Latest / CEO Kingdom Seekers / Ep 43: Soul Spent: How High-Capacity Leaders Can Create Margin and Find Rest — with Bret Kolman

Transcript

Ep 43: Soul Spent: How High-Capacity Leaders Can Create Margin and Find Rest — with Bret Kolman · CEO Kingdom Seekers

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hello, everybody.
• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to this week's episode.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: Today's guest is someone who did something that most CEOs would never consider doing, and it changed everything about how he led.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: Brett Coleman spent more than a decade leading two hospitals, and several times a year, in the middle of all of that leadership, he stepped away.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: He fasted, he met with other faith-based leaders, he sought God.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: And those pauses produced some really amazing results, creative breakthroughs, deeper peace, and eventually 23 bite-sized nuggets of wisdom that became his book, Wisdom That Leads to Soul Rest.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: Brett is a faith-based leader, former hospital CEO, and author.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: And his message is for driven professionals who feel like something in life is off, who they're seeing results on the outside and running empty on the inside.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: Brett, welcome to CEO Kingdom Seekers.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: I'm so excited to chat with you today.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you, Dr.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_01: Cordell.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_01: I'm happy to be here.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: So I'd love to just start off talking a little bit about your book.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: I'm a huge reader, and I know the title is Wisdom That Leads to Soul Rest.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: And there's a term you use, soul spent.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: I'd love to just talk about that term because when I read it, I felt that.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: I was like, oh, so before we get into the wisdom that actually leads to this type of rest, can you describe what soul spent means, like what that feels like and how somebody would know that's where they're at?
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_01: So it's a made-up word.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_01: I was like, man, there ought to be a word to describe like when your soul needs rest, but it's more than just a physical thing, it's more than a mental, it's spiritual, it's emotional, it encompasses all of you, and it's dragging you down further than just being like tired or something like that.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_01: And so I was playing around with some words and it's soul spent.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_01: That's what it is.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_01: It's soul spent.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_01: And there was a good word I found in the Hebrew about when the Israelites were leaving Egypt.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_01: It talked about they had a bitterness towards the slavery, and then they were supposed to eat bitter roots when they celebrated the Passover.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_01: And so I looked up that word bitterness, and it's like an anguish of the soul.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_01: And I think it actually was what I was trying to capture with soul spent.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_01: It's like you're not just tired or disappointed or frustrated, you're feeling some anguish.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_01: It's deeper than the flesh level.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: I think what a lot of the healthcare and wellness industries, when it comes to corporate, have been trying to capture in their description of burnout.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, burnout doesn't do it justice, right?
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: Because I think when you hear burnout, you think about some of those more physical, emotional, mental.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: What you're talking about is really the spiritual anguish.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_01: And I hate to think when people ask me, were you burnout when I left?
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like, I don't know that I was burnout.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_01: I might have been frustrated out, but I wasn't burnt.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know that I was burnout.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_01: It's just like I was ready for a change.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_01: Lord led me for a change.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_01: I talk about in the book the 25 sabbaticals at the time, but I also then after 10 years, I actually took a year off.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_01: I took a one-year sabbatical, which took a lot of faith.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_01: And it's not obviously for everyone.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_01: And it may not be your season for that, but I do believe that for me it was.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: So I guess my wondering is when we hear that term sabbatical, I've heard that term, but it's usually for researchers or philosophers who are studying at universities and doing all this really deep thinking and pondering, and they're like, I need to go steal away to rest, right?
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: How would you define a sabbatical for somebody who is working in a corporate career or very much not in that theoretical philosophical space?
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, the pastors and the professors.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_01: So I think of Sabbath, the Bible talks about taking once a week a Sabbath day, which is a day of totally ceasing.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_01: And so a sabbatical doesn't have to be a year, a month.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_01: It can be five minutes every day, it can be one day every week, and it can be three times a year.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_01: So that's what my many sabbaticals are.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_01: They're 60-hour retreats with solitude, prayer, fasting, and a time to just get alone with the Lord.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_01: So I don't want to put that kind of burden on people.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_01: Everyone knows their capacity for a sabbatical or for a break.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_01: So do what you can do.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_01: But here's the important thing the rhythm of rest is built into the universe.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_01: And so if you look at the Jews during the Sabbath day, the Sabbath actually started at sundown.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_01: So the day of rest, the day that you were going to spend with the Lord, you didn't go to the Lord all tired and then go to bed that night.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_01: You got rested up first, and then you spent the day with the Lord.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_01: So the day of rest began with rest.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_01: And when he created the universe, on the sixth day, he made mankind.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_01: On the seventh day, he rested.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_01: On the eighth day after rest, man went into the fields to work.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_01: Work was before the curse.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_01: So we were working the ground before the curse.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_01: So work is not a curse.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_01: It's part of what God has intended for us, but it's intended from rest, not to rest.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: I love the restoration of order that you're talking about here.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: Of okay, God created, rested, then man is creating from that restful place.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: That is gorgeous because I think a lot of people, what they do is, and I know I used to do this, the saying I remember was work hard, play hard, and the rest wasn't even in there.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_00: And but I was like, it's not play hard, work hard.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: It's not rest, rest hard, work hard.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_00: It's the work comes first.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_00: We do all of these things, and then the rest is almost a reward rather than going like, no, God wants you fully restored and filled up before you go out and be fruitful and multiply and take dominion over the things that He's given us to manage.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: Because I know that we were talking right before the episode started.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_00: I mentioned that I'd been out of clinical practice for five years.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: The amount of restoration and just rest in general that I have now, I can sleep seven and a half hours a night and feel so much more rested than I did when I was working because I've got this cycle and this cadence of ensuring that on a consistent basis versus before it'd be like, okay, I'm working in overnight the entire time.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_00: And then, okay, today I'm gonna rest and sleep for four hours, and then tonight I'm gonna go to bed, but I'll sleep for 12.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: And it's oh yeah, in a two, three night period, I got 18 hours of sleep.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, yeah, but that's not restful.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: So I think this idea that you said, number one, about the sabbatical being it doesn't have to be a month or a year, it can be five minutes.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: That's gorgeous.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's something that people can practically take away.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: And then this other piece of the rest gets to come first.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: Stop trying to almost earn it.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: God did that.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: God already did that for you.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's the old lover boy song, everybody's working for the weekend.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_01: That's the way we think about it.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_01: But it's not that way.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_01: And I've heard a lot of people talk about recovery or things like that.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_01: And they're like, you need to slow down.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_01: And it's like, no, actually, you need to cease.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_01: You need to stop.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_01: It's actually not slow down.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_01: So sabbatical and sabbath does not mean, hey, go ahead and work today, but just put in a four-hour day instead of an eight-hour day.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_01: It means don't work today.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_01: And it's really hard, honestly.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_01: Even I having type A, we got cortisol, we're all stressed out or caffeinated or energized, and we don't want to slow down, to be honest with you.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_01: We don't want to.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_01: But I think that nature has built it into the universe.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_01: And I said that before, but if you think about the electricity that happens in when cells fire, muscle cells or brain cells, when they fire, they literally can't do it again.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_01: They go into a refractory period and they're incapable of doing it right again.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_01: There has to be a part of a time that they can't.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_01: And this, it's night and day, it's breathing in and out, it's your heart beating, your heart resting.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_01: It's everywhere.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_01: And if you ignore it, you will ignore it to your own demise.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: My brain is tickled by what you just said because I'm thinking back to my pathophysiology days where I would teach about heart failure and pulmonary failure and all the failures of the body.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: And almost everything when you look at it comes down to does this organ have the ability to constrict and/or relax?
