wallet or your purse any time you needed to see it. I’d also give you the name of a graphic artist who could lay out each answer you gave me over an image, almost like a piece of art, so you could hang them in your office.

Closing Thoughts

Our vision at Storyline is to help one-million people live better stories with their lives. Like most of you, we’re tired of all the negativity, all the fear and complaining about how bad America has gotten. We don’t want to add to the chorus of complainers. We’d rather change the world by living better stories. After all, nothing is more powerful than a person who’s story is inspiring the world.

Hopefully, by now, I’ve convinced you that setting New Years Resolutions doesn’t work, and to really change your life you have to set a firm foundation, set goals, make and keep a plan and create a vision for your future. If you take the last five blog days seriously and do all the assignments, nothing in your life will be the same. We promise.

Thanks for joining us in living better stories. Thanks for helping us change the world.

Much love and Happy New Year,

• • •

FORMS USED IN “A WEEK OF FREE LIFE COACHING” SERIES:

Timeline    Positive and Negative Turns


Storyline Productivity Schedule

Create a Vision Filter – A Week of Free Life Coaching – Day Five is a post from: Storyline Blog

Make a Plan – A Week of Free Life Coaching – Day Four

From January 6th through the 10th I’ll be taking Storyline readers through a life-coaching experience. Each day I’ll offer exercises that will give you clarity and direction. Let’s pretend you’ve decided to spend a week in my office, organizing your life. This process will prove more effective than New Year’s Resolutions, I assure you. If you want more, either pick up the Storyline book or attend one of our conferences.

On Day Three we set goals and started establishing a vision for each role you play in life.

Making plans isn’t difficult. It’s sticking to them that takes effort.

Dr. Henry Cloud says the three keys to extreme productivity are:



To attend: This means to focus on one thing until serious progress has been made.





To inhibit: This means there must be a strong ability to inhibit distractions from getting through.





A working memory: This means we need to be reminded throughout the day of what we are supposed to be working on.


EXERCISE ONE: List Actionable Steps Toward Your Goals

If we were up in my office, I’d clean off the white board and write one of your roles so we could read it together. Then, I’d ask what steps you need to take to make that goal happen. If your goal was to restore your marriage, we’d likely write down steps like:

Find a counselor.





Spend 2 hours each week listening to your spouse without editorial comment or judgment.





Find out your spouse’s love language and write down ten times they’ve felt loved when you “spoke” it.





Plan the next 10 date nights in advance, make the reservations, buy the tickets, plan the trips, whatever you need to do.





Pray every morning for your marriage and so on and so on.

If your goal was to double your business, we’d make a similar list. We’d want to launch that new revenue stream, let go of that employee who’s dragging the company down, revamp our marketing messages, clarify goals for the entire staff and so on.

For each role you play, we’d want to have some actionable steps you need to take in order to make those goals happen.

If we were up in my office, we’d open your life plan binder and write down all the steps you need to take toward each of your goals so they were housed in one place.

EXERCISE TWO: Get Rid of the Clutter

The first thing that will happen after you leave my office is you’ll find yourself distracted. I can’t tell you how many people have complained to me that they’d love to write a book but they have kids and a job and a spouse and so on. People who are afraid to try love having excuses. But if you want to accomplish something, you have to clear your schedule and make it happen. Plenty of best-selling authors have written books while raising children. Anne Lamott’s Operating Instructions was written in her son’s first year and it’s still a best-seller some twenty years later.

So to reach your goals, what has to go? To determine this, you and I would clean off the white board again and write a sample schedule of your entire week. I’d want to know the truth about how you spend your time. Most people, if they are terribly honest, are shocked at how much time they spend watching television or checking their Facebook account. The truth is I have nothing against that stuff (rest is incredibly important) but we have to learn to do that stuff after, not before, our work is done.

• • •

My friend Bob Goff had a running tradition that on each Thursday he quit something. He either resigned from a board he was on, quit getting the newspaper, dropped his membership to Netflix or whatever. But every week he quit something. It was fantastic. In a short period of time he’d cleared hours in his schedule, not to mention a whole truck load of mental cobwebs.

