64 Lessons for a Life Without Limits

T.D. Jakes

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780857206060
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

What people need today when they and society at large are in social and economic distress is great advice and spiritual support that is easy to access. 64 Lessons- informed by two of Bishop Jakes' bestselling titles, Reposition Yourself and Making Great Decisions- is a ready-reference book of advice to keep readers on course in managing their careers, relationships, health, home and spiritual well-being. The 64 lessons explore ideas like: 1. Good choices begin with research; 2. Quitting can be good, at the right time; 3. Begin before 'need' arises; 4. Regret can be the begging of triumph over adversity. For instance, we've all been told that quitters never win. But, there IS a time to quit, whether it's your job, marriage, church or project. The biggest problem with quitting is the timing. Quitting too soon may mean that you relinquish your dreams. Get comfortable with change. Even after you've repositioned yourself, change is constant. You may need to quit something in order to make room for the next season of your life. Before you quit anything, look within and determine your real motives. Revisit the longings deep in your heart. Get a clear perspective on what you're releasing and what your taking hold of. Examine your prior choices and consider what you've 'quit' in the past. This honest self-examination will prepare you for a new beginning.

 

SECTION I

—

Get a
Reading
of Your
Reality

 

– 1 –

Know Who You Are and What You’re
All About

You are you wherever you are. Wherever you go, you take you with you. If you are kind and thoughtful to your friends and family, you are typically a kind and thoughtful employee as well. If you are the life of the office party and enthusiastically organize the secret Santa activities every year, then chances are you make things fun at home too. More often than not, our personalities are consistent across most of the areas of our lives.

So then, who are you? It seems like a simple question but is often one of the most challenging for people to answer. To know who you are and what you stand for, to be aware of how you are perceived by others and how you present yourself to the world is one of the most important aspects of a well-lived life. Your behavior in your public and private moments acts as your life’s billboard, your personal brand.

Your brand consists of three attributes that are present for every encounter or meeting that you have with work colleagues, family, or friends. I like to call them “deliverables,” virtues that you bring to all your social and business interactions. They aren’t something that we get from a seminar or that we develop as we mature; deliverables are characteristics that are natural to you as a person and that reflect who you are as a person.

You may take your deliverables for granted. They seem second nature to you by now. But consider writing down or revisiting your own personal mission statement. What is your purpose on this planet? What are you about? What is your vision? Does your life truly reflect what is important to you and how you want others to see you?

So often, we live lives based on what those around us think we should be or do. We follow the path we’ve seen our friends, business associates, parents, or other family members take. Or we pursue what the media defines as success. Eventually, and sometimes surprisingly, we may find ourselves frustrated, angry, and disappointed in life. Have you ever heard business professionals lament about climbing to the top of the corporate ladder only to find that it was leaning against the wrong building? They were often so busy keeping up with what they thought they were supposed to be doing that they never stopped to ask themselves what they actually wanted to do.

By taking time to figure out your own personal brand, you make sure you are on the right path for you. You discover your unique deliverables. You develop a confidence in who you authentically are. What you learn about who you really are helps guide you throughout your life, no matter what circumstances or situations you find yourself in. Learn who you are, don’t be deterred by the paths of others, honor your personal brand, and you’ll never go wrong.

 

– 2 –

Assess Your Strengths and
Weaknesses

One of the traits of successful, joyful living is understanding what you do well and knowing those areas where you may need assistance or support. Our strengths and weaknesses don’t make us wrong or right, they make us who we are.

If you’ve ever heard the saying “No man is an island,” it was probably said about a great leader. Few people achieve great success all on their own. Consider an actor in a play. He may be the one out front in the spotlight, with perfect hair, makeup, and costume, reciting poignant lines, and getting all the applause and accolades. But to get great reviews the day after opening night, he had to rely on the costume designer for the outfit he wore, the hair and makeup artists who made him look flawless, the playwright who wrote the words he said in his show-stopping soliloquy, the director who provided the vision, and the lighting and sound crews who set the stage. Great leaders are smart enough to surround themselves with people who have strengths that complement theirs. The leader is still in charge but has a team of supporters who help achieve the vision and goals.

You’re a leader in some area of your life—home, family, your circle of friends, work, church—and you know that leadership has its challenges. While there are certainly many benefits to being in charge, at the same time leaders must often deal with conflict, controversy, and nay-sayers, who think they know better. One thing all leaders know is that while many people will never step up or out to be the leader, there are always plenty of folks willing to criticize any steps toward leadership you might take, and tell the whole world how they know better and why you did it wrong!