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_00: Because all of your muscles, your heart's a muscle, your lungs have muscle fibers in there that help them, muscles around them to help them.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: It all comes down to I can get just as sick from not being able to relax, like we call those restrictive or constrictive, or excuse me, restrictive, as it is to expand and to put things out.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: And that's that's constrictive.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: And so I'm geeking out a little bit because you're just showing it's not just in the spiritual part of it, it's actually in the physiological parts of how he designed us.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, the ebb and flow of the ocean.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_01: Everything in nature, the Lord has put eternity in man's heart.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_01: Everywhere around us, we look, and that God is sending us signals of this is how life works.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_01: If you do it this way, you'll recover better, you'll recover faster, you'll live more fully, you won't be stressed out.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_01: It'll help your relationships, it'll help your emotional state of mind.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_01: This works.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_01: God's ways work.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_01: And so if you find something that's in the Bible and it's like, this is what I think he's telling me, this is what I think I'm reading, this is what I think I'm understanding, do it.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: And so I guess I'm curious.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_00: You're leading these hospitals, you're in these high-stake, high-pressure environments.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: Was there anything specific that made you go, I need to not just slow down, I need to cease?
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_01: I would say honestly, I stumbled upon it.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_01: Me and a buddy were in a Bible study together, and we heard a teaching about Exodus chapter 34, three times a year you will appear before me.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_01: And this person had always gone on a sabbatical one.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_01: Me and him decided to do it.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_01: So it was just he and I for the first seven.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_01: I've done, I think, 32 of these now.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_01: So I've done them three times a year for 12 years, maybe, and I've missed maybe one or two where there was family things going on where I couldn't make it.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_01: But I try it.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_01: The important thing about a sabbatical is you have to be intentional.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_01: It's an intentional pause.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_01: And if you're like, man, I didn't have it planned.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't have a room booked, I didn't have a car booked, I didn't have a flight booked, and I was just gonna do it and it didn't work out.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_01: And I, yeah, it's like that's because you weren't really intentionally planning on pausing.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_01: You have to be intentional, plan a year in advance, put it on your calendar.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_01: So, no, I didn't know that I needed it.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_01: And I'd always heard it should take a day a week as a Sabbath, so I knew about that, but I was on call much of my life, 24-7.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_01: So it wasn't exactly always possible.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_01: And not that I had to work those days hard, and I don't want to mislead anyone, but I found out that when I did one, that's when I realized this is life-changing.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_01: You only have to do one, and you'll be like, wow, I need this more than I realized.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_00: And you're hitting on something that actually we were just talking with a new client about this yesterday in the onboarding phase of oftentimes people will come to us in they're in this season where they feel God calling them to grow in a very specific way.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_00: And they're like, I can't, I'm already so full.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: I'm already moving a maxed at capacity.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_00: And so I've got this really strong nudge calling from God to do this.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: I can see that this is clearly from Him, and also like the capacity, the time, the money, the energy, the knowledge, or the information.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_00: Like I'm good for where I'm at right now, but I don't have what I need to get to the next point.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_00: And so what a lot of people do, and I see this, is they're like, I'm either going to just take something off my plate, or I'm going to kind of leverage some assets and overextend myself.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_00: And neither of those work because if they take something off of their plate without then doing what you said and clearly blocking that so that they have what we call margin.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_00: I'm like, guys, you want profit margin.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_00: Margin means space.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: So that means that there's space between the capacity of what you could do and the capacity of what you are doing.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_00: So a lot of times God needs to see that we are willing to hold that space and that we're only going to fill it in the ways that He really calls us to fill it.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, you have to create that space first.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: Because if you're like, hey, God, as soon as you give me this thing, I promise I'll create the space for it.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_00: He's like, yeah, no, I know you.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_00: I've watched you.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_00: You create space or I help you create space and then you fill it right back up.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_00: Or you just go ahead and take the thing on and go, hey, God, you're gonna take care of this, right?
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_00: And he's like, that's not the way that I work.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: And so we were saying, if you want in a year from now to be able to take two weeks off, if you would like to spend only half a day a week in administration and the other four and a half days doing what you love rather than two days a week doing what you love and three days in admin, okay, let's go ahead and block off that half day right now, or block off even just starting with an hour or two hours, and show your body, hey, it is safe for us to block this off for what we want, even though there's nothing going in there right now.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that relates back to the sabbatical piece because we've lost this natural understanding of blocking off space and prioritizing God.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_00: And because when you order things that way, a lot of times that's where a lot of the I've noticed the wisdom comes in.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_00: Like when I take a full day rest, God just starts talking to me.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_00: Because I have time to listen.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_00: I'm in quiet where we can have more of that connection.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_00: I'm intentionally posturing myself that way.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_00: Versus if I'm like, oh, I'll just sneak in this email, or in the back of my head, I'm thinking about the second that the Sabbath is over on Sunday, I'm gonna do X, Y, and Z.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not positioned, I'm not creating that space and I'm not trusting God to be like, by me doing this and spending that time with you and allowing you to use that time however you desire, that's the most important thing to me.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_01: You're talking about time, which I mean, in the short run, you can say, I don't have time, time's not under my control.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_01: In the long run, no one can say that.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_01: Over the course of 10 years, it's like, I don't have time for that.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_01: There's no way 10 years from now you can say, I don't have time for a sabbatical.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_01: You might say, I don't have time this today, I don't have time next week, I don't have time next year.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_01: But time is one of those things that's totally fair.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_01: It's totally equal.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_01: You can say, I wasn't born in the right country, or I didn't have the money, or this is unfair, and this was unfair, and this was unfair.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_01: Time is not one of those things.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_01: Time is a hundred percent fair.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_01: And I used to say when I was a kid, that's not fair.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_01: I apparently kids learn this very early.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_01: It's like you give one kid four scoops of ice cream, the other one two, and it's that's not fair.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_01: And my dad used to say, fair's a place you go to show your pig.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_01: And I lived in a little town, and in our case it applies.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_02: I love that.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_01: The thing is, people have a bad relationship with the word no.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_01: And so they say yes to things they should say no to.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_01: And what happens when they do that is they get overcommitted.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_01: And if you're good at what you do and you're talented in any way, people are going to always ask you for it to do more things than you have time and capacity to do.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_01: There is no person that's like, I'm good at what I do, I love to do it, I'm easy to get along with, people like me, and I'm a servant's heart, and no one's asking me to do anything.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_01: It's amazing.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_01: You know, that person doesn't exist.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_01: So people are always going to try and fill up your calendar with things that are important to them and that will help them.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_01: So you have to do an audit of your calendar and maybe bring a second party in.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_01: Because if you'll say no to two things or three things or four things or five things, one or two no's might change your week, and three or four no's might change your life.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_00: Oh.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_00: I love how God sometimes just brings themes in because it's funny.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_00: The exact next question I was gonna ask you about was the power of the word no.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_00: And when we say no, people really gain that a lot of people don't know that they gain.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_00: And you're right.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_00: One of the things that I really struggled with was again taking that solid one day.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_00: Because when you're an entrepreneur, nobody's telling you when you can or can't work.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_00: And I had one of the very first guests on the podcast said something to me that just completely changed my mind because this guy, he had worked with just names that you'd be like, oh wow.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_00: And he was saying that it doesn't matter if you're the biggest CEO on the planet, if you're sitting on your computer at home working, to your kids, it looks like you're playing video games.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_00: And I went and I asked my kids.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_00: I was like, they were like, we don't know what you're doing.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_00: We look over there and you're like on Canva or you're doing this or you're doing that.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_00: They're like, we don't know what you're doing.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_00: We just, yeah, you're working, right?
