EP 108: 4 Types of Problems and 4 Solutions, pt. 2

Part 2 in a two part series, this podcast focuses on the 4 solutions we can utilize in overcoming our challenges. As pain shows up in our lives, we can either ignore it, or look honestly at what it means--usually it means there's a problem we need to solve.

When we engage in the process of recognizing that our pains and problems are there to instruct us, help us grow, and give our lives meaning, we no longer avoid them but optimistically meet the opportunity they provide. 

Ultimately, our pain and problems are the gateway to the greatest joys in life!

Take advantage of our FREE Mini-Training on Overcoming Your Worries and Turning Them Into Forward Momentum here: https://www.themissiondrivenmom.com/

Transcript:

I am so excited for you to be here today. We are on part two of the four types of Problems and the four Solutions. Last time we talked in depth about what these four types of problems are, and I hope that better understanding them and evaluating them in your own life has helped you see that maybe you have a little bit more power than you thought you did.

And there are, there's something you can do about the problems that you're facing because they're all different and there's different solutions. This is also something that I get into in detail in my upcoming book, How Truth Makes You Free, and there's a whole chapter that. Talks about what it means to be made free and goes over these four types of problems and gives some other solutions and helps and insights.

A big part of which is like we always do at the mission-driven mom, and that is finding those principles and living according to them, which the book is all about how to do that, what those are, and h ow to be more principle centered in your life. But for today, we're going to dive into the four solutions presented by M. Scott Peck in his book, The Road Less Traveled, and how they tie into what we do at the MDM Academy and how you can take some actions right now on those problems that you evaluated since last, since we met last time, and some steps that you can begin to take right now.

Before we do that, I want to just thank you for showing up for downloading these podcasts and listening. It would also really help us if you shared them along and gave us a review. Those reviews help others know that this is a quality podcast where they can expect to gain valuable insights and something that they ought to plug into.

And if you haven't already, head over to the missiondrivenmom.com. We actually have a few free offerings for you. I've got a really great little mini training that will help you stop worrying and start thriving if worrying is something that is a big problem for you. It definitely is for me. I found a tool that has been incredibly helpful.

You can master this tool in 10 minutes and you can turn your worries into forward momentum. We also have the first two chapters of my book, the Mission-Driven Life. How to discover and fulfill your unique contribution to the world. And you can go grab those on the homepage at the missiondrivenmom.com down at the bottom, and get a taste of what that book is like.

And then grab a copy of the book for yourself or maybe for a friend. And we also have a 7 Laws cheat sheet. If you haven't gone back on this podcast, or if you're new here, you might want to go back and begin at the beginning. We actually recently reordered some of these so that it would be an even better listening listener experience for you.

And I go through the 7 Laws of Life Mission in some pretty good depth in a few of those podcasts that will give you some idea of those seven laws that are encompassed in my book, the Mission-Driven Life, and that we mentor you through in the Mission-Driven Mom Academy. That's why it exists. We take you all the way through those seven laws and get you off to the life mission that that God is calling you to, that God has for you.

Missions that you're already engaged in right now where you can do a better job and missions that you can prepare for using your unique gifts. So those are some three things I encourage you to take advantage of all of those.

Let's dive into these four solutions. The four things we're gonna talk about today are the four things that any human being needs to do to stay mentally well. One of what he says in The Road Less Traveled is to a large degree, we participate in creating our own mental illness just as we can contribute in creating physical illness for ourselves.

We can eat poor quality foods, we can remain deprived of certain critical nutrients. We can fail to heal our gut. We can have a weak immune system. We can not get enough sleep. There are a myriad of things that we can do that will contribute to the breakdown of the body so that when we are exposed to certain things, we are more likely to get sick and stay sick.

There are actions, choices that we can make that will keep our body in its optimum health. Now, this is not to negate biology. Obviously biology is real and it's not to negate, you know, the way that we were raised or certain propensities we might have or trauma that we've been through. All of those things are absolutely real, but my goal for all of us is that we heal as much as we possibly can.

