Who Do You Want To Be

Hey team, all right, so here we are. It’s Wednesday Workshop. I wanted to read you a quote by a man named Tony Evans. Tony Evans, he says, “If you want a better world comprised of better nations, inhabited by better states, filled with better counties, made up of better cities, comprised of better neighborhoods, illuminated by better churches, populated by better families, then you’ll have to start by becoming a better person.”

We, as humans, don’t tend very well to want to change ourselves. We tend to focus on minimizing our own guilt or shame or feelings. To look outward and blame others for our plight in life and where we stand today. We want to blame God. We want to blame society, we want to blame our parents, our upbringing, our employer, our brothers, our sisters. Abuse that we might have, whether physical or mental, that we might have encountered along the way.

But we all come to this point in our lives where we look and say, “Who am I?” Which is a good question. Who am I? John Maxwell said it in his book I read recently, it’s even a better question, who am I becoming? Are you looking outward to find out? It’s not just who you are today, but who are you trying to become? And how are you going to get there?

There’s a number of things that need to transpire and happen in your life, and the first is taking accountability. Taking accountability of yourself and saying, “I am responsible for me, and I’m not responsible for others, and I can’t blame others.”

There are plenty of people I could blame for all the mishaps that have ever happened in my life. But it does me no good because I walked that road many times. I chose to maybe date that girl or take that job or hire that person or take that POS position or buy that kind of food or take that vacation and do that thing, purchase that car that may have turned out to be a lemon.

We all have done and made choices, but then we blame others for putting us in this position. I’m the one that answered the ad and tried to buy a Bowflex for $1,800 and ended up getting no Bowflex because it was a sham. I’ve had team members that put $700 down on an apartment that they never got to walk into and look at and paid somebody cash for it, and then found out that it was a fake ad.

And many of us have had similar functions and things in our lives. And if you haven’t, well, you might just be among the most lucky people in the world, or you’ve lived an extremely sheltered life and haven’t done anything yourself yet because if you haven’t made mistakes yet in life, then that means you haven’t really put yourself out there to do anything.

But you’ve got to take full ownership of where you are today because you can’t get anywhere else by blaming everybody else for where you are today. And so today’s Wednesday Workshop is a little self-reflection. Ask yourself, who am I? What makes me me, the good and the bad? Believe it or not, we’re all comprised of it—the good and the bad, the mistakes, the problems, our shortcomings. Being honest about them, transparent and vulnerable with ourselves first, and then vulnerability also sometimes includes being vulnerable with others.

Now, I’m not saying go on Facebook and put out a laundry list of all the things that you’ve ever done wrong and mistakes you’ve ever made and take that kind of inventory in your life. And stuff, you’ve got to be careful who you share with and who you open up to because people will take advantage of you. But you do need to be vulnerable with yourself and you need to take full ownership of who you are and what you’ve done.

So as we go through the rest of this week, as we’re in the first week of 2024, think about who am I? Take inventory of yourself and then who am I becoming and what can I do to become what I want to be? What do you envision, dream, right? And then start setting goals and start making those habit changes like I talked about on Monday in our Monday Message. Start making incremental, small little habit changes on whatever level. Don’t try to make too many at one time because you’ll get overwhelmed. But small incremental changes over a long period of time, you make great strides.

And I’ve learned this, and there’s so many things in nature. I mean, even polishing rocks with my boys. You take these coarse rocks that are hard and dull and ugly and over a period of time of tumbling them for a week at a time in different coarse grit. Imagine yourself being that rock, that hard, well, that hard substance. It’s dull, it’s speckled, it’s colored, it’s got, you know, but it’s not shiny, it’s not pretty. It’s got lots of sharp edges and put it in with other rocks of like nature and put some grit in there and then tumble it thousands of revolutions over the course of a period of time.

And it comes out a little smoother. You change the grit, you put it back in, and you do it again, again, and again. And after a while, all the hard edges are removed, and everything starts to shine and become polishable. And in some cases, it reveals such a beautiful thing. It’s an amazing thing. You should see my son’s rock collection. And we have dozens and dozens of rocks and things that we find all the time, and we’re talking about starting up the tumbler again and putting in another three to five pounds of rocks and the process.

My point is, you need to get tumbling, and you need to put that grit. It’s like sandpaper. You’ve got to sand down those edges, but it first takes you owning and having inventory. So this week, God bless you. Have a wonderful week. Who are you? Who are you becoming? Think about those things. Who are you becoming? What do you want to be in 2024? Think on those things. I’ll see you next week. God bless.