Cynicism

• Cynicism begins not because you don't care but because you DO care. It starts because you poured your heart into something and got little in return or got the opposite of what you desired. Most cynics are former optimists. 

• The problem with generalizing is the death of trust, hope and belief. You think you're protecting yourself form the future when actually, your new stance infects your present. The people you care about most in the here and now suffer. You project your new found suspicion on everyone and everything. The withdrawal isn't just from the future; you retreat from the present as well. 

• Cynicism is not always a conscious decision, but it's a decision nonetheless. Cynics never change the world. They just tell you why the world can't change. 

• Cynicism melts under the relentless hope of the gospel. Because hope is anchored in resurrection, it is resilient. 

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Solution

• Be curious. Schedule thinking time, wonder and discover. Ask open ended questions. Leave space for silences, don't formulate next question or comment as the other person is speaking. Give fewer answers, dig deeper. Openness attracts people and draws them in. 

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Compromise

• The subtle compromises we make day after day - the half truths, the rationalizations, the excuses - create a gap between who we are and who we want to be. You're not a terrible person, but you're certainly not at your best either. You haven't sold your soul to the devil, you've rented it. A thousand little compromises have left you... compromised. 

• Character determines capacity, not competency. 

• Your character is compromised when you can no longer tell the world the truth. Watch for any gap you see between your words and your deeds. It's easy to spot hypocrisy in others because we judge others by their actions but judge ourselves by our intentions. 

• Tell tale signs you're drifting: 
  - There's a growing Gap between your public life and private life.
  - You're hiding things
  - You fail to follow through on what you've said.
  - You justify your bad actions and decisions
  - Your life has become all about you

•  3 ways to get started: 
  - Take responsibility (self honesty)
  - Make your talk match your walk (humble your talk and accelerate your walk. even if it's embarrassing to tell the truth) 
  - Put yourself first when it comes to personal growth 

• Competency gets you in the room, character keeps you in the room. It's our character that God is most interested in. 

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Disconnection

• The demise of genuine conversation. 
  - more and more people are talking at one another more than with one another. 

• The death of confession
  - we avoid confession because it requires us to look in the mirror. 
  - you won't address what you don't confess. 

• Stop using your past as a justification, maybe you have problems for which you are responsible. Healthy people treat reasons as explanations, not justifications. Justifications lead to stagnation and complete denial or self pity. 
  - You can make excuses or you can make progress, but you can't make both.

•  Art of conversation.
  - Life giving conversation is a back and forth exchange where people have active interest in each other.
  - If the conversation is not mutual, be the adult in that case and continue to ask questions. A remotely healthy person will pick up on the change in dynamic over time and begin to foster mutuality in the dialogue. An unhealthy or self absorbed person won't. 
  - The sense that a conversation is going nowhere always carries with it an underpining of judment and even arrogance on my part. I just assume I'm better, smarter or wiser or that I have greater emotional intelligence than others. Think of others better than ourselves, that's a cornerstone habit of the humble. 

• What's your hurry? 
  - Hurried life is exciting but it kills intimacy with God, family and friends. Slowing down is the only way you can be truly present. 
  - Love has a speed, and it's slower than I am. Love pauses, love lingers and offers full focus and gives far more than it takes. When I run too fast, I outrun love and the people I love pay a price. 
  - Do I still run hard? Sure I do. But I've also built margin into my life, The world may not be slowing down anytime soon but that doesn't mean you can't. 
  - The leaders I admire most and who have accomplished the most tend to be people who never seem in a rush, who have all the time in the world. 

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Irrelevance

• Irrelevance happens when the language, methods or styles you use no longer connect to the culture and people around you. You lose the ability to communicate meaningfully. 

• The gap between how quickly you change and how quickly things change is called irrelevance. It's not soul level change, change your value system often and it won't be long before you've sold your soul. The goal is to understand the culture well enough that you are able to speak into it (with change and adaptation) 

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Craving Different

• Change is the only thing that bridges the gap between who you are and who you need to be. 

• Theologically, God never changes and God's values are timeless. But your willingness to change gives you the ability to communicate timeless truths in a way that has meaning to those who come after you. 

