Donald Miller's Blog, page 94

How to Free Yourself From Unhealthy Relationships

My friend Pete recently let me in on a paradigm shift I found helpful. He was talking about a friend of his who, for some reason, was taking up a bit too much of his mental space. He was beginning to feel responsible for a friend’s bad decisions. Another friend of Pete’s said that Pete needed to be responsible TO his friend, not FOR his friend.

Pete explained this meant he was responsible to be kind to his friend, understanding, helpful, professional if that’s what the relationships required and so on. But his friend’s decisions and even his emotions were that of his friend not of Pete’s.

A lot of this goes back to Henry Cloud and John Townsend’s terrific book Boundaries, but I found the little phrase be responsible TO and not FOR helpful.

*Photo by zoetnet, Creative Commons

So, if you’re feeling guilty about somebody else’s mistakes, their depression, or their being irritated, it might be good to ask yourself if you’ve done anything wrong that has caused that, and if not, the problem really is their problem. You can be responsible to them — to be kind and comforting — but when you become responsible for them, you are going to grow tired of the relationship, because you are going to feel guilty about issues that are not yours, but theirs.

*this is a re-post from the archives

How to Free Yourself From Unhealthy Relationships is a post from: Storyline Blog

Your Life Is Your Vote

Every week there’s one news story that captivates me and accounts for the majority of my current events reading for the next seven days. This week, the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn a key portion of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 caught my attention.

Before the VRA was enacted, many states manufactured their own unauthorized rules that made it difficult for blacks to become registered voters. Blacks had to pass a literacy test. Or show a government-issued ID. Or recite the Declaration of Independence. Because of these discriminatory practices, registered black voters lagged behind registered white voters by up to 60% in 1965. Twenty-three years later, the gap had closed to an average of 6%.

This week in a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court decided to strike Section 4 of the VRA, which mandated that states with a history of discrimination to get federal approval before making any changes to their voting laws. When I heard the news, my heart sank that minorities will no longer have this protection against unfair voting practices.

In his majority opinion, Justice Roberts said Section 4 needed to be overturned because we’re living in a different time than we were in 1965 — though the fact that Paula Deen just admitted in a deposition that “of course” she had used the N-word makes me wary of declaring the U.S. post-racial.

The Supreme Court decision makes me wonder what will happen to minorities — and to all of us — if their voices are once again silenced at the polls?

The other story I’ve been following recently is the declining health of Nelson Mandela. In the light of the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Voting Rights Act, I thought about how tragic it would be to silence great voices like Mandela’s through voting discrimination.

And then I realized that his right to vote had been squelched because for 27 years, he was imprisoned for treason because he’d had the audacity to challenge South Africa’s apartheid practices.

For 27 years, he never pulled a lever behind a curtain or dropped a vote into a box or punched a chad out of a ballot. But, I realized this week as I read about his legacy, during all the time Mandela was imprisoned, he was voting.

Every minute, every hour, every year that he spent in jail, he may not have been voting with a ballot, but he was voting with his life. He was voting for equality and unity and dignity. He was voting for mutual understanding, asserting that surely if humans could be taught to hate, they could also be taught to love.

• • •

I went to church this Sunday, where we’re studying the Fruits of the Spirit in Galatians 5. When our pastor announced the series a few weeks ago, I cringed because that passage makes me feel like a younger, female version of Shel Silverstein’s Giving Tree. I don’t want to produce all this amazing fruit like love and gentleness, only to have others consume it and leave me barren and empty.

But as I was thinking about voting this week, I realized that essentially what Galatians 5 says is because we love God and we’ve aligned our priorities with his, we get to vote for him with our lives. With each word we speak and every thought we think and every interaction we have, we’re voting over and over again for love and joy and patience and peace. We’re saying that not only is this how the world should be, but we’re giving others a glimpse into how the world will be when on earth as it is in heaven is not a prayer but a reality.

Going to the polls and casting a vote in an election is an important freedom, and we should continue to advocate for everyone’s right to participate. But in the whole scheme of things, days on which we vote with a ballot are nothing compared to all the days we vote with our lives.

