The Mission Driven Mom Podcast

Get Your FREE Audiobook of The Mission Driven Life: Discover and Fulfill Your Unique Contribution to the World: https://www.themissiondrivenmom.com/

It is kind of mind-blowing to realize just how much of our life is controlled by our own beliefs and paradigms--even our relationships! So often our frustrations, disappointments, and lack of connection are things WE are actually creating, without even realizing it. 

In this podcast Audrey asks: How are you seeing them? as an introduction to a conversation with yourself about how you might be contributing to your relationship problems and living out the drama cycle unknowingly. 

Stay tuned for engaging stories and the KEY to seeing everyone, especially yourself, as a CREATOR!

Listen with: EP 116: Creator Mode: Escaping the Victim Mentality for Good

Listen with: EP 115: One Shift Away: The Secret to Your Mission Driven Life

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PODCAST TRANSCRIPT (AI Generated)

 Welcome back to the podcast. I'm Audrey Rindlisbacher, author of The Mission Driven Life and Founder of the Mission-Driven Mom. I'm so excited that you’re joining me today.

We’re going to talk about some really interesting things. If you’re new to this podcast, you can just keep listening along. But you may also want to go back to the very beginning and do a little binge-listening. You’ll get a deep dive into the Seven Laws of Life Mission, hear a bunch of mission-driven stories, and really get a good sense of what we do here—why you can live a mission-driven life, and how that will change the way you see the world, the way you see yourself, and the way you live.

If you haven’t gone to themissiondrivenmom.com and grabbed your copy of The Mission-Driven Life: Discover and Fulfill Your Unique Contribution to the World, please go get your free copy of the audiobook. It’s available right on the homepage, and it’s the full version—so there’s no reason you can’t fully understand what Mission-Driven Living is and begin engaging in it yourself.

In that book, I tell the story of the Ten Boom family. There are many mission-driven stories I could share—as you know, I often talk here on the podcast about men and women who lived those Seven Laws and how they did it. The Ten Booms are incredible, amazing heroes of mine. They saved the lives of over 800 Jews during World War II—and they did so much more than that.

But the great thing about the Ten Booms is that they didn’t always “have it together”—just like you and I don’t always have it together. And by following in their footsteps, we can learn to become a little bit more like them. The Seven Laws help us to do exactly that.

The Story of Jack

I want to tell you a story today about a little boy—this is really fascinating.

One day, little Jack was walking down the street when, tragically, he was hit by a school bus. From the moment of the accident and in the weeks that followed, his mother always referred to it as “the horrible accident.” Every day she told the story: Jack had been hit by a bus, he had broken both legs, and now he was in a wheelchair.

She felt terribly guilty that she hadn’t been there to protect him—although, of course, how could she have been?—and seeing him in a wheelchair was extremely difficult for her.

The doctors, however, were confident. They saw no reason Jack wouldn’t make a full recovery. But his mother kept warning him that his legs might not ever fully heal. She wanted him to be “prepared” that he might never run or play soccer again like the other kids.

When doctors cleared Jack to return to school, his mom and dad were convinced that seeing school buses every day would be too traumatic. They decided instead that his mother would quit her job and homeschool him for the rest of the year. They also believed that seeing his friends play at recess while he was in a wheelchair would be unbearable—so, again, they thought it was better to just keep him home.

At home, Jack usually finished his schoolwork in the mornings. The rest of the day he filled with TV and video games. Within just a few weeks, his mood tanked. He became more and more depressed.

His parents assumed the depression meant the accident had traumatized him more deeply than they had thought. So they found a child therapist who specialized in trauma and brought Jack to see her.

When Jack’s mother wheeled him into the office, he sat silently, staring at the floor. He was embarrassed, depressed, and sad. His mother began:

“We’re having such a hard time with this terrible accident. It’s really ruined our lives and caused so many emotional problems for Jack. He’s just not the same little boy.”

To her surprise, the therapist didn’t respond with sympathy. Instead, she turned enthusiastically to Jack and said:

“Boy, have I been looking forward to meeting you, Jack! I’ve never met a kid who could beat a school bus. You have to tell me—how did you manage to get into a fight with a school bus and win?”

For the first time since the accident, Jack smiled.

Over the next few weeks, Jack worked with the therapist on a creative project: making his own book. He titled it How to Beat a School Bus. In it, he wrote a wonderful story about how he had fought a school bus and escaped with only a few broken bones. He even ended the book with a drawing of himself in a wheelchair wearing a superhero cape.

With the therapist’s encouragement, Jack returned to school and soon became a normal, happy, well-adjusted boy again.

But the therapist also had to work with Jack’s parents. She helped them see the core issue—the message of today’s podcast: they were seeing Jack wrong.

What Went Wrong

Why was Jack’s mother treating him this way?

I don’t know all the reasons, but here are some:

But underneath all of that was the real problem: she saw Jack as broken.

She didn’t truly believe he could overcome this. She projected onto him her own fears, her own imagined pain, even the ways she thought she would have reacted. Instead of being confident in her son’s resilience, she treated him as weak, fragile, and permanently damaged.

The therapist helped her realize: if Jack was going to thrive, his parents had to stop seeing him as broken.

Seeing Others Properly

What’s fascinating about Jack’s story is that it encapsulates so many powerful principles. It’s easy to see how his mother was actually creating trauma in him. As soon as Jack was presented with someone who saw him fundamentally differently, the “problem” disappeared.

When the therapist came in and said, “You’re incredible—you beat the school bus!”—everything shifted. Jack smiled, he felt challenged in a positive way, and he reframed his entire identity. When he saw himself differently, the doors opened. He was able to heal, move forward, and overcome the accident.

Stephen Covey’s Story

Let me share another story—this one from Stephen Covey.

He tells how he and his wife were struggling with one of their sons. This boy was having a difficult time in school. He didn’t know how to follow instructions on tests, so his grades suffered. Socially, he was very immature, often saying or doing things that embarrassed his family and friends. Athletically, he was small, skinny, and uncoordinated. For example, when he swung a baseball bat, he would often swing before the ball was even pitched—and people would laugh.

Covey and his wife were desperate to help. They wanted their son to be successful in every area of his life. At first, they focused on their attitudes and behaviors toward him, trying to be positive and encouraging.

Covey recalls:

“We attempted to psych him up using positive mental attitude techniques. ‘Come on, son, you can do it! We know you can. Put your hands a little higher on the bat. Keep your eye on the ball. Don’t swing until it gets close.’ If he did a little better, we would go to great lengths to reinforce it: ‘That’s good, son. Keep it up!’

“While others laughed, we reprimanded them: ‘Leave him alone. Get off his back. He’s just learning.’

“But our son would cry and insist that he’d never be any good, that he didn’t like baseball anyway. Nothing we did seemed to help.”

Despite their encouragement, Covey and his wife watched their son’s self-esteem plummet. Finally, they pulled back and looked at the situation on a different level.

They realized that their attempts to “help” weren’t working because—deep down—they didn’t truly believe in him. Subconsciously, they saw him as fundamentally underdeveloped: academically, socially, physically. Inept. Inadequate.