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_00: But to them, they don't know if I'm working on a$200,000 contract versus I'm doing something else.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_00: And so to them, it just looks like mom spending time on the computer and not spending time with me.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_00: And so after that, I went to my husband because I was like, I don't have any boundaries right now.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_00: I have no boundaries.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, okay, at least one day a week, Saturday or Sunday, I'm not gonna work.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_00: And then I'm gonna take my messaging app off of my phone.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_01: But now you're scaring me.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, I'm gonna have this second phone for work, and it's the battery dies within 12 hours.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_00: So it's great.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_00: You've got to plug it in every night.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, I'm gonna have this for work, and I'm gonna put all of the social stuff and the messaging stuff and all of that on that phone, and I will carry that phone with me from eight to six.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_00: And then beyond that, I'm not answering clients' messages at 10 p.m.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_00: anymore.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not, I'm not doing this anymore.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_00: And he was kind of like, This is a little, and I said, God has just so clearly convicted me around this.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_00: And I did it.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_00: And the first couple of days, I felt like I was detoxing.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_00: It was crazy, like how many times I went to check my personal phone to check things and go, Oh, yeah, that's not on here anymore.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_00: And then a really funny thing happened.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_00: Our clients didn't care.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_00: A couple of them didn't even notice.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_00: And actually, when I said, Hey, y'all, just so you know, these are the new boundaries I'm putting in place.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_00: Some of them were like, Wow, thank you for modeling that.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_00: And I just went, I gotta be clearer about my on time and my off time.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_00: And so what happened after that was like, God really started clearing my schedule because he was calling me to write more.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_00: He was calling me to do some things that really required these bigger chunks of time where I wasn't being interrupted.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_00: And as soon as I was like faithful in a couple of those areas, it was like, okay, now you've got these two whole days a week where you can write.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_00: And at that point, it was up to me to go, and I'm gonna keep those blocked off.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_00: Because again, a lot of times we create that space.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_00: And then we go, Oh, look, there's a lot of space.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_00: Let me put this other thing in.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_00: And so I'm not sitting here saying I'm perfect at it.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_00: We're gonna have three high schoolers in a month.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_00: And I was just talking to one of them, and they were like, This is the most involved and present summer we have ever had with you.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_01: Man, that's a powerful testimony.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_01: There's no one who can give you a testimony, positive or negative, better than your kids.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_00: Just to have them be like, mom, if we want to go do something, it's not a oh, let's schedule that in two weeks.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, let's figure that out.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm sharing this because by saying no to a lot of those things and reprioritizing, I was able to say yes to the four people, my husband and my kids.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_00: They're the four most important people in the world to me.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_00: So I our clients are still happy.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_00: We're still having our business growth.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_00: I'm working less, I'm in this more clear on and off time.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_00: And the feedback I'm getting from the four humans I love the most is you are saying yes to us so much more often.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_01: Wow, that is powerful.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_01: And God's ways work.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_01: This is the way I look at it.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_01: If God says give and it will be given back to you, that means that instead of living on a a hundred percent, I'll live better on some percent less than that, 95, 90, 85, wherever your heart's at on that.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_01: I'll live better on 85% than the world's living on 100%.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_01: Because his ways work.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_01: And if God says, Hey, take a day of Sabbath, that means he's gonna create a system in a way that I can get what needs to be done in six days, as everyone else can in seven days.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: God's created something that He knows that we need rest.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_01: He knows that we need recovery.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_01: He's on our side.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_01: He's for us, not against us.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_01: And so He hasn't created this you have to run on a treadmill seven days a week to keep up with his system.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_01: He's built in rest to his system.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_00: You talk about in your book, there's a chapter that's titled Learning to Lose, right?
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_00: I think some people might hear that and be like, ooh, that feels edgy.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_00: What happens to give you that wisdom that losing, quote unquote, could actually be powerful?
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_00: What does that look like in the context of leading at that level that you were leading in your faith?
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_01: It starts with being an overly competitive, have to win at any cost person.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know what you're talking about, Rhett.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_00: I've never done that.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_01: So that creates fertile training ground for a lesson like this.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_01: And then enter my wife, who is my teacher.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_01: And I was her student.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_01: And we've been married almost 35 years here coming up in October.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_01: But we were married a few years, and I don't even think we had kids at the time.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_01: And we were having debates and arguments, just normal stuff, I think, of married people.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_01: And there is a part of me that still kind of thinks this, but the winner of an argument is whoever's the most logical.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_01: And so if you're more logical than the other person, there's a good chance you're going to win that debate.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_01: And so my wife and I were having this debate.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_01: She was being emotional.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_01: I was being illogical.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_01: So I was winning.
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_01: And it was really great.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_01: I loved win.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm very competitive.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_01: And winning at any cost seemed like a logical thing.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't know where she got this horrible sentence from because it just stopped me dead in my tracks.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_01: But she said, Do you want to be right or do you want to be happy?
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_01: And the problem was at that time, my little emotional intelligence brain wanted to be right worse than it wanted to be happy.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_01: And I started noticing that at that time I didn't supervise anyone, I don't think.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_01: And then later on in life, I was supervising, had 1,500 people that were reporting up through me.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_01: And I noticed that the people who had to win every debate ended up losing every relationship.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_01: And so I'd started looking for win-win.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_01: But then I kind of realized there was a next step.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_01: I'd gotten smarter because I'd realized that I didn't have to win at all costs.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_01: It could be win-win, and that there was a relationship cost to always winning.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_01: And so what happened was I don't know where I got this idea.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_01: Radio, readers digest.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_01: It was a long time ago.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_01: So it was probably about 30 years ago.
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_01: And we had kids at that point.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_01: And it was just the I call it the paper cuts of life, where it's like, hey, pick up your socks.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_01: Hey, we're gonna be five minutes late.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_01: And I won't say which one of those examples apply to which person, but you can probably guess.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like, all this nitpicking is not healthy.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_01: Why don't we make a list of everything that's bothering us?
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_01: That way, once a week, we'll just write it down.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_01: So when something's bothering us, we'll write it down.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_01: One day a week, let's say Wednesday morning.
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_01: Wednesday morning's a horrible day anyway.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_01: It's the middle of the week.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_01: We're all tired, we're grouchy.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_01: We don't want to ruin a weekend.
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_01: So let's just take Wednesday morning and we will present each other a list of complaints.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_01: And it will make the other six days great, and it'll make the seventh day just horrible.
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_01: But this is a winning idea.
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_01: And so we get through the week, and my wife's like, do this.
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, hang on, that's not life or death.
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_01: You need to put that on the Wednesday list.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_01: And so she does something, and I'm like, attack her, and she's like, I think this can wait for the Wednesday list.
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_01: And so we're starting to laugh about it by the end of this week that's gone on.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_01: So Wednesday morning comes along, and as you would probably not be surprised to know, I hadn't made my Wednesday list.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_01: I had not done a good job of keeping track of all the things that were irritating me.
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_01: And I couldn't remember what was irritating me.
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_01: But my wife had a list on the table, eight and a half by eleven, folded in half.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like, man, she's so much more detailed than me.
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_01: She's gonna nail me.
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_01: So I opened this list and it says, I love you for providing for this family.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_01: I love you for being a great husband.
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_01: I love you for being a great dad.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_01: And it was about 10 reasons why she loved me.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_01: And this was the first, last, and only Wednesday list that we had.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_01: And what I learned is that she took what might honestly be a good idea for some people to kind of reduce the complaining to one day a week.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_01: But she took it from a physical, hey, I'm not gonna win, I'm gonna look for win-win to losing on purpose.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_01: And there's a spiritual principle in there that you don't have to win all the time.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_01: God can sometimes be your defender.
• 27:27
  SPEAKER_01: And this is good and this is healthy for relationships when you don't have to win and sometimes are even willing to lose on purpose.
• 27:39
  SPEAKER_00: You talk about testimony, that's gorgeous.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_00: I was like tearing up as you said that because I'm guessing that was more convicting for you than anything she could have written down, right?
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_00: Because she just essentially modeled Jesus.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_00: He's like, I love you no matter what those sins are.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_00: And you know what those are.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_00: Like, bring them to me.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_00: I want to work on those with you.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_00: I want to help you with those.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't want to hold those things against you, right?
