Mentors, Models, Coaches & Friends

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Mentors, Models, Coaches & Friends

April 12, 2011 in Community, Friends, Leadership, Relationships with 12 Comments

I’ve spent a lot of time lately considering the close relationships I have in my life and how each one has impacted, influenced and shaped me. Talking about the importance of community, I recently heard Rick Warren say:

Mentors, models, coaches & friends. The quickest way to change your life is to change who you’re close to.

I don’t know where it originated, but I’ve often heard the following statement and believe it to be true:

Show me your friends and I’ll show you your future.

This same theme is echoed in a more cautionary tone in the Bible:

Whoever walks with the wise becomes wise, but the companion of fools will suffer harm. – Proverbs 13:20

There’s a lot to be said about who you surround yourself with. What this particular Proverb is saying is that, to a great extent, we become amalgams comprised of the voices we ascribe worth to and give permission to speak into our lives. With that realization comes with it a great responsibility to steward our hearts on a relational level.

When you’re young and invincible, it’s easy to take for granted the life lessons and wisdom flying through the air like radio broadcasts, yours for the taking if you’re paying attention and dialed in to the correct frequency. But sadly, we spend many of our younger years scanning the dial in relational oblivion, often not realizing the long term effects of how we allow others to invest into the moments of our lives. The older I get, the more I’ve not only seen the need for all of those varied voices in my life, but the more I’ve felt the weight of not having them as life assumes different shapes, regularly handing me new and diverse challenges and opportunities to grow.

I also realize that the more I’ve become intentional about anything, the more I’ve seen that thing change. The more intentional I’ve gotten about investing in these kinds of relationships, the more I’ve seen my life take shape and bear fruit resulting from the investment of others. At the same time, the more I’ve embraced this perspective, the more I’ve found myself on the other side of the equation and filling these various roles in the lives of others.

I’m thankful for those who give big picture counsel, live the blueprints, shout ring-side blow-by-blow instructions and speak wisdom and truth into my life. It’s a combination of the presence and selfless investment of all these voices that are constantly shaping, developing and investing in me, pushing me forward to a better version of myself and speaking to the trajectory of my life as much as to the next step.

Do you actively engage the presence of mentors, models, coaches & friends in your life?

Confessions Of A People Pleaser (Guest blog by Stephen Brewster)

May 11, 2010 in Faith, Friends, Guest Posts, Life with 27 Comments

Today’s guest blog post is from my friend Stephen Brewster. Stephen is the Sr. Director of Marketing for Integrity Media, where he works closely everyday with some of the most prolific and recognized worship leaders of our time, including Paul Baloche, Israel Houghton, Kari Jobe, Carlos Whittaker and John Mark McMillan. Stephen and I first met in February 2008 when his artist and my then boss, Israel Houghton, was invited to perform live on the 50th Annual GRAMMY Awards telecast in L.A. That was a trip I will never forget for many reasons, and Steve and I clicked right off the bat. By the time that weekend was over I was convinced we had been separated at birth, and we’ve had a great friendship ever since. Stephen lives in Mobile, AL with his wife Jackie and 4 awesome kids. He is passionate about people, creativity and leadership and merges all those passions in a very unique way on his blog. You can also follow him on Twitter.

I am not sure if it is a creative thing or just an insecurity thing, but being a people pleaser has always been a problem for me.

We all desire to be liked. We want to fit in, and we all feel the need to be accepted. Sadly, that desire ends up selling us short on the unique nature for which we were created. We start to sell out our original US to be a poor imitation of someone else. And we do all this just to be accepted by someone who in all likelihood is just as insecure about themselves as we are.

I know this, because I have been “that guy.” The chameleon guy. The dude who changes who he is to be accepted, admired, approved…and then felt guilty afterwards because I was not being real about who I was created to be. We walk into these relationships setting expectations that are so out of wack and totally built on an act that we can never live in a healthy relationship.

It is normal to want to be accepted, liked, and approved, right up until we turn that emotion into an idol. Then we start to obsess with these emotions. Because the truth is, after we start to slip down this slippery slope, we find ourselves being defined by our relationships, our acceptance, and these fake ROLES that we have manipulated and constructed. We are defined by how we feel other people see us, even if it is only our perception of how the actually view us. Worse, we never get to live our lives by the blueprint that has been customized just for us by the true Creator. Instead of full lives lived with purpose we live inside the lives of everyone else. We live for them, through them, and based on their emotions instead of with the purpose and destiny God designed for our lives.

It gets worse though, GULP. After a few years, we get really good at being “all things to all men” when really we are nothing to anyone but a fraud and a cheap imitation of who we should be. And so our cycle of fake relationships, half realities, and worshipping the idol of man pleasing takes over our life. We even justify it away as much as we are able to, in an effort to convince ourselves we are not people pleasers.