Covey explains:

“When we honestly examined our deepest feelings, we realized our perception was that he was basically inadequate—somehow behind. No matter how much we worked on our attitudes and behaviors, our efforts were ineffective because, despite our words and actions, what we were really communicating was: ‘You aren’t capable. You have to be protected.’

“We began to realize that if we wanted to change the situation, we would first have to change ourselves. And to change ourselves effectively, we had to change our perceptions and paradigms.”

Paradigms Change Everything

I recently did a podcast about paradigms—how they are everything. Go listen to that one in conjunction with this one.

I’ve shared before how reading Leadership and Self-Deception was life-changing for me. At the time, I had broken, unhealthy relationships with extended family. I blamed them—for dressing their kids alike and leaving my daughter out, for their supposed moral failings, for whatever narrative I had created in my head.

But the real problem wasn’t them—it was me. I saw them as “less than.” I judged them and propped myself up as morally superior. Because I didn’t see them properly, I distorted our entire relationship.

Leadership and Self-Deception helped me understand that no matter what my attitudes or outward behaviors were, how I truly felt—how I truly saw them—was impossible to hide. That’s what always got communicated.

This is why it’s so important to work on our basic perceptions: to see others as creators.

Victimhood and the Drama Cycle

This ties back to what we teach in the MDM Academy about drama and victimhood. When we see people wrongly, we usually cast them into roles in the drama cycle.

When we cast people into the drama cycle—victim, persecutor, or rescuer—we distort reality. We stop seeing clearly.

The truth is: everyone is a creator.

Applying This to Marriage

I’ve said openly that my husband struggled with a pornography addiction for many years. Because of that, I’ve spoken with many women in similar situations. And what often happens is this:

Neither view is true. Both distort reality.

When we cast others in drama roles, we horribilize them, gossip about them, or pity them. And every time we do that, we destroy real connection.

The truth is, everyone is a creator. As children of God, it’s in our very DNA. We cannot not create. Even a husband addicted to pornography is still a creator. He is capable and competent of finding answers, and his wife is capable and competent of bearing the struggle, supporting the healing process, and patiently walking through it.

My Daily Creator Statement

I remind myself of this truth daily. I recorded a “Creator Statement” on my phone, and I listen to it every morning.

One line says: “I see myself and others as creators—capable and competent, able to navigate life successfully.”

Another line: “I trust that I and others are having the experiences we need to have for our ultimate good.”

This framing resets me every day. It puts me right where I need to be: knowing that I am a creator, you are a creator, and that the experiences we’re having are for our growth. We are capable and competent to overcome challenges, to find solutions, and to step fully into the role of creator.

Choosing to See Others as Creators

Maybe you’re not ready today. Maybe you don’t want to take that step yet. That doesn’t make you incapable, and it doesn’t make you incompetent.

If you’re in a relationship where things aren’t going the way you’d like, and you really want things to be different, here’s my challenge to you:

Sit down with yourself and ask honestly, Am I casting this person somewhere in the drama cycle? Do I see them as a persecutor, rescuer, or victim? And if so—why?

Ask yourself, Do I really believe they can’t do it? Do I see them as incapable? And if you do, ask yourself why.

Sometimes there are real limitations—maybe someone is five-foot-six and wants to play in the NBA. Okay, probably not going to happen. But here’s the truth: they are still a creator. They are capable and competent to figure that out for themselves. You can trust that they are having the experiences they need to have for their ultimate good.

And yes—that can be unbelievably painful. It can look like they’re hurting themselves, heading toward disaster, or walking a path that clearly won’t work out. But they are still a creator. They can do it. Who am I—and who are you—to limit them? Who are we to decide it can’t be done?

Seeing Potential at Their Own Pace

Stephen Covey shares more about his son. He says:

“Through deep thought, faith, and prayer, we began to see our son in terms of his own uniqueness. We saw within him layers of potential that would be realized—but at his own pace and speed. Instead of trying to set some unrealistic bar or timeline, we decided to slow down, calm down, and let nature take its course.”

I’ve got a child who’s disappointed with where they’re at in life right now. They wish they were further ahead. And I keep reassuring them: There’s no race. You’re not in competition with anyone. There’s no rule that says you have to check certain boxes by a certain age. Life doesn’t work that way. You’re capable. You’re competent. You can solve this problem.

Covey continues:

“We decided to relax and get out of his way and let his own personality emerge. We saw our natural role as being to affirm and value him.”

How different is that? Imagine being with your child, and instead of being embarrassed when they do something awkward, you just laugh and think it’s genuinely funny. You don’t let it bother you.

Covey goes on:

“We also conscientiously worked on our motives and cultivated internal sources of security, so our feelings of worth were not dependent on our children’s acceptable behavior.”

I cannot emphasize this enough. This is vital for healthy, happy mothering.

Cultivating Internal Security

We must have our own internal sources of security.

This is why we do the MDM Academy. This is why it’s so vital to your mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical health to meet your own needs. To manage your heart and mind. To discover your gifts. To live by principles. To study worldviews, to practice servant leadership, and to go out into your community helping others come to truth.

Why? Because you need your own confidence.

For too long, my ego was tied to my children’s choices. Their successes—or failures—made me happy or unhappy. But that wasn’t good for them, and it wasn’t good for me. My arbitrary standards and expectations weren’t serving anyone.

So you and I must cultivate our own inner sources of worth, so we’re not dependent on our children’s “acceptable” behavior. And that means working on you.

We sometimes tell ourselves, This is my children’s time. I can only focus on them right now. I can only spend money on them. But that’s simply not true. It’s a lie. They need you to live your own mission-driven life so they can see what it looks, feels, sounds, and smells like. They need to watch you do it—so they’ll want it for themselves.

The Outcome

Covey writes:

“As we loosened up our old perception of our son and developed value-based motives, new feelings began to emerge. We found ourselves enjoying him. Instead of comparing or judging him, we stopped trying to clone him in our own image or measure him against social expectations.

“Because we saw him as fundamentally adequate and able to cope with life, we stopped protecting him against ridicule. As the weeks and months passed, he began to feel a quiet confidence and affirmed himself. He blossomed at his own pace, and soon he excelled academically, socially, and athletically—far beyond what the so-called natural developmental process would have predicted.”

He grew into his full potential because the people around him stopped treating him as a victim and started seeing him as a creator.

Final Thoughts

So here’s the takeaway: You are a creator. They are creators.

If a relationship feels broken or discouraging, ask yourself: How can I see this person more as a creator? How can I affirm to myself and to them that they are capable and competent?

Stop thinking of all the reasons they can’t, and start thinking of all the reasons they can. As Earl Nightingale said, “Think of all the reasons you can.”

And as you shift your paradigm—even in subtle ways, like your body language—you will communicate something new: I believe in you. I know you can do it.

And over time, they will begin to believe it, too.

Because when we refuse to live in drama—when we stop casting ourselves and others as victims, persecutors, or rescuers—and instead choose to see everyone as creators, we empower the people around us to blossom into who they were always meant to be.

We allow them to grow through the aches and pains of life, to gain strength, and to learn how to manage life successfully.

They can do it. You can do it. We can do it—as mothers, as friends, as spouses. We can become the creators we were divinely designed to be.

