00:00:00 Thanks for joining me on episode 713 of the inspired stewardship podcast. I'm Bob melodic from seed, And I challenge you to invest in yourself, invest in others, develop your influence and impact the world by using your time, your talent and your treasure is to live out your calling, having the ability to grow your money. Like a seed is key to learning God's way of handling money.
00:00:24 And one way to be inspired to do that as they'll listen to this, the inspired stewardship podcast with my friend, Scott Mader, And what's more as they began to gain some, some traction as they began to move forward, then it gives them a little bit of hope and then they can see a little further. They can understand a little better. They can get a little bit more done and they can even see a little bit more of their why,
00:00:57 because they begin to recognize that there is a way out of this. Welcome. 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 call in the inspired stewardship podcast. Learn to invest in yourself,
00:01:21 invest in others and develop your influence so that you can impact the world. In today's episode about impacting the world by stewarding your time. I talk with you about why without hope productive use of your time is hard. How using your time well can actually give you hope and why. What we do with our time is important when it comes to hope, as we talk about stewarding your time,
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00:02:15 just use inspired stewardship.com/amazon hope is one of those things that we all sort of know what it means, but we've never, probably really thought about the formal definition. We've never really thought about what it is. We simply know how it feels when we have hope. And when we don't, you know, the truth is hope, affects our use of time,
00:02:39 a tremendous amount. I don't know about anyone else, but whenever I've had periods where my hope has been down, where I haven't really been able to think about my goals, I haven't felt like I had agency or control of my life. I wasn't able to see a path forward when I feel like I have lost my a little bit, then it always becomes harder to figure out what do I do?
00:03:04 What should I do the, the most important thing to do? And often that's when I find myself focusing on little things, focusing on the things that I can control. I feel the most productive doing. Even if those things aren't necessarily really important tasks, just being able to step in and check something off the list and say, I've done. It begins to make me feel better and that's not all bad,
00:03:30 but yet at times that can end up trapping you and just doing busy work. Because when you've lost hope, it's hard to recognize what it is that you need to do to begin to gain progress, to begin to move forward. Instead, oftentimes the little things become all you can focus on or even worse. You begin to even lose sight of those little things,
00:03:58 because you know, you begin to step forward and say, Hey, I don't even know what to do. So again, to shut down and do nothing at all, all it's easy to waste time, either just pure entertainment or fall into a, a loop where you begin to just sleep or do nothing or do simple things. And maybe now it begins to pile up and it can turn into a true depression as well,
00:04:23 where you get behind on even just the daily task like showering and those sorts of things. You know, the truth is there's a feedback loop here because when you fall into those traps and begin to lose sight of what to do stepping forward and getting a few things done actually can begin to make you feel like you have hope again. It can begin to make you feel productive.
00:04:48 Again, it can begin to give you some energy and as well, spending some time on things like self care, like gratitude journals, like other activities that we're going to talk about on Saturday, Saturday night, special can begin to inject hope into your life. Even physical exercise size can be doing that. So it's important when you begin to get into those hopeless times that you spend some energy on spending time on things that give you self care also important that you spend some time on things that give you energy,
00:05:23 as opposed to things that drain your energy. If you're an introvert, you need to spend some time by yourself. If you're an extrovert, you need to spend some time with others, no matter what you need, define those things that inject energy into your life. This is also where sometimes therapy or spending time with coaching or other things that give you positive energy can be helpful.
00:05:46 Cool. See, the truth is what we do with it. Our time affects our hope and what hope we have affects what we do with our time. So if the, if the negative energy begins to develop and spin forward, then it becomes harder and harder and harder to actually spend time doing the things that give us energy. It, it begins to be harder to spend time on the things that are actually productive.
00:06:15 It begins to be harder to do anything because you get trapped in that mire of hopelessness. That's the reason why one of the first things that almost happens almost every time, if I'm coaching someone, that's got some challenges, that's got some difficulty going on in their life. One of the first things I have to do is inject hope into that because the truth is that that hope is what gives them the energy to move forward.
00:06:44 And without that hope, it doesn't matter what tools or what practices or what ideas I inject in their life, because they're not going to be able to do them. They can't see forward enough. And what's more as they began to gain some, some traction as they began to move forward, then it gives them a little bit of hope. And then they can see a little further.
00:07:04 They can understand a little better. They can get a little bit more done and they can even see a little bit more of their why, because they begin to recognize that there is a way out of this and it's not going to be easy. It's not going to be simple, but it is going to happen. And once that hope is injected, then the time gets spent on the things that they need to do.
00:07:31 And the same thing can happen for you. So if you've lost hope, find a way to begin to inject a little bit of that. Hope back into your life. Work with another person, work with therapist, do the physical exercise. Do the other activities that we're going to talk about this week and begin to move forward a little bit at a time,
00:07:53 doing a little bit more each day until you've regained your help. 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 time,
00:08:23 be sure to sign up for our stewardship of time tips series, by going to inspired stewardship.com/time or texting four, four, two, two, two Time tips, And that'll get you our best tips on stewarding your time until next time, invest your time, your talent and your treasures, develop your influence and impact The world.