We want to be whole. We want to be healthy, and that means mental health as well. And we can be, that's achievable for us. It doesn't mean that we're gonna be happy all the time, and I'm gonna talk about that in just a minute. But it does mean that we can have the optimal physical and mental health that our biology makes possible for us.

Some things we can't change if we're blind, if we're missing a limb, we can't change the past. We mentioned those things last time. There are things we can't change, but we totally can control the future. And what Scott Pick is saying is that these four elements that we're gonna talk about for the next few minutes are vital tools to all of us staying in good mental health. They really do contribute. It's like vitamins for our brain and to the extent that we really understand them and own them we'll be as mentally healthy as we can be. There's also other tools that we can take advantage of. You know, therapy might help for a time, you know, there, there might be people you need to forgive.

There's a myriad of tools that are available to us and a big part of the MDM Academy, especially level one, is to recenter ourselves on. God and to recenter ourselves in our relationship with ourselves, and that means doing activities that generate better mental health. And there's a bunch of tools that I give you there in the academy. We've been around for seven years, this fall. We launched MDM level one the first time, and now we have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of testimonials.

We just did a kind of a meetup with some of the leaders that do the teen program. In some schools and, and homeschool co-ops and the teen program is having tremendous impact on the youth and the moms program.

You know, if you go to the website, you can see dozens and dozens of testimonials. If you go to YouTube, you can see all sorts of video testimonials as well of women who are much healthier mentally, physically, spiritually, emotionally. Because these tools are principle centered and vital. So all of that being said, that's all available to you.

Anytime you're ready to plug in, we are here ready to help you and walk you through that. In the meantime, let's get to what Scott Peck has to teach us because it's so helpful.

Now, the first solution. To overcoming our problems is delaying gratification. And when I first was going through this to prepare for this podcast, it reminded me of one of my favorite, I don't know if you would actually call him a philosopher.

He's definitely a political economist. His name's Frederick Bastiat. He's French. He lived in the 1800's. He was brilliant. He has several brilliant articles that I absolutely love, and one of them is called “What Is Seen, what Is Not Seen.”  This really ties into what it means to delay gratification. He says,

“There is only one difference between a bad economist and a good one. The bad economist confines himself to the visible effect. The good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be for seen. Yet this difference is tremendous for it almost always happens…"

Listen really carefully to what he says here, because this is not just an economic principle. You think for just a minute. When I read what Bastiat says here to you, I want you to think about every era of your life. I want you to think about your relationships and your finances and your career, and your parenting, and your mental health, your physical health, your relationship with yourself.

All in every area of life, delaying gratification is vital. It's vital to any kind of long-term lasting success. And what he says here, this principle is universal. He says,

“...for it almost always happens that when the immediate consequence is favorable, the latter consequences are disastrous and vice versa.”

So think about that for just a minute. It almost always happens that if you can take an action and it feels great and wonderful right this second, there's a good chance that the long-term effects are not gonna be good. But if the reverse is true, if the thing you need to do right now is not your first choice, it's not necessarily gonna be incredibly pleasant, then there's a better chance that the long-term consequences of that will be good.

Whether it's going to bed early or going out for that run that you've been putting off or having a hard conversation with one of your children or telling someone you're sorry or getting a better meal plan together for yourself. It almost doesn't matter what it is. If the immediate thing if, if you can get a fix.

And this is what addiction is all about, and that is why as soon as we tell a lie to engage in a behavior, as soon as we start fixing our problems with these immediate fixes, these immediate consequence that are favorable, we are probably on our way to digging a hole for ourselves. He goes,

“Thence it follows that the bad economist pursues a small present good, that will be followed by a great evil to come while the good economist pursues a great good to come at the risk of a small present evil.

This is really tough in terms of economics, what he's talking about, because you're talking about making choices that affect many, many, many people's lives. If you are any kind of a leader in any kind of a government or you're any economist teaching people how to have more stable finances, you're usually gonna tell them to do something that's not pleasant.