Thank you for joining me today. I hope this was helpful to you. Don’t forget to grab your free audiobook copy of The Mission-Driven Life at themissiondrivenmom.com. And I’ll see you next time.

Grab Your FREE copy of the audiobook The Mission Driven Life: Discover and Fulfill Your Unique Contribution to the World: https://www.themissiondrivenmom.com/.

What can we do when our persistent problems just won't go away? When we're stuck and can't figure out what is really going on? When depression, overwhelm, or anxiety seem to be running our lives? When our relationships are stale or taxing? 

This podcast holds the answer! 

You'll learn about George who was tortured by voices who spoke of his imminent death. You'll hear about Eric and how an English degree from Yale left him unemployed, spiritual bankrupt, and lost. You'll hear about Tracie, who liked her life and didn't want things to change. And you'll hear about Audrey and one of the most challenging times in her life. 

And you'll discover the 2 SIMPLE STEPS that each of them took to move beyond their struggles to a better life!

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PODCAST TRANSCRIPT (AI GENERATED)

 Give It up or Take it on Podcast

Welcome back to the podcast. I’m Audrey Rindlisbacher, author of The Mission-Driven Life and founder of The Mission-Driven Mom. If you haven’t yet visited TheMissionDrivenMom.com to get your free copy of the audiobook The Mission-Driven Life: How to Discover and Fulfill Your Unique Contribution to the World, you should definitely do that!

We’ve recorded the entire book for you, and in it you’ll discover the 7 Laws of Life Mission—principles that will revolutionize your life. They’ll help you love God and yourself better, learn to love truth and humanity, and gain the tools to lead yourself, your home, and your community. You’ll learn how to use your greatest gifts and talents to bless those around you, while finding joy and fulfillment in the process.

If you’re new to this podcast, we’ve reorganized the episodes so you can start from the beginning, binge-listen, and get all the key elements you need to understand the 7 Laws of Life Mission framework. We have a whole series on the Laws themselves, plus series on other topics like feminism. You’ll also find “Mission-Driven Stories,” where you can see the Laws in action in the lives of great men and women, along with personal development episodes like this one—on self-education, growth, and more.

The Story of George

I want to start today by telling you the story of George. He was a middle-aged man, married, with three kids. He worked as a traveling salesman with a large sales territory. Life was pretty normal for George—his marriage was “fine,” his kids did okay in school, and he went about his daily routine without much disruption.

Then something strange began to happen. Over the course of a few weeks, George started having disturbing thoughts about his death while driving his sales routes. Thoughts like:

“The next time you come this way, you’ll drive over that embankment and be killed.”
“Before it’s filled, your car will drive straight into that excavation, and you will die.”

The scenarios were always the same—his death, always imminent, always tied to the road he was traveling.

These thoughts became more frequent and began to plague him. As they grew stronger, George started losing sleep. He would pace the floor at night, wake up repeatedly, and find himself worrying.

One night, he thought he’d found a way to stop it. That evening, the voice had told him, “The next time you cross that bridge, you will die.” He decided that if he drove back to that bridge right then, crossed it, and didn’t die, he could “prove the voice wrong” and be free from the thoughts.

Even though it was over an hour away and the middle of the night, George got in his car, drove to the bridge, crossed it two or three times, and of course, didn’t die. Relieved, he went home, certain he had “kicked it.”

But a few days later, the voice returned. This time, it gave him a new death prediction, and again he felt compelled to drive to the location and prove it false. Soon, this became a pattern—whenever the thoughts came, he couldn’t sleep until he drove to the spot and disproved them.

Over time, the toll was obvious: less sleep, more anxiety, declining work performance, and a haggard appearance. Eventually, George told his wife what was happening. She was shocked—she had no idea. But she happened to know Dr. M. Scott Peck, a psychiatrist, and told George, “You need help. I’m calling this doctor.”

Therapy with Dr. Peck

At first, in his sessions with Dr. Peck, George insisted he didn’t know where the thoughts were coming from:

“Everything’s fine in my life. There’s no problem.”

But as time went on, he began sharing more—about his abusive childhood, his broken marriage, and his estrangement from two of his three children. He was only close to his youngest, a 10-year-old.

It became clear to Dr. Peck that George was struggling with obsessive-compulsive disorder. The compulsions were running his life. Dr. Peck wanted to help him understand why this was happening, but George resisted. He wouldn’t fully cooperate or admit the seriousness of the problem.

Then, after several months of therapy, George walked into a session elated.

“I’ve solved it! My problems are over. I don’t even know if I need therapy anymore.”

Dr. Peck was skeptical. How could such a long-standing problem vanish in less than a week? Eventually, George admitted his “solution”:

“I made a pact with the devil.”

George quickly clarified that he didn’t actually believe in the devil:

“I don’t think the devil is real. But you wouldn’t command me to stop, and I couldn’t control it myself. I had to get someone in control of the problem—so I decided to make this pact.”

He told Dr. Peck he felt “a little bit guilty” about it, but since it was helping him feel better, he didn’t see what the big deal was—especially since, in his mind, the devil wasn’t even real.

Dr. Peck asked, “What does that mean? Why are you feeling guilty?”

Finally, George admitted, “I guess there’s a little bit more I haven’t told you. There’s another reason I have the ‘guilties’—at least a little bit. You see, there was another part to my agreement with the devil. Because I don’t really believe in the devil, I couldn’t be certain he would actually kill me if I went back. For it to work, I needed some insurance—something that would really keep me from going back.

“What could that be? I wondered. Then it occurred to me that the one thing I love most in the world is my son, Christopher. So I made it part of the agreement that if I gave in to the compulsion and went back, the devil would see to it that Christopher died an early death. Not only would I die, but Christopher would too. Now you know why I can’t go back anymore. Even if the devil’s not real, I’m not willing to risk Christopher’s life on this issue. I love him so much.”

Dr. Peck replied slowly, “So you threw Christopher’s life into the bargain as well?”

“Yes,” George said numbly. “It doesn’t sound good, does it? That’s the part that really gives me the guilties.”

As you can imagine, Dr. Peck sat for several minutes in silence, trying to process what George had just told him. He didn’t want to be judgmental, but this was a serious problem. Sitting across from George, he tried to decide how he felt about what George had done, what the truth of the matter was, and what they should do about it.

Finally, Dr. Peck said he was glad George felt guilty—it meant he still had a conscience and knew what he had done was wrong. “That’s why you feel guilty,” he explained. Then he added, “George, you’re a kind of coward. Whenever the going gets a little rough, you sell out. When you’re faced with the reality that you’re going to die one of these days, you run away from it. You don’t think about it because it’s morbid. When you realize your marriage is lousy, you run away from that too—instead of facing it and doing something about it.

“Because you run away from these things that are inescapable, they come back to haunt you in the form of symptoms, obsessions, and compulsions. These symptoms could be your salvation if you said to yourself, These mean I’m haunted. I’d better find out what these ghosts are and clear them out of my house. But you don’t. Facing them would mean confronting painful realities. So you try to run away from your symptoms too, instead of facing what they mean.