• Why are we resistant to change? 
  - Change is internally driven or externally imposed (beyond your control, so we always try to control it) 
  - We crave what we already like (it's impossible to crave something you haven't tried) 
  - You encounter problems with success (when you are successful, you suddenly have something to preserve and conserve, you become less open to changes) 

• What does change looks like?
  - Love the mission more than the methods (methods need to serve your mission. Methods should be constantly changing so that you can better accomplish your mission.)
  - Get radical (Incremental changes bring incremental results.) 
  - Become a student of culture (people who don't understand today's culture will never be able to speak into it. Whether you agree with the culture or not, understanding it is a prerequisite to being able to influence it) 
  - Surround yourself with younger people 

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Pride

• Pride makes me believe these things:
  - What other people think matters more than what God thinks
  - His love for me is not enough
  - His approval of me is inadequate unless I have approval of others
  - Appearances count for alot
  - I am what others think I am. 

• The most obvious form of pride is narcissism. They think they're God's gift to humanity and demand to be the center of attention. 

• Pride shows up all over our lives and every time it does, it's deadly. (it will snuff out your empathy, stifle your compassion, create division suffocate love, foster jealousy, deaden your soul nad make you think this is normal) 

• Signs that Insecurity is driving your Pride
  - you compare yourself to others (there's a diff between tracking with others to grow versus tracking with others to see how you stack up.) 
  - Your self worth is determined by your latest performance (your opinion of yourself rises and falls with how you perform or what others say about you) When you've tethered your identity to your performance "When work is your identity, success goes to your head, and failure goes to your heart" 
  - Secure people takes issues seriously; they just don't take them personally anymore. They realize that who they are and what they do are separate things. 

• - You can't celebrate someone else's success (someone else's victory means your loss, if someone does well you can't help but wonder why you didn't see the same results and that the odds are stacked against you) 
  - You squeeze gifted people out of your Life (how comfortable am I around people I think are better than me, even at the things I'm good at?) 
  - You want some Say in Everything 

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Consequences of Pride

• Superior
  - pride and insecurity needs you to be better than somebody - anybody. 

• Judgmental 
  - You invent reasons why others are behind to bolster your sense of success. 

• Unaccountable
  - You justify avoiding real accountability and surround yourself with people who tell you what you want to hear. 

• Isolated
  - the only person your pride impresses is you. Nobody else is attracted to your arrogance or self absorption. 

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Habits of the Humble

• Cultivated as a discipline or through humiliation (involuntary humility) or invite it and cultivate it.

• Never lose your Gratitude
  - The more you have, the easier to lose your gratitude. You lose your gratitude when you start to think you earned what you have and even think you deserve it.
  - Express your thankfulness regularly, fall more in love with the Giver. What should you be grateful for? 

• Take the Low Place 
  - Intent on serving rather than being served. 
  - Share your blessings.

• Open your Notebook
  - Learn from anyone and everyone.

• Push other people into the spotlight
  - Pride wants to be acknowledged, recognized and celebrated. 
  - Realize that the overall mission is more important than you are. 

• Get ridiculously honest with yourself (and God) 
  - Check your motives constantly, ask people for a reality check. 

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Burn Out

• It's just that in the numbness that accompanied by burnout, I couldn't feel my faith anymore. I prayed, but it seemed like my prayers bounced off the ceiling. I read scripture but I no longer sensed that Scripture was reading me. 

• There would never be enough people, never enough thank yous, never enough recognition to fill the hole deep inside. It doesn't matter how much you pour in your bucket if your bucket is filled with holes. 

• Low grade burnouts - joy of life is gone but the functions of life continues. You're not dead, but you're certainly not feeling fully alive. 

• Signs of Burn Outs
  - Passion Fades 
  - No longer feel the Highs or Lows (if you're healthy, you feel things. Burnouts numb your heart)
  - Little things make you disproportionately emotional (treat small things like big things and big things like small things) 
  - Everybody Drains you (when nobody energizes you, they're not the problem, you are)
  - You're becoming Cynical 
  - Nothing satisfies you 
  - You can't think straight (your heart messes with your head. "Just don't do anything stupid" Avoiding stupid is a win. 
  - Your productivity is dropping 
  - You're self medicating (overeating, over working, sexual addictions, drinking, impulsive spending) 
  - You don't laugh anymore 
  - Sleep and Time Off no longer refuel you 

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Your New Normal

• Tell Someone (the way through burnout is through community. Even if you suspect that the impact of being in community was one of the factors that caused the burnout. When you admit to others, you're also admitting to yourself) 