It reminded me a lot of what it took for us to get out of debt. I think I mentioned this maybe in a podcast recently, I can't remember. One of the first steps was just starting to pay off debt. And I remember, we were doing the rolling debt program that's supposed to be so great.

It is really great, but at the time, this is supposed to be so great, and it just meant that I was sending $10 to people. And it just felt, “This is so dumb, by the time I pay for the check or whatever, or the stamp or whatever it is then what's the point?" But it was necessary. And one of the reasons it's necessary is because only in delaying gratification can discipline be built if you are always just doing whatever feels good right now.

You don't have the discipline to withstand any really difficult challenge. It's just like your immune system. If it's healthy, if it's strong, because there were a lot of really good health choices that were made in the past, then as soon as some big illness comes around, you'll have a mild aversion of it, or you won't get sick at all because your immune system is at its peak and it can fight it off.

When we have a crisis, my husband likes to call them character defining moments. When crisis comes, we really see who we really become. When we're comfortable and life is going by and things are good, we don't always know just really how weak we are; how weak emotionally, how weak relationally, how weak in our faith. We just don't even know until we're faced with that moment where now we have to really do something about it and we are really weak or our immune system is weak, or whatever the case might be.

Scott Peck says,

“Delaying gratification is a process of scheduling the pain and pleasure of life in such a way as to enhance the pleasure by meeting and experiencing the pain first and getting it over with it is the only decent way to live.”

He really is saying something so profound there. You can schedule the pain and you can schedule the pleasure. You can decide when you'll take a break. You can decide when you'll have downtime. You can decide when you'll take a vacation, and if you'll build that cadence into your life and schedule the pain and the pleasure, life is just going to go so much better. You know, you can.

One of the things I love about this first section of this book so much is that Peck is really getting at the heart of what a lot of life is about. And again, I talk about this extensively in my new book, How Truth Makes Us Free because we all have pain, and pain is so helpful. It is an indicator that something is wrong.

It is a signal that we should change something and if we will listen to it, our lives can be so much better. It's helping us to see that something needs to be done. We are bumping up against life in an unhealthy way.

Peck tells this story of when he was running a therapy group and he says.

“There was a 30-year-old single salesman in the group, and it was in a small town, and he began to date a recently separated wife of another group member who was a banker. The salesman knew the banker to be a chronically angry man who was deeply resentful of his wife's leaving him. He knew that he was not being honest either with the group or with the banker by not confiding his relationship with the banker's wife. He also knew that it was almost inevitable that sooner or later the banker would learn about the continuing relationship. He knew that the only solution to the problem would be to confess the relationship to the group and bear the banker's anger with the group's support.”

But he did nothing. And he goes on to talk about how it blew up later and created far more problems than it needed to because he, he told himself, in fact, when he was faced with it and it finally blew up and everybody asked him, why didn't you do something about this?

He said, “I knew that talking about it would be hard. And I thought if I just waited long enough, it would go away.” Then Peck says,

“Problems do not go away. They must be worked through or else they remain forever a barrier to the growth and development of the spirit.”

That's really what we're about. We want to grow, we want to develop and ignoring problems just prolongs the pain. He also has this really beautiful section where he talks about the role that parents play in modeling by delaying gratification for their children and how we really can't give our children something that we don't have. They can go try to acquire it for themselves.

We're not going to be perfect. We're going to be deficient in some areas, but to the degree that we can actually have the skills that we're trying to pass on our children are going to in benefit incredibly. And he talks about how important it is to model it and for us to be the kind of people that are disciplined ourselves. Discipline is also something we give our children when we discipline them, and it requires a lot of time and it requires a lot of love. He even goes on to talk about how ultimately love is everything, that even when we're deficient in certain areas, if we'll love properly, then that will make up for so many deficiencies that we carry ourselves.

It's the time and the patience that we need that's going to help us solve our problems. So if you really want to solve some of these problems that are causing you a lot of pain, you're going to have to slow down. You're going to have to take the time.