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_00: I was chuckling because my husband and I are marriage mentors.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_00: We have our very first marriage mentor couple.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_00: So, as Catholics, you go through something called pre-cana, which is where you take this very long assessment.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_00: It's 150 questions and it's 14 different categories.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_00: And then you meet with a marriage mentor couple for five to six sessions and just talk about your answers and talk about, okay, were our answers the same and do our answers match what the church recommends?
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not for us to say, oh, you guys aren't getting along here, so you can't get married.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_00: It's just to make sure that they have these conversations before they go in.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_00: And there's three lessons that my husband and I have pulled from this.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_00: The first is that we realized we never went through this because we were at a very old school Catholic church where we knew the priest well and he knew us well.
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_00: And I think we literally, I think God might have orchestrated this.
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_00: I think we just slipped through the cracks.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not kidding.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_00: Cause we asked, we went back and we were like, weren't people supposed to go through this?
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_00: And they were like, You didn't go through this?
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_00: And we were like, No, we didn't.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_00: And they were like, that was probably a mistake.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_00: So the second thing was is that in order to prepare for those sessions, my husband and I are reviewing our couple's answers, and then we're also talking about how we're gonna teach it together.
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_00: And he and I are like, so many of the arguments we had started when we had kids.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_00: And we realized that.
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_00: And so we were just going, why?
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_00: Like, why did so much of this start when we had kids?
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_00: And it comes back to priorities and capacity.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_00: We weren't practicing Sabbath rest at that point, we weren't prioritizing seeking God first and having him support us in that way.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_00: And we were doing our best.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_00: We're 22, and again, there's some education and mentorship missing.
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_00: And so we realized we actually have a lot of the same answers and truly want to show up in this way that we feel like God has designed marriage, and also in business, we're business partners, we want to do those things.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_00: Almost all of our issues come from capacity.
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_00: And so that was really helpful from a wisdom perspective because that's where a lot of these no's started coming in.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_00: What do we need to say no to in order to say yes to the things that we want to prioritize?
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_00: And then the third thing was that we just had the most incredible first couple, and to keep everything anonymous, but we just had the most incredible first couple that were mentoring and we're watching them and we're like, oh my goodness, when you are aligned in this way, look how beautiful this is.
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_00: And so it was almost, we were joking with them.
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_00: I said, Y'all, I I know you're saying we've been inspirational for you, but you have been an absolute inspiration for us because of how you are approaching this going in.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_00: You are so in alignment with how God has ordered things.
• 30:57
  SPEAKER_00: And you can already see the fruit of it in your relationship before you two even walk down the aisle together.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm sharing that because it's amazing what wisdom that came through in that marriage mentorship, like it helped us understand wow, when you've got that good mentorship yourself, both from God and from other people who know what he's taught, like who know what the Bible says, who know what the word says about entrepreneurship and rest and all of these things, that makes a huge difference.
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_00: And also, I was just reading about this morning, like growing in marriage and reordering your life in your home will massively and positively impact what's happening at work.
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_00: And again, it's one of those places that's disordered.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_00: We're putting work first and then we're putting the family in the home second.
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_00: And we're not doing it from this place of selfishness.
• 31:55
  SPEAKER_00: We're doing it from this place of this is the career that pays for the food, that goes on the table, that closes the kids and lets them do the sports and does all those things.
• 32:02
  SPEAKER_00: But one of the things I've realized just again from the summer is my kids are like, we will go with less if it means we get more of you.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_01: Aw, that's pretty awesome.
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_00: And they're seeing the positive impacts of us creating this because our business is starting to really flourish in some ways.
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_00: And they're seeing, like, oh, if we're willing to reorder things, that might be tough for a little bit.
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_00: And oh wow, look at the fruit that produces.
• 32:26
  SPEAKER_01: Wow, that is awesome that you raise kids that think this way.
• 32:30
  SPEAKER_00: It's all God, honestly.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_00: I feel like he really blessed us with three kids that are honestly smarter than us, I think.
• 32:36
  SPEAKER_00: But it's been really cool to get the feedback from them.
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_00: There was one other thing from your book that you talk about that I wanted to pull out that I think is a huge piece of like the ordering and the rest, and it's the gratitude piece because you talk about gratitude being something that can be trained, not just felt.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_00: Can you talk about what that actually looks like in practice?
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_00: Because I think a lot of people think that gratitude is something like, oh, when something good happens, I'll be grateful, or I'll practice gratitude around like a couple of things, but it's not something that they recognize as it feels like it has to be intrinsic and not something that you can actually like develop.
• 33:17
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, this is probably one of the things that has as much science in it about it as anything in the book, and it's the fact that gratitude can be trained.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_01: So I'll start with red car ethere.
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_01: Because when you're driving to work and you just bought an F-150 red, you start seeing all the F-150s, what color they are, what year they are, you start seeing all these reds.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_01: That's too bright, that's too dull.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_01: I don't like that one.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_01: So you notice all these things that you didn't notice before.
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_01: And all of a sudden, instead of, hey, there's one one red car on the way to work, there's a hundred.
• 33:51
  SPEAKER_01: And instead of one truck on the way to work, there's a hundred.
• 33:55
  SPEAKER_01: And it's just our minds, when we drive 10 miles to work, you could spend the rest of your life making a list of everything you saw on that one 10-minute, 10-mile trip.
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_01: Because there's just so many things to observe in life.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_01: And so our mind has to be selective in what we pay attention to.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_01: We can't pay attention to everything, so we become selective in what we pay attention to.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_01: So what you're doing is when at night, so you make a list of 10 things you're grateful for, and the next day you make another list of 10 things.
• 34:29
  SPEAKER_01: And honestly, the first 10, depending on where you're at in your emotional state, the first 10 might be hard.
• 34:37
  SPEAKER_01: But even if you're in a decent place, the second 10 might be hard.
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_01: And by the third day, the third 10, if you can't repeat, it's gonna start getting tough to think of 10 new things every day that you can be grateful for.
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_01: So what happens is your mind is going to start subconsciously thinking about things that you can write down at the end of the day.
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_01: So it's gonna subconsciously look for the red cars.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_01: And those red cars are the things that you're gonna be grateful for at the end of the day.
• 35:10
  SPEAKER_01: And while your subconscious is doing that, your entire outlook and way of thinking about life is gonna change because now everywhere you look, you're looking for things to be thankful for, gratitude for, appreciate, and it's gonna change your life.
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_01: And it's proven, it's proven over and over again scientifically.
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_01: I believe it's just a seven-day or 10 days of doing a gratitude journal will make a difference for six months.
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_01: So this is something that's proven in science.
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_01: It works every time it's tried.
• 35:41
  SPEAKER_01: I also think one of the things about gratitude is you have to have your expectations at a good place, realistic place, because some of the time when we're not feeling gratitude, it's because we had our expectations too high.
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_01: And so I went on a bike trip across to Iowa.
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_01: It's called Ragbri, Registers Annual Great Bike Ride Across Iowa.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_01: And it's seven days, 500 miles, 70 miles a day.
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_01: Which and I'm sitting on this little bike seat that's about four inches by four inches, and I found out about the pedural nerve, and I was a little frightened when I heard that.
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_01: And my hands were getting numb.
• 36:19
  SPEAKER_01: Everything was getting numb.
• 36:20
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm getting ready to get on the bike for the fourth day, and I'm using this company to move my luggage from location A to location B.
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm at their semi-truck throwing my bags in, and I see this sign on the truck, and I'm sure it was there the first day, but I didn't see it until day three or four, and it meant more then than ever.
• 36:41
  SPEAKER_01: It said, if you're not having fun, lower your expectations.
• 36:45
  SPEAKER_01: Oof.
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_01: So sometimes our gratitude, this is the difference between what we expected and what we got.
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 36:53
  SPEAKER_01: The longer you live, the more you realize that life may be a nine out of ten fun on average, but not every day is.
• 37:01
  SPEAKER_01: And not every season is.
