Why Tough Times Are Necessary to Your Faith

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Stepping Out in Faith

One of my favorite parts in the movie Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is towards the end where Indiana is trying to get into the room where the Holy Grail is. He knows he has to reach it in order to help his father, who lies bleeding from a gun shot wound in a cave in the mountain. As he gets closer to the cave where the grail is supposed to be, he reaches a large chasm that he must cross to reach it. The chasm is wide and there is no jumping across it and it seems to drop down with no bottom. His only hint is clue he got from ancient scrolls that says, “Only with a leap from the lion’s den will he prove his worth.” Indiana has doubts and hesitates and then his father, almost telepathically, murmurs, “you must believe, boy, you must believe!” Indiana steadies his heart and then takes a step. He has to simply step out in faith that there is something out there that will support him. It was a leap of faith for him! And it worked! He found that there was a camouflaged bridge to convey him to the other side. You can see the scene here: Leap of Faith Scene

When crisis hits is when our faith is put to the test. Anyone can believe what they see or when the evidence supports it; although there are certainly cynical people that don’t even do that much. It’s the moments when everything we see and all of the evidence seems to be against us that we must believe completely that we can accomplish our goals. We have to engage in a leap of faith that things are going to work out as long as we continue to work towards them. There are going to be moments where we are growing, moments that are going to test our faith. We have to step out in that leap of faith and trust that things will work out.

In the Bible it tells the story of Jesus walking on the water. Peter asks to join him and Jesus simply says, “come”. Peter steps out of the boat onto the swelling waves and takes a few steps and then….falls into the water. Peter took a leap of faith that he too could walk on water like Jesus. Once he realized what he was doing, his mind started putting in limiting beliefs and into the drink he went.

Like Peter, we need to be reminded to keep the faith and step out of the boat; confident that we will reach our goal.

Here are some things to help you keep going and keep working towards those goals:

Keep Moving! Don’t Stop!
Don’t buy into what others say about you. There will be doubters but don’t let that stop you.
Use Daily Positive Self-Talk greatly helps you maintain the right attitude.
Focus on your strengths. Know what it is that you are good at doing and find people to come and work with you whose strengths overcome your weaknesses.
Commit to daily growth. Become a 1%er! If you commit yourself to grow daily then you can overcome the obstacles that get in your way.

A Flop and a Leap of Faith

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Over the Bar

You ever watch the High Jump during the Olympics or on television during one of the rare occasions they show track and field events? I think the competition is somewhat cool, probably at least partly because I can’t do it very well. I have never been a very good jumper either horizontally or vertically. The idea is that the athlete approaches a horizontal bar and attempts to leap over it without knocking the bar down. Each time they raise the bar a little higher. Naturally, whoever jumps the highest wins.

The first recorded High Jump event was in the 19th century in Scotland. They would basically just scissors-kick over the bar. That advanced to running up to the bar and then throwing the one leg over and then the other. Shortly after people innovated with “roll” techniques where they would almost literally roll their body over the bar. For protection, there would be a sawdust pit on the other side of the bar for a landing area.

Changing the Landscape

The real innovation happened in 1968 when Dick Fosbury of Oregon State University employed a totally different technique. By this time, the saw dust pit gave way to a cushioned landing area. Fosbury would run up on the bar at an angle and the thrust himself backwards over the bar, head first, and complete the jump by “flopping” his legs over and landing on his back. Fosbury used this technique to win the Gold Medal in the 1968 Olympics. Today, almost every high jumper uses the “Fosbury Flop” technique. The current record, according to Reference.com, is 8 feet and one-half inch set by Javier Sotomayor from Cuba.

Leap of Faith

The reason I mention this is an observation made about the flop technique. If you were to do that and land on hard ground or even in the old saw dust pits, you would likely break your neck. In other words, if the cushion wasn’t there and you landed, you would be in a whole lot of trouble. Broken bones, skull and brain damage would be highly probable. But the flopper, because of the technique, doesn’t get to see the landing area as they are jumping; they simply have faith that it is there and that they will land in the right spot. It is a LEAP OF FAITH in their ability to complete the jump.