He tells this other story, which I didn't pull up, but he tells a story of there was something wrong in his car and he'd always thought of himself as not a good mechanic and that. He didn't know how to solve these kinds of problems. And finally, one time there was something wrong and he really, really slowed down and he took the time to look at everything and push buttons and go slow, and the solution emerged and he realized, there are many things that he could figure out in life if he just decided to figure them out.

So the second solution is taking responsibility. He explains that there are two types of people that would come to see him in his practice. Two major groups of people there are neurotics and there are character disorder people. The neurotics take on too much responsibility and the character disordered people take on too little. I lean in the direction of the neurotic. In other words, I could really double down because I have a tendency to be a rescuer, and the more I do that, the more I kind of push that button and allow that tendency in myself to go, the more I take on responsibilities of other people that they should be completing and I handicap them, but I also do a lot of internal damage. It causes me to do a lot of beating myself up. But it is also sometimes the case that we don't take responsibility. I mean, I guess I do this too because I want how my finances look or how my marriage is going to be my husband's fault and I want, my pain with who I am to be somebody else's fault. That doesn't work. We have got to find the balance of what is really ours. And that's why some of these books and like being mentored in the academy can be so helpful because sometimes it's hard for us to navigate that personally. Sometimes we're just so in it, you can't see the forest for the trees.

Or you’re like a fish in water. You just don't even see the water around you. because you have such deeply entrenched patterns, it's hard to see. So getting the perspective of lots of other people being mentored, reading and gaining tools and practicing them is so vital.

So this isn't necessarily something you can have figured out, but recognize that you can only solve a problem that you take responsibility for. One of Covey's favorite ways of talking about this is that. Until we're ready to radically say, I made this problem. I am where I am because of the choices that I've made, then we can't assume the power for fixing them if they're not our fault. We're powerless.

If the academy, all of the sections where we talk about better governing our heart and mind, which is one of the principles of loving ourselves every section,  the beginning of that section title is “Increasing my personal power by…” So every time we gain a skill or a tool for taking responsibility appropriately, we increase our personal power.

I could tell you story after story after story. One woman that comes to mind had blamed her husband for years and years and years about their marriage, and then the Academy helped her realize there are so many things that she needed to own. She realized, "I’m the only one that can make me happy.” That was like a huge takeaway for her. “I'm the only one that can make me happy. I've got to take care of myself.” There are many things that she was expecting her husband to do for her and be for her that he couldn't do and be. I do think this is also a big reason for our high levels of divorce. I think that faith plays a role because there are things only God can do for us that we expect our spouse to do or we expect ourselves to do. And I think that there are many things that only we can do for ourselves. Definitely meeting our needs, discovering our talents, disciplining our heart and mind, striving for self-mastery. Those principles of self-love that I talk about in the book and that we mentor a woman through in the academy are vital. Nobody else can do those things for us, but there are things that we do need a spouse to do, and there are things we do need God to do. Finding that balance is not always easy, but the number one tool, the most important tool is self-examination. And Peck actually talks about this quite a bit, as does Covey.

I'm going to read you some really cool quotes here from Peck about this. He's talking about the neurotics and the character disordered people, and he says. That it's so difficult to sometimes distinguish. He says, “The reason for this is that the problem of distinguishing what we are and what we are not responsible for in this life is one of the greatest problems of human existence.”

So we know we have a problem, we have a pain point, so there's a problem there. Is it my problem or somebody else's problem? Is it something I need to let go of or is it something I need to repair? Is it something I can do something about, or something I can't do something about? He goes on to perform either process adequately to know, to distinguish what we're responsible or not responsible. We must possess the willingness and the capacity to suffer continual self-examination. It's terrible to some degree to put the word suffering with it, but it is painful sometimes, maybe most or all the time.We've had women say that they didn't do the academy because they didn't want to read self-help books. Because either they didn't help or they just made them feel worse about themselves, because it was just a laundry list of things that they were doing wrong. That's why in the academy, all of the readings are so tightly vetted and you only read like one chapter that applies specifically to one specific principle that you're learning and we're giving you the tools for overcoming it. So it's a totally different experience. But you do need the tools. We shouldn't just ignore the information or the tools that are out there. We just need to acquire them in the right way. He goes on to say,

“It is only through a vast amount of experience and a lengthy and successful maturation that we gain the capacity to see the world and our place in it.”