• 37:02
  SPEAKER_01: And I believe as people of faith, we have to understand that Lord, like we said, physically and spiritually, he's created seasons, and some of them will be tougher than others.
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah.
• 37:15
  SPEAKER_00: I try to be intentional.
• 37:16
  SPEAKER_00: I would have said the sentence that's about to come out of my mouth, like without the context.
• 37:22
  SPEAKER_00: It appears as if we are coming out of a season that we were in for several years that was just hard.
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_00: And like I have no other way to describe that.
• 37:32
  SPEAKER_00: And things happen to us in that season that we'll never even talk about publicly because you know they're between me, you know, the wall and God.
• 37:42
  SPEAKER_00: And it has been fascinating how the last several months of this season we've been lowering our expectations and going, hold on a second.
• 37:56
  SPEAKER_00: My husband and I ask ourselves this question, where are we playing God?
• 37:59
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 38:00
  SPEAKER_00: Because that's where expectations come in a lot of times for us, is where am I deciding how this has to go in order for it to go well.
• 38:07
  SPEAKER_01: That's good.
• 38:09
  SPEAKER_00: And so we had something happen the other day that was very unexpected.
• 38:16
  SPEAKER_00: And he and I were both like in our feelings about it.
• 38:20
  SPEAKER_00: And what's fascinating is is we have different responses to when things go unexpectedly.
• 38:27
  SPEAKER_00: I'm the one that's always trying to find the silver lining in it a lot of the time.
• 38:32
  SPEAKER_00: Or I'm absolutely crashing out about it.
• 38:34
  SPEAKER_00: But usually I would say about 80% of the time, I'm like, okay, but like this is actually gonna work out because of this.
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_00: And I and I am avoiding feeling any of it.
• 38:44
  SPEAKER_00: And he is typically feeling a lot of it, but like just internalizing it.
• 38:47
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm out here just jawing away, talking about like, oh, but this will work out and this will be okay, and yada, yada.
• 38:52
  SPEAKER_00: And he is like, I don't want to hear any of this because I am not there.
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_00: And also I'm not gonna say what I'm thinking because he's like, I know this is really negative, and I know that this probably isn't the case, but that's how I'm feeling about it.
• 39:06
  SPEAKER_00: And what was interesting about this last time was that, and I could see I was like, there's some growth happening here, was because he said he actually got frustrated.
• 39:19
  SPEAKER_00: He voiced his frustration and was like, I know that this is part of God's plan, like I get this, and also I'm really frustrated about it.
• 39:29
  SPEAKER_00: And he's like, and also I need you to not talk to me.
• 39:33
  SPEAKER_00: And this is one of the first times he's ever said that to me.
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_00: He was like, I need you to not process out loud what you are going through because I'm actually doing that for the first time.
• 39:43
  SPEAKER_00: And it was like, okay, we're actually starting to shift to doing this in a healthier way.
• 39:49
  SPEAKER_00: Because for him, the disordered way was I'm gonna shovel this down and not have a conversation about it.
• 39:54
  SPEAKER_00: And it's gonna continue to impact me.
• 39:56
  SPEAKER_00: I'm just gonna pretend it's not.
• 39:58
  SPEAKER_00: And it was wild how I ended up taking my stuff to God and being like, God, how can I be grateful about this?
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_00: How can I look at this through your eyes?
• 40:09
  SPEAKER_00: And my husband was actually externalizing what was going on, and he was like telling God, this is what I'm upset about, and this is where my expectations weren't met.
• 40:18
  SPEAKER_00: And can you help me again?
• 40:21
  SPEAKER_00: Can you help me understand it?
• 40:24
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, Okay, I think we are really starting to see the fruits of this hard season because it's changing what happens.
• 40:33
  SPEAKER_00: And so, yes, I think that what part of this is, is that some people think, okay, growth means that you always lower your expectations.
• 40:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, we are human.
• 40:44
  SPEAKER_00: Your brain is making up expectations without you even realizing it's doing it.
• 40:48
  SPEAKER_00: So part of it gets to be let's proactively try to release the outcome to God.
• 40:53
  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes you're just gonna get your hopes up.
• 40:56
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 40:56
  SPEAKER_00: Like sometimes you're just gonna really want something.
• 40:59
  SPEAKER_00: And so if that doesn't happen, then okay, how do I surrender that back?
• 41:04
  SPEAKER_01: And surrender is the right word because there's times when it's not my will, but your will be done.
• 41:09
  SPEAKER_01: And we don't always get what we want.
• 41:11
  SPEAKER_01: You know, Paul had a thorn in the flesh and he prayed three times.
• 41:15
  SPEAKER_01: God remove the thorn.
• 41:17
  SPEAKER_01: And it just plain flat told him it's not gonna happen.
• 41:20
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, no, and so we don't always get what we want, and we have to submit to the someone who maybe knows more about what's in our best interests than we do.
• 41:30
  SPEAKER_01: Jocko Wheelink has a video.
• 41:32
  SPEAKER_01: Have you seen his good video?
• 41:34
  SPEAKER_00: I have not seen that video as soon as you said his name, his whole discipline equals freedom was I got so excited when you mentioned him, but no, please share.
• 41:42
  SPEAKER_01: He does a video, it's only like three and a half minutes long, and I think your husband would probably love it.
• 41:46
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of people would love it.
• 41:47
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's great.
• 41:48
  SPEAKER_01: It helps me relate to life.
• 41:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 41:50
  SPEAKER_01: So he's in the military and you know, life and death situations.
• 41:56
  SPEAKER_01: And his number two, number three person comes up to him, and it's like, hey, we didn't get the new equipment we thought we were gonna get.
• 42:05
  SPEAKER_01: He's like, Good.
• 42:07
  SPEAKER_01: Now we know the equipment.
• 42:08
  SPEAKER_01: It's all familiar, it's all stuff we've used before, we can use it again.
• 42:12
  SPEAKER_01: And then his number two comes to him, and I'm expanding this a little bit.
• 42:16
  SPEAKER_01: And Jock goes, he comes to him, he's like, Hey, I didn't get that promotion.
• 42:21
  SPEAKER_01: He's like, Good, that means you got more time to get better.
• 42:25
  SPEAKER_01: And he comes with him with another problem.
• 42:27
  SPEAKER_01: He goes, I know what you're gonna say.
• 42:30
  SPEAKER_01: You're just gonna say good.
• 42:32
  SPEAKER_01: He goes, uh, you know, I'm not even gonna tell you what happened.
• 42:35
  SPEAKER_01: So if we can always say good, yeah, we have a good God, he's on our side.
• 42:42
  SPEAKER_01: Things aren't happening to us, they're happening for us.
• 42:45
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so you need to ask God, why is this happening for me?
• 42:48
  SPEAKER_01: What can I learn from this?
• 42:50
  SPEAKER_01: Because God's developing us, maybe he's protecting us from something.
• 42:54
  SPEAKER_01: And honestly, he's not gonna always explain himself.
• 42:56
  SPEAKER_01: He didn't tell Adam and Eve, hey, don't eat the apple.
• 43:00
  SPEAKER_01: It's gonna get really complicated if you do.
• 43:03
  SPEAKER_01: You're gonna have murder, you're gonna have all these bad things that happen, and this is all the consequences.
• 43:10
  SPEAKER_01: You're gonna find out about nuclear weapons.
• 43:12
  SPEAKER_01: He didn't go through that whole list, he just said, hey, don't eat that, and then they ate it, and then there were consequences.
• 43:20
  SPEAKER_01: So God's not gonna always explain himself.
• 43:23
  SPEAKER_01: So when he shuts a door, sometimes we just have to accept that and submit and surrender that we don't have all the answers and we're not always right.
• 43:34
  SPEAKER_00: You know, this ties into what the last question I had for you about obedience and repentance and soul rest, because I read yesterday it was anything that you do in your natural strength, you will have to use your natural strength to sustain.
