Tag: powerful
Faith | Hope | Love
Faith, hope and love all have a mutual friend, her name is patience. The trial of your faith produces patience, so where there is genuine faith there is authentic patience. Love is patient. In other words, an expression of love is patience. Hope actually means cheerful or hopeful endurance. So there is no real love, faith or hope without patience. Patience brings what God is doing in us to a place of maturity. There is no real spiritual or emotional maturity without patience. Jesus said, in patience you possess your soul. You can not have rule over your mind, will and emotions without patience. Often faith, hope and love are most commonly expressed through patience. Lord Jesus be our patience and by your grace give us the ability to cheerfully endure anything and everything that may come at us in this life.
Transparency
If someone is not transparent there is usually a reason why. Some people have been hurt, abused, abandoned and let down. Some people are afraid, ashamed or just insecure. We must be intentional about not allowing how others have treated us to control who we are becoming.
Transparency is powerful because it builds trust. Trust is the currency of meaningful and purposeful relationships. Someone’s transparency is the foundation that I can put my trust on. If someone is not transparent it generally means they are hiding something. When we choose to be vulnerable we are actually showing others that we are more powerful than what others may think about us. By choosing to be transparent we are saying that we are more powerful than what happened to us or what didn’t happen for us. When we choose to be transparent we are telling others that we are real, authentic, honest and therefore trustworthy. When someone is transparent you don’t have to question their agenda because they have stated it. Being transparent means we are clear about who we are, who we are not, what we are doing and why we are doing it. Transparency is important because people can’t help you if they don’t know that you need help. Recently I shared on Facebook how my wife and I were 1 credit card away from being credit card debt free. My intentions were to share the progress we were making to be an encouragement to others. A few weeks after that I received a hand written letter in the mail with a check for $362.00. A kind and generous family wrote an encouraging letter and said “we wanted this money to go towards paying off your debt.” I was touched deeply by their generosity, but I realized without my transparency I could not have experienced their generosity. My encouragement to you is that if you want people to be real and honest with you, be real and honest with them. Transparency is not social nudity. Click here to see what social nudity is.
How Powerful People Think.
Powerful people don’t think I can’t, they think how can I? They don’t think this won’t work, they think how can we make this work? Powerful people don’t focus on the problem they focus on solutions and strategies. Let me share with you a private conversation I had with a powerful person who is happy, humble and really down to earth. This man is an inventor, an investor, a philanthropist and an evangelist. He is a good husband to one woman for many years and a good father to his children. He feeds orphans daily and sends young people to college that are not even his children. God has blessed him and he has made some right decisions over the course of his life and now he lives to give. I have leaned a lot from him. His life has taught me that the purpose of prosperity is generosity.
One day while in another country with my good friend I asked him, what does it feel like to be powerful? I said to him, you can buy a Mercedes or a house in the Caribbean or go on vacation for a few months. You can do virtually whatever you want. What does that feel like? When you get up in the morning what do you feel like? At first he really didn’t have an answer. In fact he said that it was a good question and that no one had ever asked him that before. From my question I learned that a good question is a question that has never been asked before. Not only will the asker grow from the answer, but the one answering the question will grow also because now he is thinking about something he never thought about before. The next day he answered me in a more clear and definitive way. He said, “to be honest it feels good to know that I can buy my wife a Lexus cash, but honestly I really don’t think about it until we need a car.” When he said that a thought hit me like a ton of bricks. Powerful people don’t allow useless thoughts to occupy precious head space. In other words my friend doesn’t wake up thinking about what he can buy or where he can go, he only thinks about what is pertinent to now. Because he planned for tomorrow he doesn’t have to worry about it. Powerful people live in now. They may plan for tomorrow, but they refuse to worry about it. Remember this if you are worrying about tomorrow you are probably not planning for it wisely, because fear and worry shut down the logical part of your brain. So worrying about tomorrow will mess up both today and tomorrow, making yesterday rather appealing. Powerful people don’t live in yesterday or tomorrow they live in now. You can’t be powerful living in the past or the future, because you live in now. If you are attentive to now, tomorrow will be better than if you focused on yesterday or worried about tomorrow. Whether you are day dreaming about the house or the car of your dreams, or worrying about how you are going to pay your bills. Dreaming and worrying are not how powerful think. Powerful think about what is the next right decision based on who I am, where I am, where I am going and what I value. Powerful people practice self control, which helps them to stay focused on what is most important. The more self control you have the more powerful you are. Powerful people don’t control others they control themselves.
3 things powerful people don’t think about.
- Powerful people don’t worry about what is out of their control.
- Powerful people don’t allow useless things to occupy precious head space.
- Powerful people don’t live in the past, they are focused on the next right decision.