Realistically, that's what we have to do. A realistic optimism. We talk about this in the academy too, that. We need to be very realistic, but we can be optimistic about it because we can take back our power because the future is blank and we can make it whatever want it or whatever we want it to be. We have way more power than we think we do to make other thing, to make our lives better than they are.

Like this woman that realized that she was the only one that could make herself happy, she started taking. Better care of herself and her relationship improved and her husband didn't do anything. He didn't lift a finger, but suddenly her marriage was better because she had this way better perspective. She saw it more realistically. She had an optimism about things that she could do. As she took responsibility for herself, she felt better. She showed up in her marriage differently. There are so many residual effects of doing this and doing it right.

Peck goes on about casting away their responsibility.

“They may feel comfortable with themselves, but they have ceased to solve the problems of living have ceased to grow spiritually and have become dead weight for society. They have cast their pain onto society. The saying of the sixties attributed to Eldridge Cleaver speaks to all of us for all time.

‘If you're not part of the solution, then you are part of the problem.’”

And I hadn't thought about that before. One of the goals of the academy is servant leadership, right? So when we don't actively work to solve our own problems, they go unsolved, and then either we don't show up in society as we could show up helping other people solve their own problems because we refuse to solve, to solve our own or that problem really does become a problem for society, whether it's children who don't have a good home life, whether it's you claiming or I claiming bankruptcy, whatever those things are, it's a burden to others if we don't solve them. If we want a better society, we also have an obligation outside of ourselves to the society at large.

The third solution is really so plugged in to the book that I'm writing and it is dedication to truth. I just cannot say enough about how vital this is. I want to read to you what he says about this because he's absolutely spot on. I get into this in a lot more detail in the book, and I do talk about, taking responsibility in those other things, but when you're dedicated to truth, so many of the other things will show up as well.

He says. “The third tool of discipline or technique of dealing with the pain of problem solving, which must continually be employed. If our lives are to be healthy and our spirits are to grow, is dedication to the truth superficially, this should be obvious. For truth is reality."

And this goes ties back into the natural law and the arguments I make, I make for the law of human nature and how it is enforced. And we do know it and it's part of tied up into our conscience and our sense of right and wrong and where that comes from. And I build all those arguments. I have all that information in the book so that you can better even have a, a larger frame of reference around this. But that is the nature of reality and cannot be changed and we bump up against it.

We've been talking to some people lately about, about people that we know who are struggling in their lives. More than they need to struggle, to be honest. And I think one of the problems that they're facing is that they don't have enough societal feedback in their lives. They don't go out enough in in environments where they're forced to show up for people and be accountable all the time, because that is really important feedback for us. That is the reality around us that we don't get to change. He goes on

“That which is false is unreal. The more clearly we see the reality of the world, the better equipped we are to deal with the world. The less clearly we see the reality of the world, the more our minds are befuddled by falsehoods, misperceptions, and illusions. The less able we will be to determine correct courses of action and make wise decisions.”

This is why lying is so destructive to our mental health and any behavior we engage in that we feel like we need to fudge with people that we need, that we can't be transparent about, that we need to hide. This doesn't mean you should just air all your dirty laundry all the time to people, but it does mean that if we are lying to the people close to us about who we are and what we're doing in order to get away with certain behaviors, we are actually leading ourselves. Like I said earlier, into addiction and into worse mental health.

Carl Jung said, “Lying is an attempt to circumvent legitimate suffering and hence is productive of mental illness.”

So when we lie, we're trying to get out of suffering, that we need to suffer because we have behaved in a way that has that consequence attached and we're trying to get out of it. We don't want someone's wrath. We don't want Whatever the consequence is, that would be part of the legitimate suffering for our decisions. So we lie. And another way that we lie is that we withhold truth. And sometimes this is the worst form of lying because people don't have information they desperately need in order to make better decisions about their lives.