At work, you may take on the role of supervisor or assume leadership for a special project team. As the person in charge, you have the responsibility to thoughtfully assign tasks to team members, based on their strengths and interests, to build a group that will help you achieve the goals at hand. You may be surprised to later overhear a few complaints when you walk past the coffee break room. Your colleagues think they should have been awarded the job rather than you and may even set out to sabotage your efforts. The same may happen in family situations. Unfortunately, for a leader this comes with the territory. You can’t let others keep you from achieving your goals. Not everyone will be your cheerleader all the time. That’s just a fact of life.

You always want to treat people as you want to be treated, but you can’t always count on being supported or even liked by everyone. And some people will be determined to be difficult and negative no matter what you do. You can never please everyone, but stay focused on your goals and always be who you are and you won’t go wrong.

While they may mean well, sometimes family members can be negative as well. You may try to strike out on a new path, get an advanced degree or move to a new city, and they may try to stop you, saying things like “Why do you need to do that? No one in our family has ever lived there!” They may be afraid for you, or have a vision of you different from the one you have for yourself. Not everyone is going to understand or be supportive of the decisions you make. If you are a parent, for example, the best interest of your family is your number one priority. Your family looks to you for guidance and stability, not to be their buddy. Certainly having all the pay cable stations is more fun than paying the utility and grocery bills! While all the decisions you make may not be popular, leading the way based on who you are, spending household income responsibly, doing what you know to be best for the people who rely on you is your main concern. Real leaders make the tough decisions, even when it sometimes means they end up less than popular.

Leaders are secure in their vision for themselves. They know where they are going and don’t let others deter them from their path. This doesn’t mean that you won’t face others who will try to get you off course and people who will try to convince you to take the easy or more popular route. The road to true leadership can sometimes feel lonely. But once you reach your goals, the rewards are enormous.

Follow your path, and don’t allow coworkers, children, your spouse, friends, or anyone else to deter you from where you know you want to go. If you’re going to be an effective leader, hold fast to your vision for yourself and employ the assistance of a great team of supporters to help you get where you want to go.

 

– 3 –

Accept Responsibility,
Not Blame

Change is hard. That’s just a fact of life. Bookstores are filled with popular self-help books that claim you can change your life in five or ten easy steps. But the truth is, it takes much more than that to make significant and lasting changes in your life. Change comes from consistent and focused hard work and effort. Sure, one in a million people gets lucky and wins Mega Millions, or is discovered waiting tables and becomes an instant star. The rest of us have to work at achieving our goals minute by minute, day by day, week after week, and year after year. The other important thing these “easy step” books don’t tell you is that the road to success is not always a straight path. You will meet up with challenges and obstacles along the way.

Let’s say your doctor has told you that unless you lose weight, you risk getting diabetes, like your mother and grandmother before you. You start off with the best intentions. You get yourself a gym membership and work out several times a week. You cut out sweets and other unhealthy foods, and you skip those late-night snack binges for weeks. You are looking better, feeling more energetic, and starting to feel good in your skin again, having lost ten pounds in just over a month.

Then one day your boss chews you out for being late with a report. You know the best thing to do is to head to the gym and get out your frustrations in your kickboxing class. But instead on your way home from work you drive right past the gym and head straight to the supermarket. You buy yourself some Ben & Jerry’s Chocolate Fudge Brownie ice cream, and once home find yourself a spot on the sofa, turn on the TV, and eat the whole pint for dinner without one thought about the healthy salad you have waiting for you in the fridge.

When you are trying to make changes in your life, the fact is some days you are going to forget all about your goals of new, healthier habits. You are going to toss everything you learned, all the strides you’ve made, right out the window, and go right back to your old, bad habits. The key is to understand that a bad day is not a failure, it’s not forever; it’s just a bad day. Once you’ve had one, and everyone does, you simply start back on track the next day. Don’t give up. Life is a series of stops and starts, ups and downs. Tomorrow is a new day.

Take responsibility for getting off track. While your boss may have yelled at you and that may have made you feel bad, he didn’t force you to drive your car past the gym or hold the spoon of ice cream to your lips. You made the choice to give in to the upset and deal with it in the same old way. What is required now is to renew your vow to make changes in your life and begin from where you left off. Remind yourself of your vision for change, forgive yourself for whatever slipups you made, and begin walking forward again. Make your goal your focus, not the fact that you fell off the wagon. Don’t get caught up with blaming your boss, or yourself. Acknowledge the behavior, let it go, and move on. Realize that the next time you come up against a stressful situation—and you will—you can handle it in a healthy manner. See yourself heading to the gym tomorrow after work and take that salad you have in the refrigerator with you and have it for lunch!