*Photo Credit: preetamrai, Creative Commons

So here’s exercise two. As you sat there in the leather chair in my office, looking at your week-long schedule at a glance, cut ten things. That’s right, cut ten recurring things from your schedule. Do you need to turn off your television? Do you need to step off the elder board at the church? What can you get rid of?

Here’s the key: If it doesn’t help you accomplish your goals, it likely needs to go. There’s no room for anything else, save rest and entertainment (which are essential to recharge you.)

So, at home, right now, try to think of what you can quit. The idea is to learn to love the word “no.” Telling people “no” is the most powerful tool you’ve got to move you toward your goals. I’ve yet to meet a single person who couldn’t quit a few things and find hours every day to move them toward their goals.

EXERCISE THREE: Creating a Working Memory

After deciding the steps you need to take to reach your goals, I’d introduce you to the Storyline Productivity Schedule. The SPS is a one-page planner I created and more than doubled my personal productivity. It’s all based on books I read about overcoming procrastination and increasing productivity. More than 15,000 people around the world are now using it and reporting incredible results.

You can download a free SPS here. Simply read the essay that explains it, print off a bunch of copies and start using it tomorrow morning.

If you were up in my office, we’d go through each module and I’d explain personally how it works. But you can do this at home, too. I’ve explained it in length in the document itself.

Your assignment, then, would be to work each day toward your goals using the SPS. The schedule will keep you focussed and on task and you’ll find in as little as a month your life looks completely different. Seriously, in 30 days you’ll have made more progress toward a meaningful life than you made the previous year.

Tomorrow, we’re going to talk about how we can keep you on task and focussed, not for 30 days, but for years to come. We’re going to talk about allowing your vision to become your filter.

• • •

FORMS USED IN THIS POST:

Storyline Productivity Schedule

Make a Plan – A Week of Free Life Coaching – Day Four is a post from: Storyline Blog

Set Your Goals – A Week of Free Life Coaching – Day Three

From January 6th through the 10th I’ll be taking Storyline readers through a life-coaching experience. Each day I’ll offer exercises that will give you clarity and direction. Let’s pretend you’ve decided to spend a week in my office, organizing your life. This process will prove more effective than New Year’s Resolutions, I assure you. If you want more, either pick up the Storyline book or attend one of our conferences.

On Day Two we learned what it means to redeem your negative turns. Today, we’ll stop talking about your past and begin planning your future.

Where are you going in each role you play in life? If you can’t answer that question, you’re likely living a boring story. In a story, if we don’t know what the character wants, we lose interest. Many people are losing interest in their own lives, not because life itself is boring, but because they haven’t decided what they want. In a story, clarity is king.

Our ambitions don’t have to be exciting to be meaningful, they only have to be clear.

Most people think living a great story means their life should be exciting or adventurous or risky, but that’s not true. If you’re writing a screenplay, the most important thing to remember is that all ambitions must be clear. People will shell out as much money to see Frodo destroy the ring as they will to see Adam Sandler get the girl. Having clear ambitions matters more than having risky ambitions.

So here are a few questions for you: Do you have a vision for your life? Do you know where you want to go? Can you imagine it? And furthermore, do you have a vision for each role you play in your life? Do you know where you’re heading as a husband or wife, as a mother or father, as a business owner or a ministry leader? If you don’t know, and furthermore, if the people around you don’t know, you’re likely living a boring story.

Again, if we want to live a great story, we need clarity. We need to know what you want to accomplish in each area of your life.

Today, we want to get started establishing a vision for each role you play in life.

If we were up in my office working on your life plan, I’d likely tell you the story of my friend Pete Carroll. Pete is, of course, the head football coach of the Seattle Seahawks. Before that, he was the head coach at USC and before that he coached at Buffalo, New England and New York. I had the honor of interviewing Pete years ago and have been a fan ever since. Many things amazed me about Pete, but the thing that struck me the most was that his career didn’t take a sharp, positive turn until he had a plan.