“And when they’re not easy to get rid of, you turn to anything that will give you relief—no matter how wicked, evil, or destructive. You’re always looking for the easy way out, George—not the right way, the easy way. When faced with a choice between the right way and the easy way, you’ll take the easy way every time—the painless way. In fact, you’ll do anything to find that easy way out, even if it means selling your soul and sacrificing your son.

“If you’re willing to face the painful realities of your life—your tearful childhood, your miserable marriage, your mortality, your own cowardice—I can help you, and I’m sure we’ll succeed. But if all you want is the easiest possible relief from pain, then I expect you are the devil’s man.”

This struck George deeply. He knew Dr. Peck was right, but it was hard to face. He had spent his life running.

One of the things I talk about in my new book, How Truth Makes Us Free, and that we emphasize in the Academy, is that problems can be solved—and solved permanently. God has given us truth and principles to guide us toward permanent solutions. But the first step is to be honest about the existence of the problem and to be courageous enough to face it.

The women who join our Academy are some of the most courageous women in the world because they’re willing to say, “My life isn’t what I want it to be. I believe it could be better. I believe that with the right mentoring, community, and resources, I could become more than I am. I could overcome persistent problems, discover my greatest strengths, and become a real resource in my home and community for those seeking to better themselves.”

It takes courage to make that declaration. These women sacrifice—time, money, energy, mental effort, spiritual effort, emotional effort, and social effort—to sign up and do the work. And it works every time. When the women do the work, they see the results. Over the years we spend with them, they find those outcomes—because anything worth doing takes time.

For transformation to be permanent, for it to become subconscious, for it to change the very lens through which you see the world, it takes time, repetition, and effort. That’s what George was facing in this moment. He was so desperate to get out of pain, and so much in his life truly was painful. It wasn’t all his fault—he had endured a terrible childhood, unloving parents, a loveless marriage, and had checked out of most of his relationships.

But the only way forward was through the problem—admitting it, telling himself the truth, looking at all the factors, and choosing to be different.

Luckily, this story has a happy ending. George later said, “For the past ten days, I’ve felt better than I have in many months. I’ve had a few thoughts, but they haven’t really bothered me. If I were to reverse the process, it would mean going back to where I was two weeks ago—in agony.”

“I expect that’s right,” Dr. Peck replied.

“What you’re asking me to do,” George said, “is to voluntarily return to a state of torment.”

“It’s what I’m suggesting you need to do, George—not for me, but for yourself,” Dr. Peck told him. “If it would help you for me to ask you directly, then I will.”

“To actually choose a state of pain…” George mused. “I don’t know. I’m not sure I can do it. I’m not sure I want to do it.”

Dr. Peck stood. “Are you going to see me Monday, George?”

“Yes, I’ll be here.” George stood too. Dr. Peck went over, shook his hand, and said, “Until Monday, then. Goodnight.”

That evening was the turning point in George’s therapy. By Monday, his symptoms had returned in full force, but something had changed. He no longer pleaded with Dr. Peck to tell him not to go back. He was slightly more willing to examine, in depth, his fear of death and the enormous gulf of understanding and communication between himself and his wife.

As time went on, this willingness grew. Eventually, with Dr. Peck’s help, George was able to ask his wife to enter therapy herself.

This story is really amazing, and it perfectly introduces something I want to share with you today about what’s required if we truly want to engage in personal growth. I think you’re here listening because you’re like me—because you’re like the women in our Academy, and like other listeners of this podcast, and those who read The Mission-Driven Life. You’re someone who wants more.

You’re someone who wants to overcome, who wants to really believe that there are answers—someone willing to do what’s necessary, but needing to know deep down that the answers really do exist. And I promise you, they do.

Scott Peck goes on to teach a concept that, the first time I read it, completely blew my mind. He talks about how we become evil and how we become good. For George, this was a matter of life—certainly his moral life, but probably his physical life as well. His choice in that moment would make all the difference moving forward. He had to decide: would he side with good or with evil?

Now, there are plenty of people who would make fun of this—“Oh, he made a pact with the devil,” they’d say. “He didn’t really believe in the devil,” and so on. But that’s not the issue here. The issue isn’t whether or not he believed in the devil, or even whether the devil exists. The real issue is this: he was knowingly about to do something he knew was wrong in order to escape legitimate suffering.

He wanted to avoid the pain of things that had been done to him and the poor choices he himself had made. But that suffering was part of the process he needed to face if he wanted to move forward into real growth and healing. He had to decide whether to ignore his conscience or listen to it—whether to side with the good or the evil part of his heart.

In The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn describes this perfectly. He says that right down the middle of every human heart runs a line dividing good from evil, and we each have to decide which side we’ll land on—and how far toward the good we’re willing to go. Willingness is the key here. It’s the willingness to listen when we know what we should do—or what we should not do.

Scott Peck ends this section with a profound thought. He points out that most people we think of as evil—think about Hitler—are actually very strong-willed. And so, we might assume that it’s their strong will that makes them so evil, allowing them to harm so many people. But Peck challenges that idea. He says:

“It’s tempting to think that the problem of evil lies in the will itself. Perhaps the evil are born so inherently strong-willed that it’s impossible for them ever to submit their will. Yet I think it’s characteristic of all great people—whether their greatness be for good or for evil—that they are extremely strong-willed.”

You can read The Mission-Driven Life or listen to the audiobook and hear the mission-driven stories I share—stories of many great men and women—and you’ll notice that they were all very strong-willed. They moved toward what was good, right, true, and virtuous with great force and intention.

Peck goes on:

“The strong will, the power and authority of Jesus, radiates from the Gospels just as Hitler’s did from Mein Kampf.”

If you don’t know, Mein Kampf is the book Hitler wrote in prison, outlining his intentions before he was released and rose to power. The Gospels reveal the will of Jesus; Mein Kampf reveals the will of Hitler. So what’s the distinctive difference? Jesus’ will was aligned with His Father’s. Hitler’s will was aligned only with himself.

The crucial distinction is between willingness and willfulness. And that’s where our choice lies. We get to decide, every day, which side of that line in our heart we will land on—through both our small and big choices.

That’s why I want to talk to you about how to ensure you’re engaging in your own personal growth. When we understand what it means to be willing—through the example of George’s story—we see the truth Scott Peck pointed out: George was willing, even in small ways, to examine his pain. Over time, those small acts of willingness grew. He became willing to face bigger and harder things until eventually, he found peace again and was able to move forward.

Because when we are willful—when we resist giving up what we know we should give up, or resist taking on what we know we should take on—we stop our own growth. We cannot move forward unless, as the title of this podcast suggests, we give something up or take something on.

For George, he had to give up his illusions about a perfect life. He had to give up avoiding pain. He had to stop running away from everything and finally stand still, face the truth, and deal with it.

I want to tell you another story—this one about Eric Metaxas. I may have mentioned it before in years past, but it’s such a beautiful story. It demonstrates so clearly the importance of giving something up in the process of our spiritual growth, if we’re truly willing. When we hand over our hearts and minds to what we know is good, true, and beautiful, we will also be willing to release the things that are holding us back.

Eric Metaxas had something he needed to give up as well. He’s written many incredible books—he’s a #1 New York Times bestselling author. I think he’s marvelous. I’ve met him, and I truly admire him.