Your life is your vote.

Cast it often.

Cast it well.

Your Life Is Your Vote is a post from: Storyline Blog

3 Lessons I’ve Learned About Creating, Consuming, and Criticism

I did that thing, that terrible thing that I do sometimes: when I was supposed to be writing, instead I read a bunch of reviews. Some of them were great. Some of them were absolutely awful, and they settled down on my forehead and heart so emphatically and meanly that I couldn’t shake them off.

So I did what I’m learning to do in those situations:

1. Circle the wagons.

What I mean is that I closed my laptop, as a way of saying to myself that I am not my work. I am not my books. I am a person with a home, a life, a family. I do work that invites and depends on public consumption. But that’s my work, not my whole self.

When you do work like mine, that line is very, very blurry — I write about my life, my self, my home, my feelings. So when someone writes a mean review, it feels more like a personal attack than a comment on my work. But it isn’t.

And that’s why I circle the wagons, to remind myself that my very close family and friends are with me and for me no matter what, that the writing has absolutely nothing to do with it, good or bad.

I work hard to invest in a small circle of friendships and family relationships that have nothing to do with the writing part of my life, and when I circle the wagons, those are the people I reach out to, people who have known me well and forever, who see the whole of my life, not just the one on the pages. Those are the voices that matter most, the truest compasses and guides.

*Photo by Ryk Neethling, Creative Commons

2. Develop a filter.

When the people I love correct me or tell me that hard truth about myself, I want to hear it and understand it. When Annette or Aaron or my dad tell me the loving, ugly truth about myself, I want to gobble it up like hard but necessary medicine.

But I’m learning that not all criticism should be weighed equally — and that people “out there” shouldn’t have the same voice into my life as the people in my little circle of wagons.

My work is up for public comment. But my work is not who I am. And who I am is not up for public comment.

Some people take all criticism equally. They don’t differentiate between Amazon reviewers and actual critics — by that I mean people who are educated and experienced in evaluating a particular kind of work. They hear the words of a best friend and the words of a nasty blog commenter at equal volume. They have no filter, no protective skin, and everything hits them, travels straight to their heart.

I used to be one of these people. An offhand comment from a stranger could undo me. A bad review pierced and embarrassed me. An unfriendly or bored face in the crowd while I was speaking felt like an attack, and I couldn’t take my eyes off that person, like how your tongue keeps working a loose tooth over and over.

But I know people who live at the other extreme: they never read reviews, they shut out critical words from family and strangers alike — they alone know what’s up, and they know with great certainty that everyone else is wrong. They alone understand their art or their decision or their whatever, and everyone who disagrees is a fool, a hater, someone who doesn’t “get it.”

I don’t think either extreme is helpful or healthy, because essentially they’re both giving those other voices too much power in our lives, and neither view differentiates between the voices — either all the voices bulldoze us, or we spend our energy building a wall against all of them. Either way, we’re still driven by the voices, one blurred mass of opinion.

The only way, I’m finding, is to develop a set of filters: whose voices are the ones that matter to me? Which ones matter more than any others, and which ones matter just a little?

For me, not reading reviews isn’t an option, even though that’s what my editor and publisher and several writer friends insist upon. I promise them I won’t, and I do it anyway. I really want to be a learner. Most reviews don’t provide a lot of constructive learning opportunities, but some do — they help me understand times when I could have been clearer, or what my readers are looking for, or where I need to grow as a writer.

But what I’m learning is that the reviews only matter a tiny, tiny bit. There are a few people whose voices matter very much, and I value their feedback exponentially more than I do feedback from the average commenter.

And a word on the internet: I love you, dear internet. I love that I can learn things and stay connected to people and buy things with one click. But now every time I buy something on Amazon, I get a follow-up email asking me to “rate my experience.” Um, I ordered diapers and then they came. Seriously? A review?