Because we won't just be honest with them about how we're really living, what's really going on, what's really happening. So there's three things that we need to do in order to, according to Peck. There's actually more. I have more information on this particular solution, especially in my upcoming book, which I hope, fingers crossed, I can, we can release by the end of the year. But we've got to engage in self-examination again. Peck says that's what we've got to do for all of these things. The next one is something he calls openness to challenge, and I love what he says about this as well.

He says,

“It is indeed a never ending burden of self-discipline, which is why people. Opt out for a life of very limited honesty and openness and relative closeness, hiding themselves and their maps from the world. But by their openness, people dedicated to the truth live in the open and through the exercise of their courage to live in the open, they become free from fear.

That's one of the major arguments that I make in my book about How Truth Makes Us Free. What is freedom? Freedom from blindness doesn't mean that magically our we can see anymore, but it means that that that problem, quote unquote problem of being blind doesn't stop our personal growth on any front.

In fact, it is a catalyst for greater personal growth. Whatever it is we think is holding us back, whatever it is we think that we have to. You know, not have in our lives anymore in order to be liberated. This is why we, we cast off spouses, because we think that they're a barrier, but we don't know that until we've really fixed ourselves.

There's this really a awesome quote by James Allen I just thought of, so I didn't look it up. But basically the idea is that until we have completely cleaned ourselves up until our thoughts and our actions are exactly what they should be all the time, we actually can't know if other people are the whole problem.

In other words, we can always get busy cleaning ourselves up. We can always get busy working on ourselves. And as we do that, only then, only through that process will we know, oh, this is actually something I can do something about, or this is something I can't do something about. And so when he says that by being open and living in truth, we're free from fear, it's because no one's going to, no one has anything on us. No one's going to find anything out that's going to break anything. We can be challenged.

It also means that we're meek. I love that. That's a major trait of Jesus in the Bible, that he's meek. It just means he's super teachable. He was always open to challenge people called him out all the time. If you go back and write the New Testament and you find this of great men and women, people call them out all the time.They tell them things that they're doing wrong, and those people listen. They don't just shut it down. They ask themselves. They engage in the self-evaluation, they're open to the challenge and they say, is there something I need to change? Even if this person is my enemy, are they saying something legitimate? Is there something to their case? And only then can you know what reality really is, and only then can you know, wow, I really did have the power to change that. And now things are different because I changed me. You just need the tools to change yourself, and that once you've made the commitment, then making the changes are not difficult. Once you've made the commitment, you will be led to the solutions. It's like when the student is ready, the teacher appears. That's kind of how it is. When you're really ready to engage in your own personal growth and stop blaming everyone else and being a victim, and you become truly dedicated to truth and reality, the mentors and the tools will appear that you need to engage in.

Okay. The fourth solution to your problems is balancing. We mentioned this, I mentioned this a little bit before, balancing and knowing what is mine, what is yours, and in the nature of reality, but there's also more to it than that. It's also balancing all of our resources, all of our tools. He says.

"To be free people…”

There's that word freedom again. So great. Exactly what my book is all about. Being free. What does it mean to be made free?

“To be free people, we must assume total responsibility for ourselves, but in doing so, must possess the capacity to reject responsibility that is not truly ours, to be organized and efficient. To live wisely. We must daily delay gratification and keep an eye on the future yet to live joyously. We must also possess the capacity when it is not destructive to live in the present and act spontaneously.” So there's this balance in life that we have to get, we have to mature into. We have to gain capacity in our ability to balance ourselves.

So a lot of balancing has to do with some of those problems that I talked about, that sometimes we have to let go and sometimes we have to accept what we can't control and change and let go of it. Sometimes we need to accept more responsibility for what we can change, and I think sometimes because we've tried a lot of things, we think that we can't control that, but we actually can.

We just didn't have the right tools.

So I'll tell you this little story. One time I was teaching a class and there was this older woman, I don't know, she might've been in her sixties, that was in the class and it was on, it was a government and economics primer. And we were talking about lots of different things. And so you can imagine sometimes the discussion got a little heated as people shared their opinions, governmentally.