We end up even starting to forget who we are and can not identify our own selves in a line up. So how do we know when we have fallen to the idol of man pleasing? Ed Welch wrote a terrific book called “When People Are Big And God Is Small”. In this book he lists the symptoms of being a people pleaser:

1. You are dependent on others.
2. You crave compliments
3. You devalue yourself in order to get affirmation
4. You are afraid you will be exposed as an impostor
5. You spend disproportionate amounts of time managing your reputation
6. You are overly concerned with how you look
7. You focus on your self esteem, a lot
8. You feel under-appreciated, mostly because you desire affirmation
9. You always justify mistakes, make excuses, or shift blame because you can not handle the feeling of failure
10. You show favoritism to those who can help you and undervalue those who can not.
11. You can never say no.
12. You constantly find things to keep you busy because you are afraid you will not matter.
13. You are easily embarrassed
14. You constantly compare yourself with others. Feeling great when you perceive yourself to be better and awful when you do not feel you stack up.

But there is hope.

You can end the cycle today, but it is not something that is going to be fixed overnight. It is not something you are going to be able to right all in one fatal swoop. Just like it has been a process to lose who you are, it is a process to find yourself again. Like all addictions, it starts with admitting we have a problem. Then, we must identify the things we know we have been created to do…and start chasing those passions. As we do that, we have to accept we won’t always be liked, and that is not just okay but very healthy for everyone to not be cool with us. We have to start saying no to things that do not fit our life plan. We have to pray a lot that God will help us embrace our insecurity and allow for him to define us as who he created us to be.

Steven Pressfield writes in his life changing book, “The War Of Art”:

“Our job in this lifetime is not to shape ourselves into some ideal image we ought to be, but to find out who we already are and become it.”

So start your cycle today. Break free from the bondage of what everyone else is thinking of you and start to focus on what God thinks about you. The freedom you will develop out of this process will become the strength you need to distance yourself from the traps of always pleasing man. Find people who will love you no matter what, and build with them. You can do it, you have to do it!

Do you feel trapped in the “people pleasing” cycle?

An Idol Heart – Guest Post At RefineUs.org

April 2, 2010 in Blogging, Faith, Friends, Guest Posts, My Story with 7 Comments

I was recently asked by Justin Davis, campus pastor for Cross Point Bellvue and my friend, if I would contribute a guest blog post to a series about redemption on RefineUs.org, the blog he and his wife Trisha write. To say that I was honored would be a massive understatement. I actually had to ask him if he was serious. He was.

Then I saw the lineup of who else would be adding their voices to the mix this week… Lindsey Nobles, Spence Smith and Alece Ronzino. Good Lord! Honestly, I quickly felt a bit out of my league in the company of these great folks who have inspired and encouraged me from afar with what they have written and shared on their own blogs. But yet, I had an invitation to share my story. So I did.

What I wrote for Justin’s blog is probably the most honest thing I’ve ever written in my life. I decided to share my story in a deeper and more candid way than I have even had an opportunity to share here on my own blog yet. It just felt like it was time.

Thank you, Justin and Trisha. Your lives are a light, an encouragement and a reminder of the faithfulness of God. Your story is a picture of redemption and hope to so many people. Thank you for the invitation and opportunity to open my heart and share my story. I pray that God uses it to encourage and speak to someone else in whatever they are facing in their life right now, and to draw people closer to Himself.

READ: An Idol Heart (Grant Jenkins) /// guest post at RefineUs.org

I’m Getting My $7 Worth

March 30, 2010 in Culture, Food, Friends, Life with 11 Comments

Genghis Grill is one of my favorite places to eat. In December 2004, I was preparing to leave Nashville and move to Dallas for a new job I had just been hired for. One particular evening I joined several friends at Genghis Grill for one of what I remember being several going-away parties (which actually became quite the running joke). I had been working on my bowl-building technique for some time and this was the perfect opportunity to do a Genghis Grill tutorial video.

And now, dusted off from the myspace video wasteland, here’s the masterpiece in all its glory…

A few things I’d like to point out as you watch…

As you may notice, I have hair. This was a little over 5 years ago and it’s not that it’s shocking or anything, but it certainly is weird seeing it. I don’t miss it.
My friend Stan’s commentary is hilarious. “Man, you got a lot of shrimp.”
By 1:15, the bowl appears to be full. Really full, actually. But don’t let your eyes deceive you! Where there’s a thin, flat vegetable, there’s a way!
I’m not sure my video is the cause for it, but it is worth noting that Genghis Grill no longer has the long snow peas. Instead, the long pods are cut in half before being placed on the food bar, making my Jericho Wall of Snow Peas pretty much impossible to construct now. I would actually love to be able to claim responsibility for this.
You’ll notice at about 1:25, when I begin building said Jericho Wall of Snow Peas, that I apparently have no shame and am doing so right in front of a Genghis Grill employee.
I love the part at about 1:58 where you can hear the lady behind us tell her child that he can go around me.
I believe I already mentioned the hair. Yes… yes, I did.
It’s probably not worth mentioning, but all 4 of my friends seen, or heard, in this video (Stan, Chris, Anthony and Sam) are now married, but I am not. I am, however, apparently the proud owner of what appears to be 12 pounds of chicken, shrimp and pineapple!
My favorite line: “And you’ll notice, because I built the wall with the snow peas, I can get so much more in the bowl. More than you could normally get.” LOL!! Food Network, here I come!
I should tell you that while I still really enjoy Genghis Grill, I build a very different bowl these days.

This video still cracks me up every time I watch it!!!