Start Stop Continue

Today I get to share some things that have continued to have deep impact in my life. These two ideas are separate, but equally powerful. I hope to weave them together for you so you can implement each by implementing both together.

Firstly, as we've talked about in different ways over the years, you have to see the value of a single day. Today is such a powerful gift! Each day is like a mini lifetime, with a beginning, middle and end. And yet, we get to restart and stack those days into a life, into what I pray is a rewarding and wonderful life!

Secondly, we need a proper strategy to modify and maximize days. Just a tag line like "seize the day" means nothing without a means by which to strategize that day. Let's take a look into the business world today to learn about three simple questions that can make a difference for a day, and for a lifetime.

- What is your general attitude about the day when you get out of bed?

- How is the goal of mastering a single day the ticket to a better future?

- What does it mean to be aware of your recent past and it's pluses and minuses?

- How can you use that to strategize a better today?

- Isn't effort easier when you believe it is the best possible thing you can do?

Transcript

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Welcome to season five of the Excel Still More Podcast. I'm still your host, Chris Emerson, and I'm here to encourage you and your walk with the Lord, and I'm glad you've joined. The program continues to be sponsored by Cunningham Financial Group. John is a good friend, and he's helped me and my family in everything from stock and mutual fund investing to annuities, life insurance, and retirement planning. I certainly commend him to you. If you have needs in any of those areas, you can reach him at 615-895-7773. Thank you again for your ongoing encouragement and support. Let's get started. I would say that both of these things are at least kind of running under the surface in the back of my mind on most days, and neither of them are new developments. I didn't read them in some article last year. They've been a big deal for a long time. This week each of them came to mind for me based on different angles of approach, and I had to laugh a little bit. I thought, I'm sure I've told everything I know by now. We've done 250 plus episodes. Certainly we have scraped the bottom of the barrel on ideas that can help you grow in your personal faith or improve your relationships or be a stronger Christian. And then it just sort of hit me today that two of the best ideas that I can share with you, and by that I mean the ones that tangibly and almost immediately make the biggest difference, we haven't even talked about yet. At least not in this depth of detail. There are no three-word episodes that carry these names, although, interestingly enough, each concept is three words. Let me begin by sharing the one that is not the episode title. We'll begin with it, move into the main content of the day, and then I want to bring this thing back around to the end to help with application. So I'm not sure how many years ago it was that I started reading Dale Carnegie books. I remember a great man, Bill Murph, in Baytown, Texas, first recommended that I read How to Win Friends and Influence People. That book will not get any attention today beyond this couple of sentences, but if you haven't read that one at least twice, then do yourself a favor and dig in. But the second book of Carnegie's that I read was How to Stop Worrying and Start Living. And in my opinion, it is the better of the two books. I remember doing an entire quarter of classes at church based on the chapter contents of this book, but there is one particular chapter that I will never forget. It simply states live in daytight increments. I'm not sure there's a single thing I can tell you to help with your faith or your family or friendships or any other thing quite as powerful as having the wisdom and focus to operate in day-length cycles. Anything great you can accomplish will be accomplished by effort that is sustained on a day-to-day basis. And you can't have a month straight of victory unless you figure out how to manage today and wake up tomorrow and do it again and on and on you go. I'm sure we've mentioned this idea throughout the years in different episodes, and today it doesn't get its own episode, though I am considering a short series that takes a handful of ideas from the Carnegie book and presents them to you. And so maybe day tight increments will get its own entire episode before the year is out. It's kind of interesting from my perspective. I knew I was coming in today to record for you the concept of start, stop, continue, and that's where we're headed. But this morning, before the day got started, I sat down to have my coffee and read the Bible and journal, and I got to the section level three gratitude, where I write down something that I'm grateful for, attribute it to God, and then explain its value to me and what I'm going to do about it. And this morning I simply wrote the word today. Thank you, God, for today. Every day is a blessing. I love the rhythm of the day. And I also love that to me, every day is kind of like its own lifetime. You come to consciousness in the morning with time laid out before you. You get yourself prepared to engage with others, to build something, to do something, to make a difference. You only have so much time and energy and you expend it in places that you consider to be valuable, that energy depletes throughout the day, and when the day is over, your consciousness fades. People who learn how to master their lives are people who have learned how to master today. I remember from the book he gets into these ideas about how looking backwards has benefit, but it's limited benefit because there's no ability on your part to change it. And the future is not guaranteed, and honestly, it's just going to be a place you end up because of steps that you make, you know, today. So in the end, you get up in the morning, you thank God for the blessings of another opportunity to make the day great, you evaluate what you can do better, you set the course, and you make it worth something. And this to me is how the two concepts tie together today. I'll get back to daytight increments for application at the end. But if you and I don't have some strategy in place to assess the days that have just passed so that you can live this one in a better way, and we don't have some metric to decide what to do next or what adjustments are needed, then you know what happens. Days just start peeling away. They turn into months and then years. We talk a lot about wasting time. I believe a wasted day is one that you are not mentally positioned in to leverage for your benefit, God's benefit, and the benefit of others. If you do not have a purpose for today, if it is not part of a greater build, and maybe most critically, if you don't have a process to make