*Photo Credit: DDohler, Creative Commons

Pete was let go as the head coach at New York only to spend a year back in California wondering what was next. During that year, he read a book by John Wooden that convinced him he needed an overall plan, a philosophy of sorts, if he wanted to take his coaching career to elite status. He spent a year, then, working through his philosophy of every aspect of the game. How would he manage his assistant coaches? How would he recruit? What was his philosophy on offense and defense? He even wrote down his philosophy for the janitorial staff at the stadium. No kidding, by the end of his year off, he had everything covered.

USC brought Carroll in for an interview, but the only reason they brought him in was because he was local. They already knew who they wanted to hire but they needed to show they’d interviewed other candidates to meet their quota. But Carroll shocked them. He brought in an enormous binder and over the course of several hours, took them through his entire philosophy. To say the least, USC was impressed. They hired him. And Pete went on to win 36 consecutive games and 2 national championships. Now, he’s leading the Seahawks to the brink of the Superbowl.

And why?

Because he had a plan.

As your life coach this week, that’s what I want from you. I want you to have a plan. There’s no use spending all this time with me unless we leave with a binder that tells us what your vision is for your career, your family, your spiritual life, your health and your finances. And that’s only the start.

The psychologist Viktor Frankl says that unless a person wakes up in the morning and knows where they’re going, their life seems muddled and confusing.

From this day on, you’ll know where you’re going with your life. And your life will seem much less confusing.

So today’s assignment is two-fold.

First: Define your roles.

What roles do you play in life? Do you own a business? Are you a mother? Are you a teacher, an athlete, a scholar? Let’s get every major role you play marked down on a sheet of paper so we can make a plan for each. If you’re using the Storyline 2.0 Life Plan, use Modules Four and Five to do this assignment, otherwise, simply get out a notebook and perform the following assignment.

In your notebook, create a page that has two columns. If you need more than one page, that’s fine.





In the first column (“Role”), list the roles you play. Use terms like Dad, Writer, Athlete, Husband, Artist and so on.





In the second column (“Ambition”), write a vision statement for each of your roles.

A vision statement can be very simple. My vision statement for my company is that we: Refine our process of helping people live better stories that creates in our clients a deep sense of meaning. I’ve also added to this various financial goals as well as goals for specific book sales and conference registrations. Everybody on my team, then, knows exactly where we are going and why. There’s no confusion amongst the Storyline staff about who we are and what we’re trying to accomplish. And if you ask any of our staff members, they love the clarity. Nobody walks into a fog when they walk into our office.

As a guy trying to improve my fitness, my goals are simply to increase muscle, lose fat and explore better nutritional options. I’ve kept that vision vague because it works for me. Some people need specifics, but all I need is a direction. I can figure out the specifics as I go. That said, I see a trainer three times each week and keep a food log, so it’s not like I’m not pressing the issue.

As a husband, Betsy and I have a marriage plan we stick to. Once again, it’s vague enough we don’t feel guilty for breaking it, and open enough to be inclusive to wherever God might take us. Our vision is that our marriage is restorative, that we restore each other’s hearts every day, and that everybody who comes into our lives is a person we’re seeking to build up. And we try our hardest to live by that vision.

So, in summary: Identify the roles you’re playing in life and write a vision statement for each. This is the first step in creating a plan. And again, if you’re using the Storyline book, simply do Modules Four and Five.

Tomorrow, we’re going to take the various vision statements you’ve written and turn them into plans.

Here we go!

Set Your Goals – A Week of Free Life Coaching – Day Three is a post from: Storyline Blog

Redeem Your Negative Turns – A Week of Free Life Coaching – Day Two

From January 6th through the 10th I’ll be taking Storyline readers through a life-coaching experience. Each day I’ll offer exercises that will give you clarity and direction. Let’s pretend you’ve decided to spend a week in my office, organizing your life. This process will prove more effective than New Year’s Resolutions, I assure you. If you want more, either pick up the Storyline book or attend one of our conferences.