The high jumper makes this leap of faith because they believe in their skills, their training, their visualization, and their execution to make the jump without getting injured. He TRUSTS himself to do what he has prepared and trained to do. He doesn’t wonder if any kind of outside force is going to get in the way, he trusts his body and his training to get the job done. He doesn’t create excuses for why he can’t jump today, he just goes and gets the job done.

Even though he BELIEVES he will be successful every time he jumps, he actually doesn’t KNOW until it is over whether he has been successful or not. So, the high jumper has FAITH in his ability to perform every time; even when he is unsuccessful or bettered by others. At no point does he give up because the weather got in his way, or the bar was mounted incorrectly, or there are others competing that are more athletic or talented. He ignores all outside factors and simply has FAITH in his skills and training and performs the best he can.

Flopping Our Way to Success

You and I may not be jumping over a bar 8 foot of the ground, (I already mentioned I am a terrible jumper), but we face hurdles and walls as we pursue our goals and dreams. To overcome those hurdles and complete our mission successfully, we have to have FAITH in our abilities, prepare ourselves for success, expect success, and then success will come. We won’t really be able to see the landing area until we are up and over the bar, and sometimes not until we land. But the landing area is there and we have believe we will clear the hurdles and land successfully. That is our LEAP OF FAITH.

What’s keeping you from making that LEAP OF FAITH? What is argument you give yourself? Is it true? It is always true? How can you prepare yourself more effectively to take a Leap of Faith? How can you reinforce your beliefs everyday to keep that faith alive?

Action Plan

Target an area where you feel like you are not where you want to be. Where do you want to be? What do you think is holding you back from reaching that goal?
Apply a little realism. Are the things you THINK are holding you back real or imagined? Are they simply excuses? It’s time to be brutally honest with yourself. Yeah, you know the real answer!
Read or listen to a daily affirmation to keep a positive mindset. Reading it out loud is best because the most important words you hear are the ones you say to yourself. This is not (necessarily) New Age stuff; it is real and valid. Zig Ziglar, Norman Vincent Peale, and others have promoted positive affirmations as a way of changing your mindset and your life. Here’s a good one from Hal Elrod or you can get one from Zig. I prefer the Ziglar version, although it is a little longer.
Engage in your daily personal growth to prepare yourself for success. Remember, be a 1%er.

“You were born to win, but to be a winner, you must plan to win, prepare to win, and expect to win.”

Zig Ziglar

Why Multitasking Sucks…And Wastes Time

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Multitasking Comes to a Screeching Halt

About a year ago, I was driving my son and I home from a scout meeting. We turned through an intersection and proceeded a few hundred yards forward I looked down to change the radio station. At the same time, the car in front of me decided suddenly that they wanted to turn right into a parking lot and hit their brakes. Lots of noise later, they have a beat up rear-end and my car is totaled. Thankfully, no one was hurt.

A Do Everything World

We all do it. Folding laundry and watching TV. Driving and changing the radio station. Working on the laptop while talking to a co-worker on the phone. Sitting in a meeting and sending an email. Trying to do more than one thing at the same time because we don’t think there are enough hours in the day. It’s called Multitasking and it is the biggest time waster of all!

“Wait”, you might say, “multitasking is a critical part of functioning in work and life today! How can you say that it is a time waster?”

Because it is.

Your Bad Multitasking Self

The idea is that if we are multitasking then we are working on multiple things at the same time, juggling everything and keeping things going. But that’s not what happens. In most cases what happens is it simply means that you are doing multiple things badly.

It doesn’t help that multitasking is encourage by many employers today. First, many companies advertise jobs where they specifically state in the job requirements that they want someone who can effectively multitask. I guess my question is, how exactly do they measure that? Secondly, with layoffs and streamlining, employers tell the survivors they must learn to do more with less, which unfortunately includes less staff. But not less work. While they don’t explicitly say it, they expect you to pick up all the slack and still do it within the same time frames. So your choices at either to put in twice as much time or “multitask”.

The Case Against Multitasking

There are many reasons why multitasking simply doesn’t work. The reasons run from the logical and practical to the medical and psychological. We’ll cover just a few.

First, understand that what you are doing is not actually multitasking. It is actually just task-switching. What it reminds me of is Microsoft Windows operating system on computers. Early versions of Windows offered a way to jump between tasks. You could still only run one thing at a time, but you could jump between applications. That was called task-switching. It wasn’t until later versions where Windows would allow you to actually run multiple applications at the same time. What we do when we allegedly multitask is the first one – we are simply task-switching. Problem is, we aren’t a computer with an operating system designed to do that, so we have a lot more trouble than Windows did jumping from one task to another. And that’s saying something.