changes so that tomorrow gets better, then time starts wasting away. There'll be high points and low points and surprises and routines, but you would just be living those days and then losing them instead of utilizing them as great blessings in and of themselves and as optimistic stepping stones to something more. And this is where our second but central concept of today's episode comes into play to give you a simple, systematic approach to evaluating your progress. I don't know how familiar the phrase start, stop, continue is for you, but if you're from the business world, you may have heard it a lot. In fact, the first time I ever heard it was about 10 or 11 years ago from a businessman and friend. I moved to the Dowlin Road Church to preach there for a few years. Max Dawson was there, and also a man named Benjamin Lee. Ben was there in a full-time preaching role, but years before that, he was in the business world. He worked for Pfizer up in the Illinois area. In the professional world where growth and progress are critical, it is very common for this exercise to take place where a small group of team members get together and they make three simple lists. The first list is pretty basic. What are some things we are not doing that we believe we need to start doing? Now keep in mind, and this is critical, the only way to answer that question is to look back. And that's probably the greatest value of your past. In the business world, we look at the last quarter, we look at the responses we've gotten from customers, we look at how efficiently we've been able to do our work, and we ask this question what are some things we're not doing that we need to start doing? And in the business world, those can be challenging lists to make because there may be some expensive or pie in the sky ideas that can't happen. But ultimately, through communication and honesty, we can determine some things that we believe will make a difference. But of course, companies have the same problem that families have and that you have, and that is we only have so much energy, there's only so much time in a work week, we can't just start a bunch of things, there's no room for it. So then comes the second and equally important question. What are some things we need to just stop doing? And I think for the purpose of a professional discussion, they're not talking about really terrible things that everybody knows we should stop doing and we're just not disciplined, though I'm sure there's time for conversations like that. What they're really asking is, what are some things that we keep doing that just don't work? For whatever reason, we keep doing them. They're taking up time and attention, they're inefficient, there are diminished returns, they may be anchors holding us back, maybe we do it out of respect for the people who are here before us. Maybe it's something that worked somewhere else. But what are things that just aren't getting it done that we need to stop immediately? I think by the way, this is very applicable to life, and I do ultimately want to talk to you about conversations in your family and about the way you're planning each and every day of your life, because sometimes answering the second question is harder than the first. To get ahead of ourselves a little bit, if I said, Hey, I want you to make a list of three things that you know that if you and your family were doing every day, it would make for a better family life. It would change everything over time. You probably could make that list pretty quickly. But the problem is you won't have the time or energy to do it unless you're willing to take out the knife and cut some things out. So in a company setting, it might be allocation of assets or workforce, it may have to do with the budget. It may be quite an act of Congress, real hard work to get the cuts passed through, but what needs to stop? Can we at least be honest about that? And I think that's a meaningful question for you and me, and we'll talk about that at the end. But then I think it's also worth noting that not everything has to be radical. Not everything about living better days and building stronger faith is about picking up what was laying on the ground or dropping something you were holding. Sometimes it's just about the diligence and the courage to keep doing what's working. And so that's the third question. What do we need to continue doing? Sometimes this just means a pep talk for why we're doing what we're doing and how it's ultimately changing us in a way that we'll see great results later. All of that is a part of this third question. But I think the most important element of it to me is everything that that company is doing with time and resources has to justify being continued. This is something we're not going to stop, we're going to keep doing. And here is why. We have reflected on it, we have measured it, and it earns the right to stay. Have you thought about that with the things that you're doing in your life and with your life? The things that take up time or energy or resources. As Christians, we know that we're supposed to seek first his kingdom, and we're here as pilgrims and strangers in an upside down kingdom, showing devotion through servitude. And a lot of what we do, I hope, is right in line with that. And a lot of what we do probably is not so much in line with it. Not that those things are inherently sinful, but they certainly consume our energy and attention. Do you at least occasionally make those things have to justify themselves as a part of your family's life? I mean, there's a reason why companies do exercises like this and why there's a thousand YouTube videos about it, because these companies have to survive. There are people involved here. Their success or failure affects lives. If they are woefully inefficient or misguided or wasteful, it will add up to a collapsed company and a lot of hurt people. And I say all that kind of sarcastically because I think for most of us, our faith, our relationship with God is more important than any company in the world. And I know that our families are, and for many of us, our church family as well. So it's not, hey, companies do this, maybe we should try it. It's companies feel like they have to do this because the stakes are too high. How much more so should we be considering what needs to begin, what needs to end, and what needs to hold when the stakes are at their highest level, souls and loved ones. So that's really where I want our focus to go in the last portion of the episode. I want to share with you a few things by a guy named Brian Kane. He has a company called Mental Performance Daily. He addresses this concept of start, stop, and continue, but he first addresses the bigger picture, which is behavioral change. I rarely meet a person who is not interested in some way in changing or modifying their behavior. Maybe it's something from the standard four F's of the early years of ESM. They want to see changes in their faith or