I’m certainly not the first one to point out the ugliness of a culture that wants to rate every experience just immediately after it happened. It seems very cool and democratic to give every person with an internet connection an equal vote on a restaurant or a movie or a book, but over time I think this leads to a culture of unchecked and unaccountable criticism — in the same way that we’re in danger of posting what we’re doing on Facebook instead of actually doing that thing we’re doing, I think we’re in danger of thinking that constantly evaluating and rating things is an innocuous practice. And I don’t think it is. I think that mindset is corrosive and dangerous over time. Which leads us to my next point:

3. Stay on the side of the creators, not the consumers or the critics

One of the best parts of living with another artist is that we have an ongoing conversation about what it means to live well as a creative person, and Aaron and I try to make a practice of not speaking negatively about the things that other people create. We are, of course, massively opinionated. We have very, very strong feelings about music and writing and a thousand other things. But we’re trying to be on the side of creators, not on the side of consumers and critics.

I love this post that Aaron wrote about the last Coldplay album, and about the temptation to be a critic.

Once you’ve labored something into life, you know how hard it is to do — the dream and then the work and then the endless revisions. The adjustments, the bursts of inspiration and the agonizing middle stretch, where everything feels pointless. The nights when the voice cracks onstage, or when the words come out all wrong. It takes guts and hard work to make things, and even more guts and hard work to share them, so we want to be people who congratulate the effort instead of nitpicking the result.

I want to spend my time making things, telling stories, giving everything I have, not sitting back and pointing out what someone else should have done. It’s lazy, and it’s cheap, and it’s cowardly. So I’m circling the wagons, listening to the voices that matter most, and getting back to work.

3 Lessons I’ve Learned About Creating, Consuming, and Criticism is a post from: Storyline Blog

Why I Don’t Want the Government Spying on Me

So, I’ve been living for about six months within the shadow of the Capitol dome. I leave next month, but my impression of America is forever changed.

It’s a decent neighborhood, but more than a little odd for a guy coming from the Northwest. There are parked, black cars on every other corner, engines running, sunglassed drivers at the wheel. There are cops everywhere. We are told they can and do listen to our phone conversations and are likely watching us walk our dogs. It’s enough to make somebody paranoid. I’ve watched too much television.

Still, none of that bothers me, to be honest. I’ve got nothing to hide. Anybody who listens to my phone conversations is going to get bored. And will likely wonder why I don’t just make a shopping list.

But maybe the bourgeoning surveillance state should bother me.

The whole NSA spying thing didn’t bother me until those who were for it started touting the fact that spying on American citizens might stop a terrorist attack. To me, that felt like manipulation.

Certainly, stopping terrorism is serious business. And it would be great to stop an attack. So far, reports are mixed on whether the sort of spying made known recently has helped.

Could they stop a nuclear attack by spying on us? Certainly. But collecting internet data is a small part of that operation. There are other ways to catch potential terrorists. I don’t like it when government press releases frame this is though it’s their only option. We can’t kill freedom to protect freedom.

But here’s my problem. It’s getting a bit tiring to hear “stopping terrorism” as an excuse for just about anything. We spend billions of dollars, put thousands of soldiers in harms way and sustain thousands of casualties all to stop terrorism. Has this saved lives? Yes, it likely has. And yet at the expense of what? People are killed in robberies and car jackings and mass shootings, too. Why aren’t we spending billions to stop that?

There’s one reason: Stopping crime isn’t a political issue and terrorism is. No administration wants a terrorist attack to happen on their watch. The “war on terror” may be more political than patriotic.

And administrations, both Republican and Democratic, will justify spying on their own citizens to save their own political bacon.

But are we really okay with that?

If your local police force could stop domestic violence by putting cameras in everybody’s home, would you be for it? How much privacy are you willing to give up to stop crime? How much of your life are you willing to concede to the government?

I think we should be willing to give up some, but allowing the government to seize internet records or tap phone lines without having to report what they’re doing is too far to be justified by using the “stopping terrorism” ace card.

I don’t support Edward Snowden. Governments has the right to have and keep secrets. The ends don’t justify the means, but in this case the ends made us all aware of an overreach of power. It’s a paradox, I know, but one that is easily parsed. I’m glad word is out about what the NSA has been doing. And I’d like it to stop, or, at the very least, be justified publicly.