• Develop a Circle around you (you need people who believe in you when you've stopped believing in yourself) 

• Keep leaning into God (your emotions aren't working and you feel mostly numbness, you likely won't feel like God is there for you. Just because God is silent doesn't mean He's absent. You might be tempted to think that you and God can handle this privately. But God works through people. Don't give yourself permission to quit your faith. In pivotal moments like these, you will either lean away from God or into God) 
  - Rest (you're at your kindest when you're most rested.) 
  - Find something to take your attention away from your Pain (when you slow down your pace, often you only have your pain to focus on. and pain is selfish) 
  - Do what You Can (focus on what you can do. What can you do today? Do it. Even if you don't feel like it.) 
  - Don't make any Big Decisions (make big decisions on a good day. If you have to make a big decision, lean into your circle of friends and people close to you who can help you prayerfully make a decision you won't regret) 
  - Grieve Your Losses (if you don't grieve your losses during your recovery, you're missing tremendous opportunities to put the past behind you. Otherwise, your past continues to sabotage your present and your future.)
  - Reopen Your Heart (an open heart leaves you vulnerable to being hurt and stung again. But many people ARE trustworthy. God always is. And it means you will go on to have many new, deep friendships, rekindle and foster old ones) 
  - Life today in a Way that Will help you Thrive tomorrow 

• It's easier to find relief from the pace than from the weight. 
  - Take a day off, shut off your phone, cancel some meetings, pace is adjusted.
  - Weight of life is heavy. Weight is what you feel, the tremendous responsibility that you can't ignore even when taking time off. 

• God's favorite people to use are the broken ones. Those who come to an end of themselves and learned there was not much there in the first place. Broken people get to the point that they realize the poverty within and have to look beyond themselves for renewal and strength. 

• If God wants to go deep, it's because he wants to take you far. 

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Emptiness

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What we try to do

• Money, Wisdom, Party, Retail (Solomon's examples - Ecclesiastes 1:2-8; Ecclesiastes  1:13, 16-18; Ecclesiastes 2:1-3; Ecclesiastes  2:4-11) 

• More Work 
  - You may get fired for drinking too much or partying too much, but working too much usually gets you promoted. 
  - Scared of being alone with my thoughts, love the rush of being busy, being needed and seeing progress. 
  - Ironic how the quiet on the outside can reveal so much disquiet on the inside. 
  - Seasons have beginnings and endings. If your season doesn't have a beginning and ending, it's not a season, it's your life. 

• All You Can Eat

• Appetite for Seduction
  - Appetite makes you discontent with what you have. And it convinces you that what's next will satisfy it. 
  - That's what self-medication does to you: it makes you crave more. 

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My Kingdom Come

• Find a mission that's bigger than you. As long as you keep making your life all about you, you'll experience one round of emptiness after another. 

• Money isn't the mission, money funds the mission. You're not the mission, your job is to point people to the mission. 

• The alternative of living for yourself is dying to yourself. (the people you admire the most are never selfish people. selfishness looks good only to the selfish in the same way pride is attractive only to the proud) 

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Conclusion

• Sometimes Christians can over spiritualize life. It's easier to look upward or outward than it is to look inwards. Self knowledge will take you into profoundly meaningful places. (The unexamined life is not worth living) 

• When you're intimately in touch with your own emotions & inclinations & deeply knowledgeable about the ways of God, you'll have a greater chance of seeing your issues. (Know your motives, desires, feelings and character. be in tune with how your actions affect others) 

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Self Awareness (What self aware people know that others don't)

• Their Impact on Others 
  - know not just your emotions and actions, but how your emotions & actions affect others. 
  - (eg. not letting your bad day on the inside spill out to others on the outside) 
  - When you stop using your emotions as the only filter through which you process your attitude and actions, you grow as a person. 
  - You self regulate and become more interested in other people than yourself. 

• Their Weakness 
  - Your understanding of and respect for your weakness actually makes you easier to work with and more valuable to the people around you. (create space for others to shine, allow yourself to spend more time working on your strengths) 

• Their strengths
  - If you are aware, you get to do regularly what you were created to do. Self aware people know what they're best at but they don't brag about it, they just do it. 

• Their Limits 
  - A realistic sense of what they can do and what they can't do, where they end and where others need to begin. 
  - Leaders who know their limits often operate much closer to their potential than leaders who have no idea where their limits are. 

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