One of his books, Amazing Grace, was life-changing for me during the last leg of the journey in the MDM Academy. Once you finish your mission project and graduate from the Academy, you’re invited to join our Clapham Leadership Team—named after the Clapham Sect, which I learned about through Amazing Grace. So, that’s a pretty special connection for me.

Eric’s conversion story is a perfect example of this principle: that if we want to grow, there’s either something we must give up or something we must take on. In his case, it was something to give up.

His mother immigrated from East Germany, having grown up during the Communist reign in World War II. She eventually came to the United States, where she met Eric’s father, who had immigrated from Greece. They met in an English-speaking class, hit it off, fell in love, and got married.

And, as Eric likes to say, “If you’re raised by a German and a Greek, how do you think you’re raised?”

Greek.

Eric grew up attending the Greek Orthodox Church and Greek schools, but he always felt like he wasn’t “Greek enough.” Everyone else seemed fully Greek, and he didn’t quite fit in. He felt a little odd. Still, he was naturally bright and had good parents who ensured he had a good life and childhood.

When the time came, Eric was accepted to Yale. Up to that point, he had never developed a strong foundation in any faith—least of all Christianity. Yale, a thoroughly secular school then and even more so now, made it obvious from the moment you arrived on campus: it wasn’t “cool” to believe in God or to be a person of faith. That wasn’t how you fit in. And because Eric had always felt like an outsider, he wanted desperately to fit in at Yale. So, he became an agnostic—and, in his own words, very lost.

Over time, he became more worldly. After graduating, he struggled to find a job—he’d been an English major—and eventually moved back home. That felt awkward and humiliating, and he saw himself as even more of a failure. His parents, who had sacrificed to send him to Yale, were bewildered. “What is going on?” they asked.

During this low point, Eric landed a job as an editor for a company where a devout Christian coworker kept sharing his faith. For months, Eric avoided the conversations—ignoring or shutting the man down. But slowly, his heart softened. He began to listen, just a little. Privately, he sometimes prayed, “God, why aren’t you there?” He wasn’t sure how he felt about anything.

One day, that coworker handed Eric a slip of paper with Jeremiah 29:11 written on it: “For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” For a young man who felt trapped, who feared God might harm him if he believed, and who was utterly lost, this verse made a deep impression.

As time went on, his heart softened more. Then, one night, he had a dream. The symbolism in the dream was rich—connected to his childhood, his interests, his Greek heritage, and many other layers. When he awoke, he knew without question that Christ was the Savior. “I went to bed single,” he later said, “and I woke up married.”

At work that day, his coworker immediately noticed the difference. “What’s changed?” he asked.
“I have accepted Christ,” Eric replied—something he admitted he would have been embarrassed to say even the day before.

In his interview with Jordan Peterson, Eric explained, “I was a different person. From that day forward, my life changed dramatically. The first—slightly embarrassing—manifestation of that change was that I immediately stopped sleeping with my girlfriend of three years. I just knew I can’t do that. That’s for marriage.”

In that moment, he recognized that God was real, Christ was the Savior, and that following Him meant living differently—even giving something up that had been a central part of his life. He chose to obey. Happily, he chose the path of integrity. Today, Eric Metaxas is a man of profound influence and impact, living out principles that align closely with the Seven Laws of Life Mission.

When Eric told Jordan Peterson about ending the relationship, Peterson said, “So, that’s a sacrifice.” Eric responded:

“Yes and no. People often say God always outgives you. Whatever you give up for Him is nothing compared to what He gives you. I had such a sense of His presence in those first days of my conversion that I thought, I wouldn’t give that up for anything. I wouldn’t do anything to hinder that personal relationship with the God who loves me, died for me, and created the universe. It was so beautiful and extraordinary that I wouldn’t do anything to screw it up. That’s more valuable than anything in the world.”

I’ve personally experienced something similar. Over the years, I’ve had to give up many things: complaining, gossip, unhealthy eating, negative self-talk, rescuing people, small thinking, judgmental attitudes, and sarcasm—something deeply ingrained from my upbringing that took real effort to remove.

If you feel stuck—unsure why you’re not growing, why you can’t solve persistent problems, or why life isn’t improving—start by asking: What do I need to give up? Bring it before God. He loves you and wants you to get unstuck. Ask Him what needs to change.

But personal growth isn’t always about giving something up. Sometimes, it’s about taking something on—an area of growth we don’t talk about enough.

In Scripture, the rich young man approached Jesus, saying in essence: “Good Master, what good thing shall I do to have eternal life?” He had already been living obediently, giving up much to follow the commandments. Yet Jesus replied, “You lack one thing: sell all you have, give to the poor, and follow Me.”

For him, it meant both giving something up and taking something on—the role and responsibility of a true disciple. But he walked away sad, unable to make the sacrifice.

This principle applies to us too. My friend and colleague Tracy Hyde is a perfect example. She’ll soon be rejoining the Mission-Driven Mom Academy, and I couldn’t be happier. When we approached her about coming back, she was honest: her youngest child was about to leave home, she had plenty of free time, and she was comfortable. Taking on new responsibilities—showing up to meetings, meeting deadlines, being accountable to a team—was not what she wanted.

You know, she doesn’t need the money. She’s very comfortable. Her husband is very successful, and they have a very comfortable lifestyle. She doesn’t have to do it.

Here’s what she did: She asked God to soften her heart if this was something He wanted her to do. And in that regard, she’s a truly mission-driven mom.

She’s invested in doing the missions God is calling her to. And often, those missions mean taking something on in a very real sense. All the way through the academy, we’re giving things up—wrong paradigms about ourselves, bad habits we’ve been carrying—and we’re taking things on. We’re learning, growing, studying, practicing principles.

We’re learning to discuss valuable insights and concepts with our families. Eventually, we take on more of a leadership role in our homes and in our communities.

So, for Tracy, this was a place she felt called to again—but she only knew that because she was softhearted, because she listened, because she asked God, “Is this where You want me?” And He said, “Yes.” But she could only hear that answer because she was willing to take something on.

I’m confident that in a few years from now, if we ask her whether she has experienced a lot of personal growth from taking on the role of helping in the academy again—overseeing it and mentoring our moms—she will say, “Yes.” That’s what it requires.

One of the reasons I wanted to talk about this today is because I had a really interesting conversation with someone else in my life recently—someone I truly love and respect. They asked me:

“What do you do if you feel God is asking you to do something, but you really don’t want to? You’re scared of it, you’re certain you can’t do it, and you’re convinced it’s going to turn out badly because it’s not something that comes naturally to you—or something you could ever see yourself doing—and you don’t even want to do it?”

The first question I asked this person was, “Are you certain God wants you to?”

They said, “Yes. It’s been nagging me for years, and now it’s become very clear that this is something I need to seriously consider doing.”

So I said, “Then I would ask the next question: Why am I afraid to do it? Why am I convinced it’s going to turn out badly? Why would God ask me to do something that would be awful for me and for everyone I love?”

She was being asked to take something on—and it was scary and hard and overwhelming. But sometimes growth requires taking something on. That’s the only way we can learn the next things we have to learn.