Now one time in class, it happened more than once, but this one time in particular, she got pretty rude. She just voiced her opinion. She just walked all over people. She just didn't care who she was hurting. She was pretty destructive and the way that she was engaging in a class. Well, later that week, I got an email from her and she recognized that. What she did was wrong, that she shouldn't have let it all hang out like that and recklessly hurt people. She wanted to apologize, but she didn't want to apologize. It was so fascinating. So she sends me this email and she basically says, “Hey, I know that I was saying things that were rude and you know, maybe I shouldn't have, but I'm older now and I figure I've earned the right to be able to say whatever I want, whenever I wanna say it.”

So now she was using her age. What did she use as an excuse for this destructive behavior 20 years earlier? I'm sure she had an excuse for it because it was a pattern, it was a habit. It was her way of being in the world. And now that she'd gotten older, she'd come up with a new excuse for not being considered of the people around her and just recklessly running over them by not taking responsibility for this thing that she really did need to change.

And so she didn't have balance in her life because she wasn't owning up to what she needed to change. This is when, this is what scripture means. When it talks about the refiner's fire. There's this dross that has to be melted away from the goal that sloughs off. That's all the crap about you and I that we need to get rid of, and I think sometimes we think that this is gonna be this grueling, uphill battle and it just doesn't have to look like that. It can be actually a pretty joyous journey because we see problems fall away. We see ourselves living at a higher level. We see people respecting us and honoring us more. We're more proud of ourselves. We like ourselves better. All of these wonderful, beautiful things that can happen for us, but part of this process.

It is taking responsibility for our time, for our talents, for our resources, the money that we might have, the relationships that we have, and finding ways to have better balance in our lives. Sometimes that's the fundamental problem with a problem we're trying to overcome, is that we don't have good balance, and that would solve the problem.

One of the things that Peck mentions is the experience of depression and. It was so helpful to me the first time I read it because he explained that depression is healthy. It's part of the human experience. We all experience depression. It's not all clinical, and it doesn't all need to be medicated because what depression is, it's an emotional response to giving something up to a loss. It's just the way that we respond to loss. Whether it's the loss of an expectation, we thought this thing was gonna happen and now we're here and it's not happening, or to someone else, not meeting our expectations of them, or them walking out of our lives or someone dying.

He gives a simple story of playing a chess game with his daughter. She needed to get to bed because she had class early the next morning and he kept pushing her and kind of guilt tripping her into staying with this chess game. And by the time it was over, I don't even think the game ended. She finally so was so frustrated. It was so late. He had just cajoled her over and over and over again that she just got up and left and went to bed and he finally realized. He was being competitive. It was his competitiveness, his determination to win this game at any cost that was damaging his relationship with his daughter. He felt depressed about it, that he was like a loser dad. But he had to let go of his competitiveness in order to have a better relationship with his daughter. The process of letting that go is the process of being depressed. I'm not going to get into all of this. We do touch on it in the academy a little bit, but it's something to think about that. You have an inner desire. You have a soul that wants to grow.

Think about that. You have a soul that wants to grow. Peck says depression is a normal and basically healthy phenomenon. You know what that means. That means that a lot of the time when you and I are feeling depressed. It is actually a good sign because what it means is something inside of you wants to grow or change, but in order for that to happen, you're gonna have to let go of something and you're hanging onto it. You're depressed because you know something's gotta give and you don't want to give that up. Sometimes you may not even be aware of what it is that you need to give up, and sometimes the balancing means having a willingness to make decisions and follow through with them. Sometimes it's just that we're sitting in limbo land and we're unhappy and we have a problem we can't solve because we won't just cross the finish line with any decision. We get to the point where basically any decision is better than no decision.

These four types of solutions can be dovetailed with those four types of problems, and any or all of them can be used to solve any or all of the problems that you might be facing. Maybe you need to delay your gratification. Maybe you need to take more responsibility or less. Maybe you need to be more dedicated to truth and reality and find better principles that you can live and apply in your life, or maybe you need better balance in your life.