 

– 4 –

Take the Junk Out of Your Trunk—
And Save the Good Stuff

Have you ever seen the movie Groundhog Day? Bill Murray’s character relives the same day over and over. As a movie it is funny, but in real life the idea is more sad than humorous. When we aren’t aware of the patterns in our lives, we run the risk of repeating the same day in our lives over and over as well. Sometimes this is true in a work situation. We continually end up in jobs where we are overworked and underappreciated, or where we have an uncaring or belligerent boss who criticizes and belittles us in front of others. Or maybe our personal relationships always seem to be full of the same kind of drama. We repeatedly get involved with the person who is unfaithful or self-involved or unable to commit. The jobs may change, as may the partner, but the situation always seems the same. The divorce rate for second and third marriages is higher than for the first; perhaps unrecognized patterns are the reason.

If you are like many people, the trunk of your car can often serve as a metaphor for some of the stuff you are carting around in your life. You keep a small grill in there even though you rarely picnic. You may keep your golf clubs or other sporting equipment in there even though you almost never play these days. In order to move forward in life, you have to let go of old things and habits that no longer serve you. You have to clean the junk out of your trunk. That is the only way to clear space for the new things you desire in your life.

If you’ve seen my friend Niecy Nash and her program Clean House, you know exactly what I am talking about. Niecy and her team of cleanup and design experts descend on messy homes and work with the owners to get rid of the junk that is keeping them from truly living in their own homes. Most of the people are reluctant to let go of the old possessions that are clogging the rooms, closets, and floors of their homes even though the mess keeps them from enjoying being in their houses. Most of the time they don’t even realize how attached they are to the junk, until Niecy and her team attempt to get them to throw it away. They want their house cleaned up, yet they cling to things from the past that keep them stuck in the mess they are in. Once they start to sell and throw out and let go, they clear up space to allow Niecy’s team to clean and paint and decorate in a more modern, clutter-free, beautiful way, creating the opportunity for a new kind of life. What are you holding on to from your past that keeps you repeating the same patterns that keep you stuck?

The beautiful thing about ridding ourselves of the junk is that it enables us to see clearly what we want to keep. The “stuff” we save is what we truly cherish, and by making the keep-it decision, we affirm and acknowledge what is truly important. Who are the people in your life who really matter? What are the habits and practices that truly sustain you? Once we clear away who and what don’t matter to us, we have the time and emotional space to savor what is not at all junk—whatever we have that is of enduring value.

– 5 –

Do an Internal Investigation

Relationships are important. Whether they be friendships, family relationships, or romantic ones, the people in our lives matter more than almost anything else. However, there is no more important relationship than the one we have with ourselves.

Knowing who we are and recognizing our limitations must happen before we ever try to partner with someone else. People often think that entering a relationship is about what you get, when the truth is relationships are equally about giving to others. Knowing what you would like in a partner begins with knowing who you are and why you want to be in a relationship. Jesus asks us, “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?” (Matthew 7:3, NIV). In other words, we must consider how we see ourselves before we can look closely at the other person in our life.

Knowing who you are as a person and truly believing that you deserve love and attention from another person is the foundation block of self-worth. The ability to communicate that effectively and in a respectful manner is necessary to any healthy, mutually satisfying relationship. A sense of self-worth is not egotistical. It helps you set boundaries and ensures that no matter who you encounter, those standards will never be compromised. So often, when we experience frustration and feel taken advantage of in relationships, it is because we have allowed those boundaries to be crossed, or worse we never considered where the boundaries should be. The way to avoid this situation is to be clear who we are and what we are willing to do in a relationship. Ignoring the truth about another person or ourselves may be okay in the short run, but in the long term it generally leads to disaster. Ignorance in relationships is not bliss! With a strong foundation of knowing who you are and what you stand for, you will have the courage to ask the right questions and discern the answers. You will take in information and evidence that help you see who a person truly is and whether or not he or she fits into your life. You will be honest with yourself and others about who you are, what you want, and how you want to live your life.

Do you struggle with this issue of honesty in relationships? With the many changes in the roles of men and women in our society, many of both genders often wrestle with how to openly and honestly communicate with each other. Many have difficulty expressing feelings about themselves and their lives. Rather than being honest and open about who they are and what they want, they engage in short-term relationships, running for the door the moment a potential partner doesn’t meet previously unexpressed expectations. The would-be mates in their lives routinely receive failing grades for tests they never know they are taking.

If you find that you have difficulty sustaining the long-term relationship you desire, consider if perhaps you have lacked the courage to express your true feelings and needs in relationships. Open, honest, meaningful conversation can feel intimidating...