family, or maybe their fitness or finances. And it's not always drastic catastrophic things. Maybe it's as simple as God telling us to grow and to utilize our resources more wisely. Well, Brian's observation is this is a cruise ship you're trying to turn, not a jet ski. So you don't do it in a day, but you use a series of wisely allocated days in order to do it. He talks about three key features of behavioral change awareness, strategy, and effort. Awareness is your willingness to look backwards, to reflect on how things have been going. Maybe it's just the last few days, maybe it's all of 2023 so far, maybe it's your whole life. But you have to be willing to look back with honest and open eyes. You can look back and assess what was missing that needed to be there. You can look for what was there but ought not have been, and you can even identify the things that worked. In other words, start, stop, and continue. I remember in my years at Dallin Road how Ben would do this, he brought that concept to the way that the three of us preachers operated together and did our work. He integrated this into the way the eldership operated, and we as preachers interacted with them often. You're looking at a specific thing or group or category. You're looking backwards at that thing or group, and you're doing so over a specific amount of time. And you're looking for very specific things, as we mentioned a moment ago, not to pat yourself on the back for what we did well or to relive the guilt of our past mistakes. Instead, we're using the first thing Brian Kane says, awareness of what has happened, so that we can form a strategy moving forward. And that's where start, stop, continue can be valuable to you. They represent three super practical ways that you can strategize, better ways to use your time and attention, better ways to allocate your resources, and really infuse today and tomorrow and what is coming with hope and optimism because you're approaching it intentionally and with strategy. And look, maybe you're nervous about this. Maybe you're like, I'm not somebody who just starts new things. What if they don't go well? Or what if I stop doing something, but it was more important than I realized it was? Well, to me, this really goes back to some of the wisdom of Benjamin Lee and what he talked to our elders about and the buy-in that he got from them. If we come up with a good idea, let's give it a go. Let's start that thing. Because if it doesn't work, guess what we'll do? We'll stop it. As quickly as it comes, it will go, but at least we will have given it a try. And by the same token, if you stop doing something and it ends up costing you more than you thought, you reflect on that and become aware of it, you restrategize and you put it back in place, but at least now it's earned the right to continue. I have to say about Ben, he was really good at this. He would start things he was passionate about, and if it didn't pan out, he would just stop doing it. But sometimes I had to pick on him about the way he titled things. He would start a lot of first annual stuff, like first annual free turkey trot. And then the next year I'd be like, hey, hadn't seen anything on the second annual turkey trot, and he'd be like, Yep, that's one we're stopping. And I would say, Ben, I respect the fact that you're just willing to stop stuff that doesn't work, but maybe we could quit rolling them out with the title first annual. Anyway, I say all of that to tell you that this process can seem scary and abrupt, but if we never give up on the idea of re-evaluating and strategizing, then we're never stuck. Now the third word that Brian Kane gives us is effort. It starts with awareness, then strategy, then effort. So I'm not really here to talk to you about that part of it today. I mean, in the end, we know that's where the Nikes hit the pavement. That's where the flowers get bought and brought home. That's where the church building gets entered or the Bible gets opened, or where the heads bow together around the dinner table. It's very much like faith without works is dead. Conviction requires action. And there is never a substitute for pure effort. I've struggled with that over time, just having the motivation to put in the work. But what we're really focusing in on today is it's hard to put in effort for something that you don't believe in, that you don't believe is efficient or is working, or worse yet, you're acting for action's sake, but have no real direction. We can do better than that. We can get some wisdom behind our effort. It's kind of like walking in Christ. It's not easy to live a disciplined life in Christ, but when I am clear and convicted about what is right, and I have understanding of precisely what he wants, and I can see exactly where it needs to exist, that combination of awareness and strategy make action possible. Maybe in ways that I wasn't active before. So how does all that work in your own life and health or in your marriage, in family, or in just optimizing and re-energizing your life? Well, we certainly need a wise way to evaluate what is happening as we've talked about today, but I want to finish up by taking you back to where we started. Please remember that your best effort is accomplished in daytight increments. You're not being asked to fix everything in a day. Remember, cruise ship, not jet ski. But you are being asked to believe that the steps that lead to dramatic change occur on a day-to-day basis. Your central challenge is to make today the best it possibly can be. You should thank God for bringing you into the consciousness of the day with the energy to live it. You should determine the wisest and most loving way to live it. Expend your energy so that you can lay down tired tonight, believing that you used this day well, in and of itself as its own well-lived lifetime, and yet building you directionally so that you can start tomorrow and just keep growing. Bring everything down to the manageable quality of winning the day. But we're not just talking about some emotional or mental ascent. This isn't just about taglines that sound great. It's about great awareness and strategy behind the effort you will make today. And the clarity you need or your family needs is as easy as specifically addressing three important opportunities. Start, stop, continue. Thank you so much for listening in today. If you enjoyed this program, will you share it with someone you care about? One thing I've learned over these five seasons is that there's nothing as powerful in advertising as word of mouth sharing between friends. Speaking of friends, let me once again commend you to give John Cunningham a call. He and his team have a wide variety of tools to help you use your present budget in life to build towards a more secure and hopeful financial future. Once again, you can reach him at 615 895 7773. And always remember whatever you choose to do today in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, excel still more.