I don’t know if I’ve told this story before, but in the past, one of the things I was asked to take on was being a foster mother.

It was excruciatingly difficult. I won’t go into all the details here, but there was an emergency need in my extended family, and I was the only one available. I had four children of my own. Overnight, I suddenly had three more—and then I brought a newborn home from the hospital.

I went from four children to eight children: two under two, a newborn, and two eight-year-olds. They were all young. Of course, they got the chickenpox and all kinds of other things went wrong. I had to get foster care certified in the middle of it.

But I knew it was the right thing to do. I knew it was what I was being asked to do. Still, it was one of the hardest things I have ever done. It was painful and overwhelming every single day. I was stretched to my absolute limit and beyond. It asked things of me that I was certain I could not do.

And yet, in that process, I learned things about myself—some good and some not so good—that I never could have learned any other way. It stretched me to my capacity. It required me to pray in ways I had never prayed before and to plead for guidance in ways I never had before.

When you have your own children, they’re yours—they’re not going anywhere. You love them and you’re on the journey with them for life and beyond. But with foster children, who you might not keep, in a very real way, their lives are in your hands.

I knew two things because my cousin had been in the foster care system years ago and had been abused. I knew that if I handed these kids back to the system, they would probably be abused. And I knew that everyone—including the people in the foster system—guaranteed me that the children would not remain together.

This called upon parts of me I didn’t even know existed. It enabled me to come to know God in ways I never had before—to lean on Him in ways I never had before—and to trust Him more implicitly than ever. This experience became one of the most spiritually profound of my life.

He changed me profoundly—literally in a day. I was a different person. And that change was permanent. The people around me were shocked and amazed at what happened to me because of that experience.

But I had to be willing to take on something I didn’t want to do.

Now, a couple of these stories I’ve shared were things that, at first, I didn’t see as opportunities—but they turned out to be some of the most beautiful experiences of my life.

The end of the foster care story is that everything turned out beautifully for those children. I was not to keep them; they were not mine. God helped me see that, and He healed me completely so that I had perfect faith about their future.

My mom took care of them for a time, and then—miraculously—a family who had just become foster care certified received the call about them. They knew instantly these were their children. They took all four and adopted them.

It was a miracle. I watched God work in a way I never could have experienced without being willing to take something on.

Some of you may know there’s something you need to take on. And maybe you feel like you’re silently dying inside as I encourage you—just like the rich young man didn’t want to give up his riches because his identity was wrapped up in them.

I didn’t want to give up the safe, secure, comfortable home I had for these children I barely knew, along with all the challenges they brought with them. But sometimes taking things on is scary and hard for different reasons.

There have been plenty of things—running a business, doing a podcast, getting on stages, writing books—that were terrifying for me. I spent years rationalizing not doing them.

I recently read a book by Ben Hardy where he talked about how it took him five years to convince himself to write regularly and build up a blog.

These things are hard. It’s hard to give things up. It’s hard to take things on. But the alternative is stagnation, sameness, and the frustration of feeling like life isn’t what we want it to be—and not knowing how to get there.

I’m here to tell you today that a big part of getting there probably involves giving something up or taking something on. If, as you’ve been listening, you’ve felt little inklings about something you might need to release—or something new you might need to embrace—it’s likely because that’s your next step for personal growth.

So don’t resist it. Don’t be willful. Don’t push away the things that are calling you. You are being called to be more. There is so much more in you.

I can’t tell you how many women I’ve watched blossom in the Academy—women who were timid, introverted, scared, and overwhelmed—blossoming into beautiful, confident, self-assured women. They know who they are. They’re willing to bring their gifts and talents forward in situations where they never would have had the courage or confidence before.

They may not be on TV or the radio. You may never meet them or know their names. But they’re making a real difference in the world—living truth, teaching truth, and leaning into their greatest strengths.

And it all happened because they were willing to give things up and take things on. That is the way forward. That’s my way forward. It’s a proven path.

What’s miraculous—and I’ve talked about this a lot lately—is that you always know the next thing. God is so merciful; He will show you the next step.

If that next step is working with us in the Academy, I welcome you. I’m excited to meet you and get to know you. If it’s going back to school, telling your spouse you’re sorry, stopping the habit of complaining—whatever it is—please step into it.

And here’s the truth: if God is calling you to give something up or take something on, it will be for your ultimate good. You will look back and bless that decision. Eventually, you will see that you could not have grown in that way without the opportunity He presented to you.

So take advantage of it. Lean into it. And you will find yourself beginning to grow and transform in beautiful ways.

Make sure to grab your free audio copy of The Mission-Driven Life: How to Discover and Fulfill Your Unique Contribution to the World. And I’ll see you here next time.

 Get Your FREE Audiobook of The Mission Driven Life: Discover and Fulfill Your Unique Contribution to the World: https://www.themissiondrivenmom.com/

There's so much drama in the world and it is no fun! We all want to have peace and unity but sometimes we cannot figure out why they elude us. 

In this episode, Audrey walks you through what drama is, why it happens, how we choose in, and how you can get out- permanently! 

With resources for owning your life and moving forward with greater confidence and clarity, this podcast is for anyone who feels stuck, frustrated or unmotivated!

Here's the David Emerald interview to listen to: https://www.themissiondrivenmom.com/podcasts/the-mission-driven-mom-podcast/episodes/2148868481

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Podcast Transcript (AI generated):

 Welcome back to the podcast!
I'm Audrey Rindlisbacher, the author of The Mission-Driven Life and the founder of The Mission-Driven Mom. On this podcast, you can expect to hear all things related to mission-driven living.

When I was a stuck mom with several small children, and my finances, health, and marriage were all out of control—along with other issues—we were struggling with addiction and other major problems. I went on a search to find answers. When therapy, online courses, and other sources didn’t work, I wanted to discover how to live more intentionally.

That’s when I found the Seven Laws of Life Mission—laws that have been lived by the greatest men and women throughout history. I studied the lives of dozens and dozens of them. These seven laws are outlined in my book, The Mission-Driven Life. You can grab a free copy of the audiobook at themissiondrivenmom.com. I highly recommend you go get that, and stay tuned for upcoming episodes where we’ll continue to explore all things mission-driven living—how to become a Mission-Driven Mom and how we can engage in that process today.

If you’re new to the podcast, I recommend going back to the beginning. We’ve reordered the episodes for you, so you can binge-listen and follow the whole process. We have in-depth episodes on each of the seven laws and the principles that undergird them. We also share many, many stories of mission-driven individuals. We highlight these regularly so you can see the laws in action in the lives of great men and women.

In The Mission-Driven Life, I talk about the Ten Boom family—my lifelong heroes. I idolized them for years until I realized that they were just like me when they were young. Through these Seven Laws of Life Mission, they became the incredible people who saved over 800 Jews during World War II.

So again, grab the audiobook for free at themissiondrivenmom.com. You can also purchase a hard copy of the book for just $17. While you're there, you can learn more about everything we do at The Mission-Driven Mom—including our online academy for women.

Thank you so much for being here today. If this podcast has blessed your life in any way, we’d love for you to leave a review. This helps others know they can find quality content here, and it encourages them to tune in and learn how to live mission-driven lives alongside us.