• 43:52
  SPEAKER_00: And it was in relation to this conversation around God opening a door.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_00: Versus you kicking a door open.
• 44:04
  SPEAKER_00: You have to hold that door open if you kick it open.
• 44:08
  SPEAKER_00: I've said this line on here several times, but it's the difference between me building a business and asking God to bless it, then me being like, hey God, what do you want me to build?
• 44:20
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 44:22
  SPEAKER_00: And we've been having these scenarios lately.
• 44:26
  SPEAKER_00: Like the first decade plus of my life as an entrepreneur was me really kicking open doors.
• 44:33
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, why is this so hard?
• 44:34
  SPEAKER_00: And why is this so difficult?
• 44:36
  SPEAKER_00: Like, what's going on?
• 44:37
  SPEAKER_00: And it was because again, a lot of that was disordered.
• 44:39
  SPEAKER_00: And so you start doing more and more disordered things to try to keep that door open, but that's exhausting.
• 44:46
  SPEAKER_00: And when finally I was like, God, I don't want to do this anymore.
• 44:50
  SPEAKER_00: I want to do it your way.
• 44:51
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm sorry, you know, there's that repentance of he, I think you've been trying to tell me this for a really long time.
• 44:56
  SPEAKER_00: And I just kind of did it the way that I thought was best.
• 45:02
  SPEAKER_00: There were consequences, to be sure.
• 45:03
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that that's the hard, right?
• 45:06
  SPEAKER_00: There's this period of time when you shift from doing it your way to doing it God's way.
• 45:09
  SPEAKER_00: Like you still have to experience the consequences of all of those choices you made in your natural strength.
• 45:17
  SPEAKER_00: And I think a lot of times we pray for God to take us out of those because you're like, I'm exhausted.
• 45:22
  SPEAKER_00: And the word I would use, I love this soul spin now, because the word I was using was I'm weary.
• 45:26
  SPEAKER_00: And he's like, good.
• 45:27
  SPEAKER_00: And again, I don't want to speak for him, but the inner wisdom I got was I want you to remember how exhausting it is to do this without me.
• 45:37
  SPEAKER_01: That's good.
• 45:38
  SPEAKER_00: Because I don't want you to ever go back to this.
• 45:41
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 45:41
  SPEAKER_00: I want you to see the full weight of the consequences so that you don't come back here.
• 45:49
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, I was like, thank you.
• 45:51
  SPEAKER_00: Because that's the only way I've ever learned things.
• 45:53
  SPEAKER_00: The only way I've ever learned things is through experiencing the pain of doing it wrong.
• 45:58
  SPEAKER_00: And I know there's other people, I have met other people in my life who do not have that testimony.
• 46:02
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, that's amazing for you.
• 46:03
  SPEAKER_00: I love that you don't have to mess it up to learn.
• 46:06
  SPEAKER_00: That's awesome.
• 46:07
  SPEAKER_00: But I wanted to hear just about how you see obedience and repentance and really that worship, that spending time, that putting God first and centering him.
• 46:17
  SPEAKER_00: How does that play a role in finding soul rest?
• 46:20
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 46:20
  SPEAKER_01: I sneak those into the back of the book.
• 46:22
  SPEAKER_01: I don't lead with that.
• 46:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 46:24
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, I'm sure people wouldn't keep reading past chapter one if you started there.
• 46:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I try to start with a little some good business principles.
• 46:32
  SPEAKER_01: So those are really towards the end of the book.
• 46:34
  SPEAKER_01: You asked about three different chapters, and they kind of had three different places in my mind and in my heart when I wrote them.
• 46:42
  SPEAKER_01: Obedience was based on the fact that I was on a sabbatical and I was so proud of all the money and effort and time that I'd spent to get there.
• 46:50
  SPEAKER_01: And one of the guys said, Yeah, but it's not really all the sacrifice we make, it's the obedience when we leave here.
• 46:57
  SPEAKER_01: And it's the old King Saul, obedience is better than sacrifice.
• 47:01
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 47:02
  SPEAKER_01: And I had been on a sabbatical.
• 47:03
  SPEAKER_01: The reason it hit me so hard is because a few years earlier I'd been on a sabbatical and I wrote in my journal, write a thank you note to mom and dad for everything they've done.
• 47:13
  SPEAKER_01: My dad got COVID, passed away April 1st, 2020, and I never got the note written because I just, you know, oh, I'll do that later.
• 47:22
  SPEAKER_01: And so, yeah, it was kind of it was a horror that COVID was no fun for any of us.
• 47:28
  SPEAKER_01: So I always felt somewhat not guilty because I refused.
• 47:34
  SPEAKER_01: I don't believe that God is shame on us, shame on you.
• 47:36
  SPEAKER_01: I don't believe that.
• 47:37
  SPEAKER_01: I think he's blessings on you, favor on you.
• 47:40
  SPEAKER_01: That's what God's message is to you.
• 47:43
  SPEAKER_01: But it doesn't mean that we don't have some responsibility to follow the directions we've heard.
• 47:48
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 47:49
  SPEAKER_01: And I think when we do the next right thing, that's what obedience is, do the next right thing.
• 47:56
  SPEAKER_01: That saves you a lot of cleanup on aisle eight.
• 48:00
  SPEAKER_01: That saves you a lot of guilt or emotional damage because you've done the next right thing.
• 48:05
  SPEAKER_01: And so that provides soul rest is when you do the next right thing.
• 48:10
  SPEAKER_01: I'll hit all three if you want to.
• 48:11
  SPEAKER_00: No, please keep going.
• 48:12
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 48:13
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 48:14
  SPEAKER_01: So repentance is really anytime that we have a relationship that's fractured in some way, we need to apologize.
• 48:23
  SPEAKER_01: We need to say, I'm sorry.
• 48:24
  SPEAKER_01: That's like how relationships should work.
• 48:27
  SPEAKER_01: And it's interesting because the prodigal son, he went, lost all the money, lost everything.
• 48:35
  SPEAKER_01: And it said, Well, he was not eating, and he was by himself, and he was not talking to anyone, he came to his senses.
• 48:46
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, that sounds a little bit like a sabbatical to me.
• 48:50
  SPEAKER_01: And so God wants to spend time with us and he wants to have a very healthy relationship, and we should want that as well.
• 48:59
  SPEAKER_01: You have to make sure it's clean.
• 49:01
  SPEAKER_01: And Jesus teaches when he's wishing the disciples' feet, they're like, hey, wash all of me.
• 49:07
  SPEAKER_01: He's like, no, if you've already repent, you only need to wash the part of you that's been in touch with the world.
• 49:14
  SPEAKER_01: And so you may not need a full shower or bath, repentant-wise.
• 49:18
  SPEAKER_01: You may be living a life that's like day-to-day, hey, God, I'm, you know, reveal the things I haven't done for me or that I've done wrong to me.
• 49:27
  SPEAKER_01: Or you may be like, hey, I've never really kind of gotten right with the Lord.
• 49:33
  SPEAKER_01: I kind of need to probably get right with him.
• 49:38
  SPEAKER_01: And I call that plow up the fallow ground.
• 49:41
  SPEAKER_01: And if you look in the Bible, it says plow up the fallow ground.
• 49:44
  SPEAKER_01: And it's when you have a hard heart, you've had a hard season, you've been bitter, angry, frustrated towards the Lord, you've pointed at him with dirty fingers of accusation that like he's not who he says he is, he's not gonna do what he says he's gonna do, he's not a good God, he's not a faithful God, he's not a loving God, he's not a holy God.
• 50:05
  SPEAKER_01: All those things are just dirty fingers of accusation, and you're gonna get a hard heart from them.
• 50:11
  SPEAKER_01: And so you have to plow up the fallow ground, which in a farming sense means you're gonna take the top, the eight inches underneath the soil at the very bottom and flip it up towards the sun.
• 50:22
  SPEAKER_01: Then you're gonna come back with a disc and break it up to where you can plant.
