00:00:00 Thanks for joining me on episode 650 of the inspired stewardship podcast. I'm Jennifer Lozado, author of inheriting chaos with compassion. I encourage you to find the ways to be loving with your family both before and after you pass. And one way to be inspired to do that is to listen to this, the inspired stewardship podcast with my friend, Scott Mader. How much time am I going to have to block off on the calendar?
00:00:36 Cause see, the truth is most of us think that somehow magically buying the course will change everything without actually doing the work. And the truth is that's foolish. Of course, if I say it out loud like that, you would go well, if no, that's obviously not true. You've got to do the work welcome. And thank you for joining us on the inspired stewardship podcast.
00:01:01 If you truly desire to become the person who God wants you to be, then you must learn to use your time, your talent and your treasures for your true calling and the inspired stewardship podcast. We'll learn to invest in yourself, invest in others and develop your influence so that you can impact the world. In today's episode about developing your influence through stewarding your treasures.
00:01:32 I talk with you about setting aside some time and money to grow yourself. What this can look like in a practical way and how to know if you are investing that or wasting that money. As we talk about stewarding your treasures, wouldn't it be great. If you could support this podcast and do it without costing yourself an extra dime, it turns out you can.
00:01:56 All you have to do is use inspired stewardship.com/amazon. When you're ready to make a purchase via Amazon and a small commission, we'll come back to support the show. If you enjoy the show, when you're ready to buy from Amazon, just use inspired stewardship.com/amazon. So in yesterday's episode, we talked about having a posture of learning. And today I wanted to talk about another and another indicator that yes,
00:02:26 indeed, you have a posture of intentional learning where you've actually set about to grow yourself in an intentional way. Like we talked about yesterday and here's the truth. If you aren't spending time and money on growth, then you know that you don't have up attitude of intentional learning and don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that there's not free resources. I'm not saying that there isn't things out there that you can without paying a penny.
00:03:00 In fact, in today's world, there are some awesome resources out there that you can access for little to no money. There, there are actually universities that have where they put every class online and you can actually avail yourself fully of the knowledge of those classes without you won't get a degree, you don't have the piece of paper at the end, but you would have all of the knowledge that comes with those sorts of courses.
00:03:26 Of course, there's, there's other classes and programs and various things out there that allow you to learn tremendous amounts. There's free resources and guides, there's YouTube videos, podcasts, and many, many things, but even there, you're still spending a precious finite resource. You're spending time. You've got to budget a certain amount of time in your week in your month and your year where you spend educating yourself.
00:04:00 I'll tell you for me this year has actually been a really rough one. When it comes to this they're they're, you know, conferences that I would normally go to of course have been canceled or delayed some of the resources that I normally use to network and meet other people and expand my educational circle have been limited this year due to my own health concerns and due to the,
00:04:22 the virus and other things shutting down those avenues that I normally use. And I've had to pivot and avail myself of different opportunities, but I have stepped back and deliberately said, here is where I'm still going to spend time. I'm going to exercise time and money to deliberately grow in very specific areas where I want to grow. I actually literally have a line item on my budget,
00:04:54 both on my business and on my personal budget, where I pay for education, where I make sure that I spend a certain amount of money figuring out what are the key things that I'm most need to focus on and learn about this year. And then I identify resources for those things. And I spend the money on it on my time budget. I have certain days of the week where I have certain hours blocked off and the reason those hours are blocked off is for education.
00:05:27 Now I'm active in BNI. I use their training material, which I get access to as part of my membership. So I have a thing that pops up and it says, do one hour of training on certain days. And then I have other days where I use the coach connections, the training program, that I'm part of, where I help teach other folks how to be successful financial coaches.
00:05:50 And I spend a certain amount of time educating myself in that area. And then I have other resources that I use other courses and training material. And so again, those pop up on my to do lists there's time deliberately set aside on my calendar. And I use that for studying those things. So what it looks like in a practical way is if you don't look at your checkbook in your calendar and you deliberately have some time and some money set aside for learning,
00:06:20 then you know that you're not really focused on having a posture of learning. You're not really investing in yourself in a deliberate way. And maybe you don't have both. Maybe right now, you just have time because you can't afford to buy a new course or anything like that. That's fine. Spend some time on it, make sure you have time set aside on your calendar for specific activities around learning.
00:06:47 You obviously need to have time to go apply it as well. Like we talked about yesterday because knowledge by itself is not enough. You actually have to put it into action, but the truth is you still have to have both. You have to have some time to learn and some time to do so. How do you know if you're really investing in learning or you're just wasting money or you're just wasting time again,
00:07:12 it gets back to intentionality and it gets back to action. I'll be honest. Like most of us, I have online courses that I've spent hundreds or even thousands of dollars on and never watched a single video, never completed the training, never got through it. Never did anything to put it into action. If I do that, that's a waste. That's a wasted opportunity.
00:07:39 That's a resource that I've burned and I've spent that resource without getting any benefit from it. If you're honest with yourself, you're probably in the same situation. You probably have some books that you've bought that you intended to read, that you've never read. You have some courses that you've bought that you intended to go through that maybe you've watched one, maybe even two videos on,
00:08:01 but you haven't actually completed the exercises or done the work. You may have an area or two where you've been setting resolutions for the last five years, that how you need to get better in that area. But you've never actually done anything to get better in that area or at best you spent a couple of weeks, maybe a month and then never had it go further than that.
00:08:26 And if that's true, then you are wasting those resources. But here's the thing. You can't go back in time and change that you can't go back in time and unsuspend those resources. But what you can do is pivot and going forward, behave in a different way. You can be much more intentional about making sure that if I buy a course, I'm actually going to spend the time to go through it.
00:08:50 How long is it going to take me to go through it? How much time am I going to have to block off on the calendar? Cause see the truth is most of us think that somehow magically buying the course will change everything without actually doing the work. And the truth is that's foolish. Of course, if I say it out loud like that,
00:09:09 you would go, well, no, that's obviously not true. You've got to do the work. And yet that's kind of how we act. In reality, we act like it's somehow the act of buying the book gives us the knowledge in the book. We can put it under a pillow, put our head down on top of it. And through some sort of magical osmosis absorb all the knowledge without actually reading the book.
00:09:29 And that's just not true. So I challenge you audit what you've done, audit what you've bought on it, what resources you already have, and then block out some time on your calendar. If those remain areas where you need to learn, begin going through those resources and using them to expand and be intentional in your learning and invest in yourself so that you can really grow and help others.
00:09:57 Thanks for listening. Thanks so much for listening to the inspired stewardship podcast. As a subscriber and listener, we challenge you to not just sit back and passively listen, but act on what you've heard and find a way to live your calling. If you like this episode on the stewardship of treasures, you can sign up for our treasures tips by going to inspired stewardship.com/treasures
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