Today’s Topic: A Life-Changing Concept

Today, we’re going to talk about a concept that has been one of the most revolutionary in my own life. It's also one of our moms’ favorite things to learn in the academy. This concept has the power to radically transform your paradigms.

We’ve talked recently about paradigm shifts—how they are the shortcut to living a more mission-driven life. We want to actively engage in learning, prayer, thoughtfulness, and discussion so those paradigm shifts happen more often.

Well, today’s concept is definitely a paradigm shift.

It comes from a man named Stephen Karpman. While working on his doctoral degree, he developed what we now call the Drama Triangle (also known as the Drama Cycle). He was encouraged by his professors to write a paper on it, and though I don’t believe he ever wrote a full book, the concept took off—and now it's everywhere.

Hopefully, if you’ve engaged in any kind of relationship training, therapy, or coaching, you’ve heard about the Drama Triangle. There’s also an opposite model—an antidote to the drama—that we teach in depth in the academy. Today, I’ll give you a tool to begin using that antidote once we talk through how the Drama Triangle works.

A Personal Example

A few years ago, I was in an ongoing argument with one of my teenage daughters. She was making certain decisions I didn’t agree with, and I kept pushing her to change. I was nagging a lot, and it began to erode our relationship.

Then one day, she said something really painful—but also incredibly helpful. She was very upset and said:

“I just feel like you just want to fix me.”

That sentence struck a deep chord. It hit me hard because I knew exactly what she meant, thanks to what I had learned about the Drama Triangle. It helped me realize how I had been showing up in our relationship, and it caused me to back off and reevaluate how I was handling the situation.

This is the power of a paradigm shift—it helps you behave differently in the world.

What Is the Drama Triangle?

Stephen Karpman taught that "drama" is a specific kind of relationship pattern. We see it everywhere—in popular movies, books, music. A lot of the conflict in those stories stems from drama. We can feel it. We say things like, “Why are they being so dramatic?” or “This feels out of control.”

Some of the symptoms or “fruits” of the Drama Triangle include:

These are not the fruits we want in our relationships. We want peace, unity, contentment, empathy, and love. But those things cannot flourish when we are caught in drama.

Here’s the most empowering part: You are in the driver’s seat. Just like we discussed in the “One Shift Away” episode, when you’re unaware, you don’t know how to change. But when you learn and take ownership of your thinking and your behaviors, you can change—and that is incredibly empowering.

The Three Roles in the Drama Triangle

There are three “players” in this game of drama. Often, we default to these roles based on childhood experiences. These patterns worked for us as kids—or were vital for survival—but we never outgrew them. We haven’t recognized what we’re doing, so we keep replaying the same dynamics.

Let’s break it down.

1. The Persecutor

The catalyst for drama is often a Persecutor—the "bad guy." But here’s the kicker: the persecutor doesn’t have to be a person. It could be:

You can even be your own persecutor. Many of us—especially women—beat ourselves up constantly. A little self-reflection can be helpful, but most of the time, it’s damaging. What we really need is truth (another invaluable tool we dive into in the academy).

The persecutor is something we’re resisting. It’s the thing we think is making us unhappy. When we feel overwhelmed, stuck, or like we can’t function, that’s often our internal signal that we’re caught in drama—and that the persecutor role is active.

The persecutor says things like:

This role is all about blame—blaming others or ourselves. Persecutors criticize, guilt-trip, shame, set unrealistic rules, and focus entirely on the problem, not the solution.

And here’s the truth: everyone in the Drama Triangle is focused on the problem. That’s why they’re stuck there.

I’ll go deeper into the other two roles—the Rescuer and the Victim—in the next section of this episode.

Now we have the “good guy” in the drama triangle: the Rescuer.

This is the role I most often fall into. And I’ve seen so many mothers and women who also default to the Rescuer role. We’re going to talk in just a minute about why that is—there’s a good reason. Part of it comes from our female temperament. It also comes from being nurturers. But there’s another, deeper reason as well.

Let’s start with the kinds of things rescuers say. I’ve said them so many times myself:

Sound familiar? The Rescuer often thinks, “I’ve made all these sacrifices, done all this work, and poured out so much for you.”

Here’s the real problem: rescuers feel obligated to rescue—even when they don’t want to. They see a problem in someone else's life (often before the person has even identified it themselves), and jump in with, “Did you know you have a problem? Let me give you the solution!”

It’s ridiculous, honestly. But it’s so easy to fall into that trap.

And when we do, we often end up subverting natural law—the Law of the Harvest. We try to prevent someone from experiencing the natural consequences of their actions. We’re “smoothing the road,” trying to make things easier for them. But what we’re really doing is cutting them off from vital growth experiences. We’re preventing them from seeing truth in action. And when they miss those lessons, they can’t grow. They can’t mature. They don’t learn to make better decisions.

That’s the damage a Rescuer does.

The Consequences of Rescuing

When we identify other people’s problems and jump in to fix them before they even want help—or worse, fix it for them—we are blocking their personal development.

They may be adults, but we’re still parenting them like children. And in doing so, we’re halting their emotional and spiritual growth.

Rescuers also tend to do things for others that those people didn’t ask for—things they should be doing for themselves. This is a huge issue for moms. We start out doing everything for our children, as we should when they’re infants and toddlers. But the key is to practice wisdom at every stage of their growth. We must allow our children to take on the maximum amount of personal responsibility they can handle at each age.

That’s how they mature. That’s how they become independent.

When we over-rescue, we stunt their growth. We have a generation of adult children still living at home year after year, not pursuing independence—because their parents are keeping them young, doing for them what they should be doing for themselves.

Rescuers Feel Guilty When They're Not Helping

This is another huge piece.

Many rescuers feel intense guilt when they’re not helping someone. They feel aimless if they don’t have someone to “fix.” They don’t have a project of their own.

I had a wonderful friend—an amazing mom and a woman striving to be a good wife. But she was so wrapped up in everyone else’s lives that she wasn’t working on herself.

I used to say to her constantly, “Work on what’s yours. Work on what’s yours.”

She would fall into Rescuer mode simply because she didn’t have anything else to focus on. This is a modern-day epidemic. With all the technology and convenience we enjoy in the West, women have more leisure time than ever before in human history. And if we use that extra time to hover over our families—trying to solve their problems—we rob ourselves and them of the opportunity to grow.

This is why the Mission-Driven Mom model is so vital. It gives us what’s ours. It helps us identify our gifts and talents, develop them, and use them to bless our families and communities.

When you know your mission, you have purpose. You have meaningful work. You don’t need to micromanage everyone else’s lives. You can support your family every step of the way without making them miserable—or yourself miserable—through chronic rescuing.

The Rescuer’s Harmful Message

Here’s another consequence of rescuing that often goes unnoticed: You reinforce someone’s identity as a victim.

This is what I was doing with my daughter. That’s why she said, “I feel like you’re trying to fix me.”

In one of the books I read during my deep dive into the drama triangle, the author made something very clear: when you're in Rescuer mode, people around you can feel it. They know you’re trying to avoid pain—both your own and theirs. But in doing so, you're stopping them from learning life’s lessons the proper way.