Now I know that this has been a lot of information in these last two podcasts. We've gone over a lot of things and I hope it hasn't felt overwhelming. The next step that you need to take is just whatever the next step is that you need to take. You can only do this one bite at a time, one step at a time.

Evaluate your life for the greatest pain point that you're facing right now. Think about the fact that you may be depressed about this pain point because you've tried things in the past that haven't worked, or because you need to let something go, or because you just don't have any idea what to do, and so you need to find a new principle. You need to be more dedicated to the truth, or maybe you haven't taken proper responsibility for yourself.

And the way that you can do that is finding that principle and applying it to your life. Principles can help us in any of these. They can show us where to take responsibility and where to let go. They can show us how to delay our gratification because we can delay gratification in service of the true principle. They can show us how to better balance our lives. They can come to our rescue in so many ways.

This is the path of the servant leader, the person who's learning to love God and love herself, and love truth and love humanity better. And you can do this. There's a framework, there's a path we can follow. The greats have paved it for us. We just take one step at a time.

Father ten Boom was young. Their health was terrible. He was super judgmental, struggled in some of his relationships, and he had a whole lot of debt. Just begin where the ten booms began. That's why I wrote all those stories in The Mission Driven Life book for you, so that you could have hope, like I have hope that we can each change and be a little bit better. This path is possible for all of us. You can identify the problems that you're facing and find solutions to those problems, and we're here to help you do that.

I want to end with one of my very favorite quotes from The Road Less Traveled. It is such a beautiful way of talking about the problems that we face and the kind of people that we wanna become.

He says this.

“Spiritually evolved people by virtue of their discipline. Mastery and love are people of extraordinary competence, and in their competence, they are called on to serve the world and in their love, they answer the call. They are inevitably, therefore, people of great power. Although the world may generally behold them as quite ordinary people sense more often than not, they will exercise their power in quiet or even hidden ways. Nonetheless, exercise power, they do. And in this exercise they suffer greatly, even dreadfully. For to exercise power is to make decisions, and the process of making decisions with total awareness is often infinitely more painful than making decisions with limited or blunted awareness. The best decision makers are those who are willing to suffer the most over their decisions, but still retain their ability to be decisive.

One measure and perhaps the best measure of a person's greatness is their capacity for suffering. Yet the great also are very joyful. You cannot achieve. Great levels of spiritual evolution without suffering, and in so far as you do achieve them, you are likely to be called on to serve in ways that are painful to you and demanding of you, more so than you can now imagine.

The spiritually evolved person is most of all an extraordinary loving individual, and with his or her extraordinary love comes extraordinary joy.”

That’s who you are. You are an amazing. Child of God with immense potential and power, you have not even begun to tap, and the problems that you face are simply your school. They're simply the trigger to help you know what is the next step in your growth. This thing is a problem for you because of who you are. You are bumping up life up. You are bumping up against life in a unique way, unique to you. And it's because there's a problem. You need to work through your growth, your potential is on the other side of that problem, and the truth will make you free as you seek out the principles that will help you navigate this problem.

If you need balancing, if you need delayed gratification, whatever it might be. You will become more through being the decision maker. The path forward is through those depressive feelings or through the self-evaluation, or through the searching for the principle and the practice and applying it. You can be so much more than you are, even though you're wonderful as you are, and the pain is the tool to help you get there.

So I hope that this is a very joyful message for you—that you do have problems. I have problems. And as soon as I solve this problem, I'll have another problem. And those problems are gifts. They are what brings meaning to life. Like we quoted Peck last time, that's where we really draw meaning. If we didn't have any problems, we were just always at the beach on our towel. Life wouldn't mean anything. It is through solving these problems and our growth lies through the solving of those problems. So learn more. You could pick up the book, The Road Less Traveled. You can pick up my book, The Mission Driven Life, and you can learn more about our academy, where we will walk you through all of those steps, but ultimately recognize that problems are the gateway to your joy.

So walk through that gate because your joy awaits.