Other reasons:

Multitasking does not increase productivity, it decreases it. There is research to suggest that multitasking actually reduces productivity by as much as 40%.
Studies show that task-switching rapidly actually increases the time it takes to complete a task.
Task-switching slows you down because you have to re-align yourself each time you jump to the next task. That means reaction times are slower, so if you are performing any task that requires quick reaction and reflex your performance suffers greatly.
Evidence shows more mistakes are made when multitasking instead of focused work.
Multitasking is stressful. When multi-tasking in a fast-paced environment, your heart rate increases and stays higher longer than normal. There is also emotional stress caused by the fallout of mistakes and failure while multitasking.
We are designed to focus on one thing at a time. Again, lots of research to support this. Health Magazine cites a 2013 University of Utah study that found the better you thought you were at multitasking, the worse you actually were.

In summary, you suck at multitasking. And so do I and so does everyone else.

So, if you were doing something else while you were reading this, stop it until you finish.

Now leave your comments and thoughts.

Okay, now you’re done. Go back to that other thing.

Why You Waste 12 Hours a Day of Your Precious Time

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Too Much Time on Trivia

Spending a little time doing research on this, I wanted to find out what the top time wasters we use are. While opinions vary there are some items that popped up on pretty much everyone’s list and you probably know which ones. That said, let’s look at some of the top daily time wasters and how much time they take.

FACEBOOK
Is it any surprise that this shows up on the list? For many people, their world revolves around Facebook and similar social networks. On a Marketing Charts website article, they report that Americans 18-64 spend an average of 2-3.5 hours per day on social networks. The number slides higher depending on age group and other demographics. Interestingly, business owners spend more time on social networks than non-business owners. In many workplaces, they thought that they had managed this problem early on by blocking social networks. That worked until people got smartphones with Facebook apps. Let’s call it 3.5 hours a day.
EMAIL
Again, no big surprise. What do most people do first thing when they get to work or boot up their computer? Check their email. We check it again an hour later. And then again an hour after that. And again. And again. Many even check it just before they call it a day. It becomes really time-consuming when we receive mailings from a variety of sources with people who want some of our time and/or money. We gotta filter through all that and then read the “urgent” stuff. Another 3 hours per day.
TELEVISIONReally?! But it is so educational! (yes, that was sarcasm) Many will tell you that you should find an alternative, like the wonderful recording features on many systems today. But that just means you will watch it later. Either way you are wasting time. Not too long ago our TV went out and was out for a couple of weeks. We found other things to do. Most peaceful two weeks in a long time. Still wondering why I fixed it. Average of 5 hours per day.

Wow! Let’s stop there. Just in those three items we have 11.5 hours of time spent out of our day. All those things are useful but none of them are critical; if we spend any more than an hour total on any of them we are wasting time. And this does not take into account the time we spend on other things like instant messaging or texting, pointless meetings, various interruptions during the day, generally surfing the web, and procrastinating. But there is one that I think is the most critical, first because I think it is the source of most of the others and second because of the effect it has on us overall. And that time waster is multi-tasking. We will talk about that on Friday.

Get Time Back

Knowledge is great, but action is better. How can we manage this a little better?

If Facebook is not part of your work, then you should invoke a no social networking rule during the work day. Chances are your company does not permit it and even doing it on your smartphone during business hours violates company policy. Besides that, it’s just not right. If you simply must, check it during lunch elsewhere.
If Facebook IS a part of your work, as it is for many small businesses and entrepreneurs, then block time out for it on the schedule in both the morning and afternoon, each one with a 30-minute limit.
Do not, I repeat DO NOT, check your email first thing in the morning. Save it until mid-morning after you have had the opportunity to eat a few frogs. Create a tagging system for marking emails. When you view your inbox, scan the messages and quickly and use your tagging system to mark them as urgent, critical, important, or not important. Urgent emails you respond to immediately, critical emails within a few hours, important emails by the end of the day, and not important emails either get filed or deleted. That allows you to get through it within 30 minutes each time, likely even less. Another thing: nothing stays in the inbox. Act on it, file it, or delete it.
This one is easy. Make TV time earned. Works for children, it will work for you. Half-hour segments of TV time is earned by meeting objectives or goals. Or do it by program if you wish. Either way, the idea is that you don’t watch TV unless you have earned it by accomplishment. Better yet, just keep it off and find something else to entertain you. Delegate the time to personal growth. Read a book or watch a webinar. Remember the caveat

Really successful people have large libraries and small televisions.