On Day One we learned a bit more about how you were wired and about the experiences that have formed you. Today, we’re going to patch up the cracks in your foundation.

Here’s what I mean by that: Each of us have had some hard experiences that, if we let them, can drag us down. Either we experienced a tragedy or made some mistakes or we were wronged in some way. Today, we’re going to spend the entire morning just trying to redeem each of the negative turns in your life.

And the exercise couldn’t be more important.

Here’s why: The process of redeeming your negative turns comes from Dr. Viktor Frankl, who believed one way a person gains the existential experience of meaning is by taking each bit of suffering they’ve experienced and finding a redemptive perspective toward it. His exact thought was this: Once we find a redemptive perspective on our suffering, it ceases to be suffering.

Most people try to avoid suffering, but those that accept it as a reality and seek to redeem it live a more meaningful, impactful life.

While at first difficult, you’ll find that nearly all great leaders have developed this ability as a habit. In fact, nearly all great leaders cherish their tragedies and mistakes not as negatives, but as the painful experiences that gave them the qualities they needed to change the world.

And that’s what we want to do with you.

After reviewing the reflection questions I gave you last night, I’d want to take another look at your Timeline. And this time, I’d want to focus on everything below the main line. That is, I want to focus on the stuff that has happened to you that has been painful.

I’m convinced that to call people into a higher evolution of health and productivity, learning to redeem negative turns is a must. To start this session, I’d pull out the Timelines of some famous leaders, including Dr. Martin Luther King, Mother Theresa, Nelson Mandela, Oprah Winfrey, Ronald Reagan, Billy Graham, Helen Keller, Franklin Roosevelt and Joseph from the book of Genesis.

I’d show you how each of these leaders had to make mistakes, be wrongly treated and experience tragedies in order to become people who would eventually change the world. We’d look at each of their timelines and I’d show you how if it weren’t for a dark season, they’d not have produced light later in their lives.

Franklin Roosevelt, for instance, was known as an arrogant young man, entitled and aloof, unable to connect with his peers, until, of course, he was diagnosed with polio and lost the use of his legs. From that point on, he had compassion for the poor and the outcast and could lead not only with strength, but with empathy.

*Photo Credit: min_mohd, Creative Commons

So, once you were convinced every great story goes through dark times, we’d take another look at your life. One by one, I’d circle each of your negative turns and together, we’d brainstorm how each of these painful experiences has shaped you. If you are like most people, you’ll be amazed at how each of the painful experiences you’ve had have actually saved you from a life of arrogance and entitlement and made you a more hard working, thoughtful individual.

This would likely take much of the day and we wouldn’t be fast about the work. The more I can convince you that the tragedies of your life have served you, the more emotionally stable and healthy you will be for the rest of your life.

If you want to do this exercise at home, simply complete your timeline here, and then fill out this form documenting the positive results from each of your negative turns.

Here are some examples of how a negative life turn can ALSO be a positive:

A failure helped you realize errors you were making in life or business.





A tragedy made you empathetic toward the pain others have experienced.

And more specifically:

A broken relationship helped reveal a character flaw attracting you to the wrong people.





The loss of a job prompted you to buckle down and go after the career of your dreams.





A financial loss caused you to learn more about earning and managing money.





A betrayal by a friend caused you to become a more forgiving person and understand nobody is perfect.

And on and on we go. There are always positive things that come from even the most tragic situations, and the more positivity we can understand, define and perhaps even create, the more healthy we will be.

And this would mark the end of Day Two. Today, I believe, is the most important day. While it’s important to set goals, which we will do tomorrow, setting a foundation of mental and emotional health is paramount if we’re going to help you become an impactful person. And redeeming our negative turns is the most important part of that process.

So, download the two assignments and complete them if you will. I promise your world will never be the same.

See you in the morning for Day Three.

• • •

FORMS USED IN THIS POST:

Timeline    Positive and Negative Turns

Redeem Your Negative Turns – A Week of Free Life Coaching – Day Two is a post from: Storyline Blog