What we are saying when we allow the government to spy on us is that we trust them not to use information against us for their own ambitions. But what human being longing for power isn’t going to abuse the information that flows across their desk? Nixon couldn’t resist. Are we saying there’s nobody else out there wired like Nixon?

I really liked our old Checks and Balances idea. I’d like for us to return to that. And I’d also like for us to understand that Freedom has consequences, including crime and potential terrorism. I prefer those consequences to the consequences of government overreach.

What do you think? Does it strike you as wrong or are you okay with the government reading your email?

Why I Don’t Want the Government Spying on Me is a post from: Storyline Blog

Sunday Morning Sermon – Bono on Fame, Faith and Steering Clear of Religious Folks

Each Sunday Morning we feature a sermon from an unlikely source. Today, the frontman from U2.

If Bono weren’t a rock star, he might be a good writer. Without question, he’d write about faith and without question he’d help all of us articulate and understand the mystery of God with a paradoxical clarity. This is a long interview but it’s encouraging.

Bono does not claim to be a Christian and in this interview rejects the label while comfortably and shamelessly taking a stand for scripture, prayer and his faith in Christ. I’m with him as I now see Christianity as a word that has come to mean so many different things to so many different people that, in a way, it’s lost it’s meaning. I think he’s wise, in ways, to steer clear of the term.

It’s rare to find a believer who can talk about his faith so solidly without crossing anybody’s personal boundaries and becoming the equivalent of an evangelical “close talker” (by that I mean a person who talks about God in such a way it makes you feel they’re crowding your personal space or in need of you to agree with them because their own identity is threatened.)

It’s a long interview. Bono addresses his faith at minute 43, but the entire interview is good. Have a great Sunday morning.

Sunday Morning Sermon – Bono on Fame, Faith and Steering Clear of Religious Folks is a post from: Storyline Blog

Saturday Morning Cereal: The Best Viral Videos We Found This Week

There was an overwhelming, majority vote for the ball pit video last week … and understandably so. Thanks for voting.

What about this week? Leave a comment below with your vote.

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

Why You Don’t Have to Be Radical, Just a Little Different

Invisible Trails – by James A. Pearson

Follow the invisible paths

Walk upon the high places

The sides of mountains

The edges of planters along the road

And when the trail gets too narrow to walk

Keep your knees bent

And your feet light

And your eyes on what calls you

And dance along its dangers

I love this poem.

I love it because it speaks to a unique trend I’ve noticed for those of us looking for meaning in our lives and work. If you’ve ever read a self-help book or listened to a motivational speaker, there is a lot of talk about how you should “blaze a new path” or “rewrite the rules” in your quest for significance.

They cite famous men like Steve Jobs (Apple), Richard Branson (Virgin), or Jeff Bezos (Amazon) as people who burned down the old ways of thinking and built an entirely new highway amidst the rubble of the old.

I’m inspired by those stories, but the reality is, very few of us are the burn and build types. And that’s a good thing. People often assume that in order to be successful they have to begin by charting a brand new territory – Something a very small percentage of the population will ever really do.

I believe much of this thinking is what paralyzes everyday people, keeping them complacent, discontent, and stuck in lives and careers they don’t love. You aren’t the next Steve Jobs, so why try at all?

Instead, our focus shouldn’t always be to blaze a new path, but to run along the edges of the ones that already exist.

*Photo by zeitspuren, Creative Commons

It’s not enough to be complacent, cruising down the middle of a well-worn path. The grooves are deep, the rocks swept aside. Instead, aspire to tread on the fringes of your industry, racing along its edges, your arms stretched out awkwardly for balance.

Here’s the truth:

You don’t have to be radical, just a little different.

I’ll say that again. You don’t have to be radical, just a little different.

What will happen will surprise you.

By being a little different, over time, you’ll begin to carve out a space for yourself. You started by running on the edges of the trails, but soon the path will narrow. The weeds may brush your ankles as you tromp through. But you’ll be ready for it.

