00:00:00 Thanks for joining me on episode 664 of the inspired stewardship podcast. I'm Paul sawn from Kara. I challenge you to discover your true identity and calling. So you can be empowered to live everyday to the fullest. One way to be inspired to do that is to listen to this. The inspired stewardship podcast with my friend, Scott Mader, Make yourself say right now,
00:00:32 I don't know how to do that, but I can get better. If I work at it, there's a way that I can grow in this area. If I choose to. And then you have to decide, is that what you want to do or not? And over time, what you'll find is you begin to reprogram your brain. You begin to welcome,
00:00:53 and thank you for joining us on the inspired stewardship podcast. 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 column. In 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.
00:01:25 And today's episode about investing in others through stewarding your talent. I talk with you about how our mindset is key, why mindset forms unconsciously. If you aren't intentional about the process and how you can discover your own mindset, you've heard me talk about developing your talent and what are the best ways to do that is through books. But if you're like most people today,
00:01:50 it's hard to find the time to read. And that's why today's podcast is brought to you by audible. Go to inspired stewardship.com/audible to sign up and you can get a 30 day free trial. There's over 180,000 titles to choose from. And you can pick one and listen your way to developing your talents via audible. That's inspired stewardship.com/audible to get your free trial and listen to great books.
00:02:21 The same way you're listening to this podcast mindset is so important. This is something that I come back to time and time again on the show. It's something that I work with all of my clients on. And I think sometimes we forget just how important it is, how we look at the world, the language that we use to describe ourselves and the world and how these key things,
00:02:48 how they frame so much of what we achieve. You know, one of the biggest obstacles that we face in life is around this area of, and again, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that how you view yourself as the only thing that matters. But what I am saying is how you view yourself, affects everything else. The way that we look at the world,
00:03:12 the way that we describe the world affects every choice we make. And every thing that we do, you know, if you're growing up and math is hard for you and all you ever tell yourself is I'm just not good with numbers. Well, then that becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. Indeed, you are not good with numbers. You know, Henry Ford,
00:03:34 the quote is whether you think you can, or you can't, you're probably right. Muhammad Ali is quoted as saying, if my mind can conceive it in my heart can believe it. Then I can achieve it. You know, those are great turns of the phrase, but they're also fundamental truths. The work of psychologists nowadays, Carol Dweck and others have found that the substance of our mind matters.
00:04:00 The way that we view the world matters. It affects our behavior and it affects our choices, which then affects how we learn, which can also affect how we succeed or fail in life. As an example, I challenged my clients all the time. I tell them they're not allowed to say I had to. Anytime I hear them say I had to,
00:04:22 I had to do that. I tell them to replace that with I chose to here's the truth. It doesn't matter if it was a good choice or a bad choice, even it's not about the value of the choice. It's about empowering yourself to recognize the fact that you had a choice and you made a choice. And typically we make the best choice we can with the information we have at the time we have it.
00:04:43 That's what we all do in life. You don't make a deliberate, bad decision, at least most of us don't, but oftentimes we'll beat ourselves up after the fact for not making a better decision, but given the information we had at the time we made the best decision, we could you talk about fixed mindset and growth mindset. Do you believe that abilities are set in stone or do you believe that abilities can be developed?
00:05:10 Now? I actually have a degree in genetics. And one of the questions that a lot of people will ask around this area of genetics is, is it, is it nature or nurture? Is it genetics or environment? And I'll tell you the truth is that geneticists and scientists have not asked that question that way for a long time, because they already know the answer.
00:05:30 The answer is yes. Is it nature or nurture? Yes it is. Is it environmental genetics? Yes, it is. I'll give you a, an example. This is a thought experiment, not something that we would ever do in the real world, but if you've got two parents and the father is six foot nine, and the mother is six foot seven and they have a child and you had to place a bet,
00:05:54 would you bet that the child is going to be shorter than average or taller than that average? And I'd be willing to bet that everyone that was playing along at home said taller than average. That would be the way to bet. Sure. Maybe they're a little shorter than average, but you know, if I had to lay money on it, it's going to be taller than average all day long.
00:06:17 And I simply forgot to give you a little piece of information. See this, this child is actually going to be raised inside of a trapped into a locked room and only fed a very small amount, just enough to keep them alive while they're growing and developing. Again, this is a thought experiment, not something you would ever do in the real life.
00:06:39 If you did that now all the sudden you'd change your answer, right? Yeah. They're not probably going to be taller than average, but here's the interesting thing. They would probably still be taller than someone whose genetic background involved two shorter parents. So they'd be taller than someone else raised in that situation. But B they'd be shorter than their potential was.
00:07:04 And that's kind of how nature and nurture work. See genetics gives us a range of abilities. It gives us a sliding scale of things that we can do. It isn't fixed in stone. It isn't like you're bad at numbers and you're always bad at numbers instead. It's about, yes, your mindset, your beliefs, your, your system of thinking the way your mind works may not lend yourself to be the best accountant on the planet,
00:07:32 but you still have the, the ability to be okay with numbers. You, you still have the ability to be even better than other people with the same sort of wiring. If you believe that that's possible. If you have a growth mindset about your own abilities and learning, you can push beyond the limits. That's not saying you're necessarily going to be the next Einstein Mozart or Leonardo DaVinci,
00:07:57 but it does mean that you can stretch beyond if you believe that you can see the, the truth is your mindset can form very unconsciously. If you don't take some intentional action, if you don't actually see down and focus on what is your mindset, what are your beliefs? If you don't actually do some active activities, ways to discover this and uncover it and then rewire it instead,
00:08:26 your mindset often gets put upon. You see if, for instance, if teachers believe that everyone in their classroom is brilliant, they're going to act differently with those kids, which guess what actually raises the kids abilities. They've done that as a study. They've actually found that out as a true empirical thing. See the truth is with some intentionality of designing your life,
00:08:52 the right way, you can begin to reframe and reorganize your mindset. One of the places to start, if you want to examine your own mindset is write out what are your views about yourself, your own abilities, your own ability to learn your own ability to be work, to do work. Be it brutally honest, write them down, take out a piece of paper folded in half.
00:09:19 And on the left hand side, write out all of the things that you believe yourself about yourself. I believe I am good at this. I believe I am bad at that. I believe I have the ability to do this. I believe that I have the ability to do that. Be intentional, but be honest, and then take each of those beliefs and examine it.
00:09:42 Almost like a lawyer would take somebody on the stand and, and make that belief defended itself. Is it true? And then reframe it as something that is an enabling truth and write that on the right hand side. I believe that I am bad at math. I believe that I can get better with numbers than I am today. That's an example of this kind of phrase and ways you can do it and then read those enabling truths each and every day,
00:10:14 and begin to practice a growth mindset, begin to practice challenging how you believe when you hear your say self, say I had to make yourself rephrase that as I chose to, when you hear yourself say I can't do that. I'm not able to, that's something that's beyond my abilities. Make yourself say right now. I don't know how to do that,
00:10:38 but I can get better. If I work at it, there's a way that I can grow in this area. If I choose to. And then you have to decide, is that what you want to do or not? And over time, what you'll find is you begin to reprogram your brain. You begin to recognize the fact that some of what you have put upon yourself are limiting beliefs and that you can uncover and deprogram yourself from those and do more than you ever believed you could before.
00:11:09 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.