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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Mike Bechtle
Read between
July 4 - July 10, 2014
Our discomfort with a situation varies depending on how much control we have.
If you’ve tried everything possible and the situation isn’t going to change, you’re left with the second step—changing your attitude. The question becomes, “What can I do to change the way I respond or handle the situation so it’s not constantly eating me alive?”
“Drama-free” doesn’t mean getting rid of the drama or the people who create it. It means being free from its debilitating effects in our lives. This book is about getting free—not letting our lives and attitudes be controlled by the choices of others.
In most of this book we’ll be talking about how to respond when people make crazy choices that mess up our lives. But the place to begin is with our perspective. No matter what the other person does, it’s our perspective that determines how we feel and respond.
People don’t start out crazy at birth. In their first few years, they decide if the world is a safe place or not.
The Bible says that any argument makes sense until we hear the other side (Prov. 18:17). That doesn’t mean we’re wrong and the other person is right. But it means that our perspective may be incomplete.
We won’t be able to eliminate the drama in our lives or escape all the crazies. But we can actually learn to live responsively instead of reactively, being positive when others are negative.
living as a victim is optional. We can choose how we respond.
I can’t change the traffic, but I can protect my emotions from being hijacked by that traffic.
What can we control? Ourselves. What can we not control? Everything else.
It’s not our job to fix other people. But we often find ourselves trying to do exactly that, and it’s frustrating when they don’t cooperate.
When you think of the people who have had the greatest impact in your life, what percentage of them had an agenda for you and what percentage had influence? While both may be factors, it’s probably weighted on the side of influence.
There are five characteristics that define family relationships: proximity, history, patterns, feelings, and expectations.
let people be who they are
A reaction is how we feel; a response is what we do. Reactions are automatic, but we choose our responses.
Imagine two people standing and facing each other. Both have their hands up in front of them and are pushing against the other person’s hands. Since they’re both pushing, they remain standing. But if one person pulls back and removes the pressure, the other person will have to stop pushing or they’ll fall on their face.
I guess being an adult doesn’t guarantee we handle things properly.
When our thoughts are accurate, our emotions become appropriate.
Pay attention to our inputs. What we watch and listen to, what we read, and who we talk to provide the raw ingredients for our thoughts.
Realize that we can change our thoughts. Just because we feel something doesn’t mean we’re stuck with those feelings.
It’s not just acting like we’re OK; it means becoming the type of person who is OK, regardless of what other people say or do.
That’s what people do who see life through the lens of truth. They don’t make character judgments about themselves when they mess up. Instead, they identify what they did that was a problem without seeing themselves as the problem.
Humility means not thinking better of ourselves than we really are, but also not thinking worse of ourselves than we really are. Any time we have an unrealistic perspective of ourselves, we’ve lost our basis for healthy relationships because we’re not operating from truth.
Reactive people always focus on the things that are going wrong. Responsive people recognize the power of their choices; they learn to take life lightly and realistically. That’s called joy.
The truth is not that the glass is half-full or half-empty; it’s that the glass has water in it. Some of it is gone and some of it is left. That’s seeing things realistically.
Other people and circumstances try to drag us down. We have to choose to see life differently. It’s not a choice based on positive self-talk or affirmations; it’s a choice based on reality.
Emotional control is determined by where we put our focus. We can choose to focus on one of three things: Crazy people Ourselves Truth
Tony Snow, former press secretary for President George W. Bush, died of cancer at the age of fifty-three. He wrote, “We all want lives of simple, predictable ease—smooth, even trails as far as the eye can see. But God likes to go off-road.”
The key to being in control of our emotions is to work on our thinking patterns. Our thoughts determine our feelings. If we want different feelings, we need different thoughts.
our thoughts come from our inputs. That’s why we need to be aware of what we allow to come into our minds.
Dr. Poland practices a different perspective on being “fishers of men.” He says, “It’s our job to catch them; it’s God’s job to clean them.”
Trees aren’t supposed to display fruit; they’re supposed to produce it. As much as I wanted to see results, I knew that I had to wait. The tree had to become healthy and mature before it could produce the fruit, and that takes time.
People buy books about how to be healthy, wealthy, popular, and balanced. But few people are rushing out to buy books on how to be kind.
Think about how we feel when someone demonstrates kindness to us. We don’t just notice the act of kindness; we feel differently about that person, period. Kindness is an emotional handshake that builds trust between two people.
Kindness isn’t a replacement for personality; it’s a catalyst that makes our personality more effective. Adding salt to food doesn’t replace the food, it enhances the natural flavor. Kindness brings out the richness in relationships.
What if we short-circuited the process by being kind to a person who was unkind? There are no guarantees of how they might respond, but it would change the dynamics in the relationship. It’s not about being kind so the other person will change. It’s about being kind because it’s right.
True kindness isn’t a technique we use to change someone else. It’s a character trait that causes us to care for others no matter what they do or say.
The entertainment industry is built on make-believe. Actors and actresses are real people pretending to be someone else, saying words that someone else gave them in buildings that don’t really exist. Millions of us spend millions of hours and billions of dollars watching the fantasy, knowing it’s not real but engaging with the characters as if we’ve known them for years.
Integrity means the outside accurately reflects the inside; it’s when our public image is the same as our private image.
People will only trust us if we prove ourselves trustworthy. We become trustworthy as people watch us over time and see our integrity. We can’t just tell someone they can trust us; they have to observe it for themselves.
What would happen if we found a way to “burn our boats” in relationships? What if we developed a level of commitment where people absolutely believed that we wouldn’t run when things got uncomfortable?
The problem is that we add new activities without getting rid of any old ones. We’re not replacing good commitments with better ones; we’re simply making a longer list. When we have trouble giving the proper level of attention to each one, we feel guilty.
Money has no value by itself; it’s just paper and ink. Money gains value when we decide what we’re going to do with
each person is responsible for their own behavior. “The child will not share the guilt of the parent, nor will the parent share the guilt of the child. The righteousness of the righteous will be credited to them, and the wickedness of the wicked will be charged against them” (Ezek. 18:20).
It’s healthier to live in expectancy. That means we do everything in our power to change the situation, influence the other person, and hope for the best, accepting the fact that things might stay the way they are. Expectancy lives in reality but watches every relationship with anticipation of what could happen in the future.
all of the solutions fit into one of three actions: Stay in a bad situation Leave a bad situation Stay in a bad situation with a strategy for working on it