The practice of finding your balance on the edges prepares us for hacking through the brush of a brand new trail.

All the while, you’ll “keep your knees bent/ and your feet light/ and dance along its dangers.“

• • •

Will you do something for me?

In the comment section below, tell me how you are on the fringe of a trail? How are you dancing along the planter instead of the middle of the road?

If you aren’t there yet, what can you do to get there? What in your work can be done a tiny bit differently and how can you be the person to do it?

Why You Don’t Have to Be Radical, Just a Little Different is a post from: Storyline Blog

Happy People Seem to Do This Well

Recently somebody asked me to help them redeem their negative turns.

Redeeming our negative turns is a major concept in the Storyline process. The question was coming from somebody who was creating their life plan using our book and my guess is it was also coming from a place of pain.

Negative turns are events that happen in our lives that shut us down or cause severe setbacks. Every great story and every great life has plenty of negative turns and they’re no fun to live through. A negative turn can be as simple as losing our job or as tragic as losing a child.

It’s important, however, to find something redemptive about every hard thing that happens to us.

In the Storyline book we give readers a huge, blank map so they can actually chart their positive and negative turns. We then ask them to circle their negative turns and find some way each painful event has benefited them.

For me, this single act of reflection was transformative. In fact I’d say it’s one of the most healing exercises I’ve done.

Viktor Frankl says when we find something redemptive about our suffering it ceases to be suffering. And he’s absolutely right.

The idea behind finding a redemptive perspective toward our suffering isn’t about becoming an optimist. In fact, it’s not about turning a negative event into something positive at all. There are very real tragedies that strike us, and there is no reason not to call them what they are: tragedies.

Finding a redemptive perspective, though, is simply about creating two lists rather than one.

Normally when something hard happens we start a running mental list of all the negative consequences. And that’s fine and normal. Finding a redemptive perspective, however, is about creating a second list, a list of the benefits of a given tragedy. And there are always benefits.

For instance, if I lose my job my mind immediately starts counting the costs. I won’t be able to make rent, I’ll be embarrassed in front of my friends, I’ll come off as needy. That’s a real list and it really hurts. But alongside that, I can also make a positive list: I hated my job but was too afraid to quit so being fired forced me to look for something better, and I also can use this time to adjust my budget so I make better financial decisions in the future.

Whether it’s a breakup, a finacial crisis, an ethical mistake or a death in the family, making two lists rather than one changes everything.

If you take each of the hard things that have happened to you and make two lists rather than one, I promise your perspective on life will change. This is what it means to find a redemptive perspective on the hard things that happen in life.

If you like, there’s a worksheet in the Storyline book that will help you do just that. That said, you don’t need the book to do this exercise. Simply write down the five hardest things that have ever happened to you, and make two lists. You’ll find, over time, your focus shifts from the negative to the positive and some people, myself included, now claim what I used to see as tragedies as honest gifts from God. Still painful, but redeemed.

I hope this brief explanation on how to redeem your negative turns helps.

Happy People Seem to Do This Well is a post from: Storyline Blog

We Blame God, but is it His Fault?

A few years ago I was about to go on a big road trip with a close friend. We had spent months planning, had both quit our full time jobs and moved out of our respective apartments with the idea that God had called us to do something big — chase our dreams of becoming a musician (my friend) and a writer (me).

50 States. Six months. Seattle, Boise, Rapid City, New York, Boston, etc. We spread maps out in front of us and charted our course. We were literally prepared to sell everything we owned to make our dreams a reality.

Then, one day, I just said it — I can’t go.

I listed a dozen reasons, like money (we had run the numbers a hundred times, and still weren’t sure how we were going to make it to all 50 states) like school loans, like the fact I was 27 years old and there was still no sign of marriage on my horizon. I was convinced that, if I left now, I would never find a husband.

After I lay all of my reasons like little treasures on the table in front of us, my friend looked at me and said:

“Ally, you don’t have to go. But if you don’t, you’ll regret it forever.”