• 50:26
  SPEAKER_01: So repentance may be for you in your season at this time, it may be plow up the fallow ground.
• 50:34
  SPEAKER_01: I'd kind of be surprised if someone got this far into the podcast and that's where they're at, but it may be.
• 50:39
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 50:39
  SPEAKER_01: And for other people, it may be, hey, you need to run the disc.
• 50:43
  SPEAKER_01: You got a few big chunks.
• 50:45
  SPEAKER_01: And for other people, it may, hey, you need to wash your feet, or you got a little something on your toes.
• 50:49
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 50:50
  SPEAKER_01: And so that's the way I look at repentance.
• 50:53
  SPEAKER_00: I am going through the OCIA process, the confirmation process with my teenagers at church.
• 51:00
  SPEAKER_00: And then also I'm a sponsor for another young adult.
• 51:04
  SPEAKER_00: And there's a lot that I've learned about my own faith that I didn't understand.
• 51:07
  SPEAKER_00: And I wanted to bring this in here because I know we have a lot of Catholic listeners too.
• 51:11
  SPEAKER_00: And also, I am we have a lot of Christian friends that are like, Lee, I've learned so much about Catholicism.
• 51:16
  SPEAKER_00: Like, y'all aren't as different as I thought you were.
• 51:18
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, I we're not.
• 51:20
  SPEAKER_00: We actually agree on a lot of things, y'all.
• 51:22
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, we go to confession and it's something that we do once a month.
• 51:26
  SPEAKER_00: And I heard this analogy, and I think it's something whether you go do this with a priest or a spiritual mentor or you and God alone, we have something called an examination of conscience.
• 51:35
  SPEAKER_00: And so it's something that you sit down and on a monthly basis, you go through the Ten Commandments, and it's just got a lot of questions around ways that you may have ruptured your relationship with God.
• 51:45
  SPEAKER_00: And even as somebody who understands that the whole reason you're doing this is to repair and connect, I always still have heart palpitations before walking into the confessional with the priest because there's just this idea, and I think a lot of us as humans have this of like, this is gonna be punitive, and like God's gonna be mad at me, and I'm gonna get judged.
• 52:06
  SPEAKER_00: I'm a bad person for making these mistakes.
• 52:08
  SPEAKER_00: And God designed this so that we can repair.
• 52:11
  SPEAKER_00: God designed this so we can come back.
• 52:14
  SPEAKER_00: And the last time I was at confession, it had admittedly been a couple of months, and I said that and I was sharing some of the things that happened, and it was to a brand new priest who just came, and I didn't know it at the time, but he is a professor at this the local seminary, and I'm a former professor, so uh the way he approaches the conversation is very different.
• 52:33
  SPEAKER_00: He asked me, he said, What's grieving your heart the most out of everything you just shared with me?
• 52:40
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, Oh, what's hurting me the most is hurting God the most because he loves me.
• 52:49
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 52:49
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, going back to that parent piece, when my kids' hearts are grieving, my heart hurts.
• 52:56
  SPEAKER_00: And so I'm like, I'm an imperfect parent.
• 52:59
  SPEAKER_00: So I can only imagine with God, with all of his wisdom and all of his knowledge and how all loving he is, how when I'm hurt by something that I've done to our relationship or to myself, to others, to his creation, how much that hurts him.
• 53:12
  SPEAKER_00: And so it really just flipped this script and it helped me go, okay, these are the chunks I need to break up in that analogy that you had.
• 53:23
  SPEAKER_00: And it was so fascinating.
• 53:25
  SPEAKER_00: Usually, just if people don't know, they're like, okay, for your reconnection and penance, you're gonna go say a couple of these prayers or you're gonna do this.
• 53:33
  SPEAKER_00: And all he told me to do, he was like, I just want you to go spend a little bit of time sitting in front of Jesus and ask him to help you to trust him.
• 53:44
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 53:45
  SPEAKER_01: That's awesome.
• 53:46
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, okay, first of all, that's the easiest penance I've ever gotten.
• 53:50
  SPEAKER_00: But actually, it wasn't.
• 53:52
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't because I went and sat there and I was wrecked, Brett.
• 53:56
  SPEAKER_00: Like I was wrecked in that entire next two days.
• 54:00
  SPEAKER_00: I was an emotional mess because I was like, these are all of the places that I'm hurting myself in a way that God never asked me to hurt myself, and I'm blocking myself from Him.
• 54:10
  SPEAKER_00: And it was just so powerful.
• 54:12
  SPEAKER_00: And ever since then, it's been like the weight is huge, and it's helpful to do it with somebody else who really understands because they're like the OG therapists.
• 54:23
  SPEAKER_00: They're like, and how does that make you feel?
• 54:25
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 54:26
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that's essentially what he asked me.
• 54:27
  SPEAKER_00: So when you were talking about repentance, I flashed back to that because he wants to love us and we keep him from loving us when we don't repair.
• 54:35
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's good.
• 54:36
  SPEAKER_01: Man, I love it.
• 54:37
  SPEAKER_01: That's a great example of repentance for sure.
• 54:40
  SPEAKER_00: And I think you definitely got more from that than any other kind of yeah, like go say three Hail Marys and like you know, do whatever.
• 54:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, Well, I already say Hail Marys every day.
• 54:50
  SPEAKER_00: So, like that's adding anything, right?
• 54:53
  SPEAKER_00: I think a lot of times we look for obedience.
• 54:56
  SPEAKER_00: We go, Oh, this is very prescriptive, right?
• 54:58
  SPEAKER_00: And repentance.
• 54:59
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, I'm gonna do these things, and we can get well, literally, we can get religious about it.
• 55:05
  SPEAKER_00: And I think I see the soul rest in this because you talk about my soul being able to be more at peace after that.
• 55:13
  SPEAKER_00: Like my soul was definitely more at peace.
• 55:16
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, there's physical rest, which I think we need to have.
• 55:20
  SPEAKER_01: That's why I think fasting, we do fasts when we do the sabbaticals.
• 55:24
  SPEAKER_01: I think fasting, the Bible says when you fast, not if you fast.
• 55:27
  SPEAKER_01: Now, not everyone can do it for medical reasons, but most people can.
• 55:32
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 55:32
  SPEAKER_01: And so there's physical things with fasting, with good sleep, hygiene, with fitness, good eating, all these things are physical, then there's mental.
• 55:42
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not gonna scroll all the time, I'm not gonna let these certain things through my eye gate or my ear gate.
• 55:48
  SPEAKER_01: There's all these things, physical, emotional, mental, but spiritually, if you're not rested spiritually, if you're not in a good relationship with the Lord and just before him, that's what worship would be the last one.
• 56:04
  SPEAKER_01: The worship in the Old Testament and the New Testament, both times the word means bow, bow down, which also signifies servanthood and that you're not the boss and that you're submitted to God.
• 56:17
  SPEAKER_01: So when you add that to physical, mental, emotional, when you add the fact that you're submitted to the Lord, you're gonna find a kind of soul rest that the world can't find through drugs, sex, TV, fitness, whatever it is that everyone else is running to, you're gonna find something that can't be bought, that can't be duplicated, that only God can bring.
• 56:45
  SPEAKER_01: And there's fake peace when we go on sabbatical, we don't talk to each other for one of the days, it's total solitude.
• 56:53
  SPEAKER_01: That allows you to experience true peace.
• 56:56
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so that when you have to make a decision and you have to decide what you're gonna do, you know what true peace is because other people are doing fake peace or counterfeit peace, they're on their phone, they're watching TV, they're riding their bike, they're working out in the gym, and those things may not be true peace.
• 57:19
  SPEAKER_01: And so then when you have to make a decision and you're like, God, if this is meant to be, help me to have a piece about it.
• 57:26
  SPEAKER_01: Well, you may not have anything to really compare it to.