No matter whether you work for a large or small company, are a business owner, network marketer, run a charity, or manage a household; getting things done is a matter of managing the things that can waste your time. Knowing what they are and developing systems to handle them in definitive periods of time will go a long way towards making your day more productive and helping you find time for things you enjoy.

Action Plan

Buy a journal or notebook and document your time from the moment you wake up until you go to bed. Do this for at least three days but preferably a week. Include everything, no matter how insignificant it might seem. What you want is a good idea of how you are spending ALL your time.
Total up the time you spend per day on non-critical things like the activities above. Remember, social networking is not essential unless you use it to market yourself or your business IS social networking.
Create time limits and block out time on the schedule for those activities. Make sure that the beginning of the day is spent doing critical activities for the day, especially the ones you don’t really want to do or procrastinate on (eating the bullfrogs).
Follow the new schedule for 3-5 days and again document your activities. How much free time did you discover? Were you more productive and effective?

Three Ways to See the Value of Your Time

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Time Wasting

You are wasting time.

We all do to an extent, but the more successful people minimize wasted time and know how to get the most out of the same 24 hours daily that you and I have. Yes, many work long hours, that is true. Yes, many work weekends as well, that also is true. However, there are lots of people who work long hours including weekends and don’t get near as much done. It’s a matter of getting more value from your time because you understand the value of your time.

In my postings on social networks today, I shared a quote from M. Scott Peck. Peck was a psychiatrist and also an author. His most famous book is The Road Less Traveled. A lot of what he wrote about over the years was fulfillment and he was a big advocate of leading a disciplined life. He also believed in understanding your worth. The quote I shared today was

Until you value yourself, you won’t value your time. Until your value your time, you won’t do anything valuable with it.

Understanding the value of our time begins with understanding the value of those things, including us, that take up that time. Here are a few considerations to help you understand the value of your time:

My friend Kevin McCarthy developed the concept of the On-Purpose Person (you can buy the book on Amazon). The foundation behind it is that we have to determine what our purpose is and once we understand that we have to plan our actions to make sure they are in alignment with our purpose. In other words, you must be On-Purpose. Kevin uses a light switch as an avatar to remind you to evaluate whether what you are doing is on purpose or off purpose. While sometimes off-purpose can be a good thing, what we look to do is make more of our actions on-purpose. So, in other words, when you understand your purpose, you attach value to yourself and your time. Being On-Purpose is making sure that you are doing something valuable with that time.
If you lean more towards the pragmatic, you can do the math. If you calculate out the dollar value of your time, then you understand better how much that time is costing you each time you waste it. There are lots of internet sites to show you how to calculate it out, but the simplest one I found was on The Simple Dollar. You figure out your take home pay from last year and subtract out all expenses associated with working, such as child care, transportation costs, etc. Divide that by the actual number of hours you devote to working each year, including commuting time and all. That gives you an actual dollar value per hour. So everytime you look at an activity, evaluate it by how much it is costing you using that figure. You may find yourself leaving out a lot more less productive uses of you time.
Be both sides of the customer/business relationship. As a customer, how do you feel when service in the restaurant is slow, when the doctor makes you sit 30 minutes in the waiting room, when the repair shop doesn’t have your car ready when promised, when someone promises to deliver something to you by a certain time and then doesn’t come through. You probably, if you are like most, display anything from displeasure to outright rage. Someone has not valued your time and you WILL NOT TOLERATE IT. But you do the same to yourself. When you choose to put off productive tasks, to pick activities that look busy but actually don’t get you any closer to your goals or tasks, or simply choose to do something entirely unproductive, then you are treating yourself like that restaurant did, like the doctor’s office, like the repair shop, or the dozens of others who may have let you down today. Insist on quality productive time out of yourself and believe in the value of your time.