Not to spoil the story or anything, but I decided to go, and the next year was filled with the highest highs and the lowest lows of my entire life up to that point. And I’m embarrassed to admit it, but each time we experienced a new turn in our story — for better or worse — I blamed it on my friend.

When things were going well, and we were having fun, I would think to myself, she was so right! I’m so glad she made me come here! But when we hit road blocks, or conflict, or when I was just having a bad day, I would think to myself: this is all her fault. I can’t believe she made me do this.

I totally ignored the most important part of what she told me: You don’t have to go.

*Photo by mil8, Creative Commons

Sometimes I wonder if we listen to God like that.

I’ve spent most of my life waiting for God to show me what to do. When an opportunity comes across my path — like a 50 state road trip, for example — I ask God, “should I do it? Should I go?” I wonder if God is a little bit like my friend, sitting across the table, explaining how I don’t have to go — but that, if I choose to stay home, I might really be bummed I missed such an exciting opportunity.

You don’t have to go, but if you stay, you’ll really regret it.

If I listen to God (because I’m a good Christian, or because I’m scared of regret) most of the time I end up blaming him at every turn of the story. If things are going well and I have the things I want, I say, “Thank you, God for blessing me in my obedience!” But if I lose my job, or get sick, or experience heartache I beg, “God, why did you bring me here? How could you make me do this?”

Part of me wonders if God is thinking, like my friend might have been if I had spoken my blame out loud — wait, how is this my fault? 
I never promised this path would be perfect.

I believe God sometimes asks us to do specific things for specific purposes. But most of the time I think he gives us freedom to choose. Most of the time I think he’s our friend, sitting across the table saying, “You don’t have to go, but I know you — and so here’s some advice about this particular experience.”

Something really powerful happens when we believe we get to choose to go, or not go. We stop feeling resentful and passing blame. We start taking accountability for our circumstances and actions.

We start embracing difficulty and failure for what it has to offer us.

We begin to see how God has been for us all along.

We Blame God, but is it His Fault? is a post from: Storyline Blog

Can Positive Self-Talk Make You Run Faster?

Recently, I had to learn how to combat negative thoughts. I joined a gym a couple months ago because I was getting lightheaded doing even minimal physical activity. You’d look at me and assume I’m in shape, but up until this past spring, my days were spent in front of a computer or reading. Neither of those things require being in shape.

Walking into a new gym can be overwhelming. Where do I go? How do these machines work? To minimize my risk of being embarrassed, I hopped on the treadmill and started running. That thing is pretty straight forward. I even started running outside every once in a while.

I’m an optimistic guy and according to StrengthsFinder, my #1 strength is “positivity.” But something abnormal happens for me while running — negative thoughts. It’s been going on for several weeks and I haven’t been able to shake it.

You can’t make it.

You should just walk.

You’re tired, you can just stop.

Sitting in the rocking chair on my porch yesterday, I was reading a chapter from Shauna Niequist’s beautiful book, Bread & Wine. In it, she tells the story of her Chicago Marathon training. Apparently, there are a lot of positive words thrown around in the running world:

If you can get to the starting line, you can get to the finish line.

One foot in front of the other.

So on my run this morning, I decided to give it a shot — combat negative thoughts with positive words.

I run with my iPhone and am able to analyze distance, pace, and elevation when I’m done. The last mile and a half is typically the hardest for me. That’s usually where the negative thoughts are the strongest. But today, I started saying positive words to myself on the final stretch:

If you can get to the starting line, you can get to the finish line.

One foot in front of the other.

Not only did I finish in record pace, I actually got faster as I was speaking positive words that last mile and a half. Runners call that a “negative split” which I hear is good. Regardless of splits, I was pretty pumped to get those negative thoughts out of my head.

All this made me wonder what other areas of life I was affecting with positive talk, and whether my work, relationships and even faith could be boosted by taking greater responsibility for the words that flow through my head. How much faster could I be running in other areas of my life?

What positive words do you need to speak to yourself today?

Can Positive Self-Talk Make You Run Faster? is a post from: Storyline Blog