• 57:30
  SPEAKER_01: And that's what bank tellers only look at real money, they don't look at counterfeit money, and they look at so much real money, they can spot counterfeit.
• 57:38
  SPEAKER_00: That is so wild that you are saying that because I literally just read a story yesterday where they were like, the thing is that if you spend enough time studying real$50 bills, you can immediately spot a fake one.
• 57:51
  SPEAKER_00: And I've never heard that idea before, and then you literally said it again.
• 57:54
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 57:55
  SPEAKER_00: It's having now over these last several months, like experienced that peace that surpasses understanding more and more and more.
• 58:04
  SPEAKER_00: You are absolutely right.
• 58:05
  SPEAKER_00: There are moments that I will get into and I'll start to do something and I'll just pause for a second and I'm like, what's going on?
• 58:12
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, I don't have peace.
• 58:13
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, okay, so that doesn't mean that this is the wrong decision.
• 58:17
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 58:17
  SPEAKER_00: It just means that there's something about this that if I continue in the way that I move forward isn't in alignment with how God wants me to do it.
• 58:26
  SPEAKER_00: And so that might be timing, that might be method, that might be who I'm doing it with, am I doing it alone versus collaborating with someone else?
• 58:35
  SPEAKER_00: And my husband said this to me yesterday as I was working on a project and I did not have peace.
• 58:39
  SPEAKER_00: And I came to him, I was like, I don't know what's going on.
• 58:41
  SPEAKER_00: I don't have peace.
• 58:42
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, Your brain does this thing sometimes when you rest, where all of a sudden you get like a flash of inspiration and you make an idea 10 times better.
• 58:51
  SPEAKER_00: And he's like, You've been running around all day.
• 58:54
  SPEAKER_00: He was like, What if you said that you wouldn't get this thing to this person until you know this time at this date?
• 59:00
  SPEAKER_00: He's like, What if you just give yourself a little extra time and see if once you rest that doesn't come?
• 59:06
  SPEAKER_00: And sure enough, I laid down, falling asleep last night, and he's laying next to me, and I was like, and I said, We don't have to talk about it right now, but I think I figured out the thing that was bothering me.
• 59:16
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, good night.
• 59:17
  SPEAKER_00: And he was like, It's like there it is.
• 59:22
  SPEAKER_00: So you're making two really valuable points there, and I think this is such a perfect place to rap.
• 59:28
  SPEAKER_00: You've got to try these things, right?
• 59:32
  SPEAKER_00: You've got to time block this in your calendar, intentionally prioritize it, like purposefully take these rests and these breaks and seek God first and ensure that you're prioritizing that relationship first.
• 59:46
  SPEAKER_00: And you've got to do that before the peace comes.
• 59:48
  SPEAKER_00: And oftentimes it's gonna maybe make you feel a little bit more anxious or overwhelmed to start because you're used to doing it the world's way.
• 59:58
  SPEAKER_00: And once you start to experience that peace, you've got to really stop and notice okay, what does that look like?
• 1:00:05
  SPEAKER_00: What does that feel like?
• 1:00:06
  SPEAKER_00: What does that sound like?
• 1:00:07
  SPEAKER_00: What is that?
• 1:00:08
  SPEAKER_00: Because from there, you can then use that as a benchmark for knowing if something's out of alignment or not.
• 1:00:15
  SPEAKER_01: A hundred percent.
• 1:00:16
  SPEAKER_01: That is a perfect way of saying it.
• 1:00:18
  SPEAKER_01: And the Bible says taste and see.
• 1:00:21
  SPEAKER_01: Jesus says follow me.
• 1:00:22
  SPEAKER_01: So Jesus is a follow me, come and see kind of guy.
• 1:00:27
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:00:28
  SPEAKER_01: I would say if you're not sure if taking an intentional pause is for you, taste and see.
• 1:00:35
  SPEAKER_01: And there's a lot of people that have benefited from it.
• 1:00:39
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know what your season is like, where if you can do an intentional pause versus a vacation, I don't know your family's capacity, your time in the next six months may be not in your control over the next six years, 10 years.
• 1:00:54
  SPEAKER_01: You cannot say that this is outside of your control.
• 1:00:57
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:00:58
  SPEAKER_01: So come and see what the Lord can do.
• 1:01:01
  SPEAKER_01: If you spend some time with him, I guarantee you, he will not be a debtor to you.
• 1:01:07
  SPEAKER_01: He will repay it exponentially.
• 1:01:09
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah.
• 1:01:10
  SPEAKER_00: Beyond your wildest imagination and in ways that you don't ever expect too, which is, I think, the cool part.
• 1:01:16
  SPEAKER_00: He's always surprising and delighting, which is, I think, one of the best parts about being in a relationship with him.
• 1:01:23
  SPEAKER_00: Amen.
• 1:01:24
  SPEAKER_00: Brett, where if people would like to connect with you further, where can they find your book?
• 1:01:30
  SPEAKER_00: And where can they connect with you if they're like, oh man, I would love to have a conversation or work together?
• 1:01:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:01:36
  SPEAKER_01: W.
• 1:01:37
  SPEAKER_01: sabbatical taker.com.
• 1:01:39
  SPEAKER_01: So the idea is we're all sabbatical takers.
• 1:01:41
  SPEAKER_01: So that's the publisher of my book.
• 1:01:43
  SPEAKER_01: The book's called Wisdom That Leads to Soul Rest.
• 1:01:46
  SPEAKER_01: It's on Amazon.
• 1:01:47
  SPEAKER_01: It's also on Audible.
• 1:01:49
  SPEAKER_01: It's also on Spotify now.
• 1:01:50
  SPEAKER_01: I got it on Spotify.
• 1:01:51
  SPEAKER_01: So if you want to just listen to the book, it's out there to be able to listen to.
• 1:01:55
  SPEAKER_01: I do the reading of it.
• 1:01:57
  SPEAKER_01: And it doesn't take that long.
• 1:01:58
  SPEAKER_01: It's only about four and a half hours.
• 1:02:00
  SPEAKER_01: When I sat down to write the book, I'm like, I'm writing the book that I would read.
• 1:02:05
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 1:02:06
  SPEAKER_01: I don't have the patience for three and four hundred page books.
• 1:02:09
  SPEAKER_01: If you're capable of reading that or writing that, good for you.
• 1:02:12
  SPEAKER_01: I am not.
• 1:02:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:02:14
  SPEAKER_01: It's a nice 160-page book.
• 1:02:16
  SPEAKER_01: I'm on sabbatical taker.com.
• 1:02:18
  SPEAKER_01: I'm planning a sabbatical October of 2027 that I'm going to invite other people to.
• 1:02:24
  SPEAKER_01: So if you want to check it out, it'll be on the website.
• 1:02:27
  SPEAKER_00: Awesome.
• 1:02:27
  SPEAKER_00: That's amazing.
• 1:02:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:02:29
  SPEAKER_00: There's a couple people I'm thinking about that I'm like, yeah, I'm going to send them that link right away.
• 1:02:34
  SPEAKER_00: Like, hey, you know how you're talking about tanky intentional rest, but you weren't sure how.
• 1:02:38
  SPEAKER_00: Here you go.
• 1:02:39
  SPEAKER_00: So that's amazing, Brett.
• 1:02:40
  SPEAKER_00: Well, thank you for this conversation.
• 1:02:42
  SPEAKER_00: I feel like you sparked so much just connections for me in this.
• 1:02:49
  SPEAKER_00: And so I know if that happened for me, that's going to happen for our audience.
• 1:02:52
  SPEAKER_00: And so I just really appreciate you taking the time and sharing your wisdom with us.
• 1:02:56
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you, Dr.
• 1:02:57
  SPEAKER_01: Cordell, for having me.
• 1:02:58
  SPEAKER_01: I appreciate it.
• 1:02:59
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 1:03:00
  SPEAKER_00: All right, everyone.
• 1:03:01
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for tuning in, and we will see you next week.