My daughter was saying, “Your way of being is communicating something to me. It’s telling me that you think I’m broken.”

That’s why I was trying to fix her. That’s why I was trying to make her decisions for her. That’s why I was stepping in over and over. Because at a subconscious level, I believed she needed rescuing.

And here’s the tricky part: if you had asked me, I would have said, “I don’t think you’re broken.” I might’ve told her, “You’re just being dramatic,” or “That’s not what I’m doing,” or “Your thoughts are your problem.”

But my behavior was saying something entirely different.

My actions were communicating: You’re broken. You’re incapable. You need me to fix this for you.

Getting Out of the Rescuer Trap

It’s a hard balance. I get it. This is why having community is so vital—why the MDM Academy is such a powerful tool. We have mentors, peers, and fellow mission-driven moms who help us reflect and get perspective.

We recently did a deep dive into the drama triangle and the Creator alternative. One woman shared how she’s been actively using these tools to pull herself out of drama when it creeps in. Another woman said she had been doing well but had some recent family drama arise, and this refresher was exactly what she needed.

Together, we’re having ongoing conversations in the community, meeting regularly, and supporting one another as we strive to move from Victim to Creator.

It’s incredible, liberating stuff. It will heal your relationships. It will help you love yourself and others in a whole new way.

The Third Role: The Victim

Of course, the third role in the drama triangle is—yep, you guessed it—the Victim.

The Victim is the one who’s hurting. The one who doesn’t like what’s happening to them.

Victims say things like:

Now, some people act like victims but claim they’re not in self-pity. And maybe, in rare cases, that’s true. But most of the time, when we’re in Victim mode, we are in self-pity.

We feel:

We feel like we don’t have answers. Like we don’t know how to fix our situation. And sometimes, that’s actually true—we may not yet know how to make things better. But we can learn. We can grow. We can shift into a Creator orientation.

That’s the key.

Instead of thinking and acting like a victim, we begin thinking and acting like a Creator. And when we do that, everything changes.

Victims often look for a Rescuer to validate their victimhood and reinforce their negative self-beliefs. That’s the toxic dance that keeps the drama triangle spinning.

Now, I'm going to be completely transparent here. Even though I taught this in the Academy, I still fell prey to it. I'm much better at it now, but I still fall into it sometimes.

In fact, internally, inside the business, I still held some false paradigms—some false beliefs about myself—that were causing me to act or think like a victim in certain ways and to look for rescuers.

And when you look for rescuers, they usually show up. But then you interact in ways that are unhealthy, and it's damaging to everyone around you.

Even though we were clear about this concept, you still have to learn it. You have to practice it. You have to get better at it. Luckily, I knew the structure, and I was able to catch it. I was able to understand it, to process it, to see it clearly—and then to step into my creatorhood and show up differently again, both for myself and for the people around me—as a creator instead of a victim.

Here’s the crux of it all. Here's the fundamental issue at the heart of the drama triangle: the victim gets to avoid taking responsibility.

That’s really what the whole game is about.

If you're a victim, you didn’t do anything wrong. You're not to blame. It's not your fault that your husband is x or your children are y, or that your house is a mess, or that your parents failed you, or that you got fired, or whatever current life circumstance is oppressing you or making you feel victimized.

If you can prove to yourself—and to others—that you're truly a victim, then you can get your needs met without having to meet them yourself. You can garner empathy, attention, help (maybe financial or otherwise). People will listen to you, care about you, and do things for you that they wouldn’t otherwise do—because you’re a victim. It pulls at their heartstrings. They want to be there for you.

And being in the victim role also causes people to expect less from you. It enables you to avoid effort. Most importantly, it gets you out of meeting your own needs.

Almost always, when we are trapped in drama—especially over a long period of time—and we’re struggling to get out, it’s fundamentally because we are not aware of our real needs and we’re not meeting them.

I talk about this principle in The Mission-Driven Life book. If you don’t have the audiobook yet, go grab it and listen to it—it’ll help you see this clearly. Of course, in the Academy, we do a deep dive on all things needs-related and help you walk through the process to do that well. But you can begin practicing the principle right now just by getting the book and learning what it means to meet your real needs.

Because when needs aren’t being met, people feel depleted. And when we feel depleted, we start feeling negative and down. Then we look around for a persecutor.

If I don’t feel the way I want to feel, and I can identify a persecutor, then I can justify why I feel so bad. It makes me feel better to say, “Oh, I feel this way because of that person or that situation.”

But here’s the thing: no one and nothing has to control us.

This is the great lesson from Man’s Search for Meaning, which sold millions and millions of copies. Almost any great or influential person you've come across has probably read that book—and they can talk to you about Viktor Frankl. Because he, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and others like them proved—pretty much definitively—that you can live in a concentration camp and still be free.

They showed that you can have every human freedom taken away, but you still have the choice of your attitude.

You always have choice. You can always choose your response. You can take responsibility for how you show up in the world—regardless of how awful your circumstances are.

That’s the great lesson of Man’s Search for Meaning.

It’s also a key element in all of this: recognizing that we’re acting like victims and creating drama, which makes us and the people around us unhappy, because we are avoiding some sort of responsibility.

I’ll never forget the first time I read The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. The first habit is: Be Proactive. And when I really understood that habit—which is a key principle of human development and growth—I remember saying to my husband, “This is huge.”

It really was a massive paradigm shift for me.

Most of us—so much of the time—are just struggling to live that first habit: to really take complete ownership of ourselves and say, “I am where I am because of the choices I made. And I can change my circumstances because I can change me.”

It’s the most powerful phrase in the world:
“I can change my circumstances because I can change me.”

That’s at the very core of shifting from a victim orientation to a creator orientation. It’s like putting on a new pair of glasses and seeing the world through a different lens:
“I am a creator. I created this, so I can create something else.”

No matter what’s going on around me, I control my response.

I want to finish off today by giving you a few tools you can start using right away, and some additional resources you can turn to.

As I said earlier, awareness is everything. Just understanding that drama is a real thing—that we are choosing to participate in it and that we can choose out of it at any time—is powerful.

If we’re fighting with someone, if we’re feeling stuck, if life doesn’t look the way we want it to, and we find ourselves blaming, shaming, being negative most of the time—we can stop and ask:

It’s because we don’t like how life is going—and we feel helpless.

That’s the victim mindset.

Because in that moment, we’re not choosing to be a creator and make the situation different.

So the first thing you have to do is be honest with yourself. You are problem-focused. You’re feeling this way because you are not focused on the solution and what you can do.

As soon as you get honest and sit with yourself and say, “Okay, I don’t like how things are going. I don’t like how powerless I feel. But I want to be a creator. I want to own my life. I want to make things different”—that’s when things begin to shift.

Then, you can ask yourself these three clarifying questions, which come from a great book called The 3 Vital Questions by David Emerald. He goes into a lot of detail, but I’ll just touch on them briefly.

What actions am I taking?

When you examine your relationships, ask yourself: How am I relating? Look at your relationship with yourself, with others, and with your experiences. Ask: Is the way I’m relating to myself, others, and my experiences empowering or disempowering?

Asking empowering questions is another vital and helpful tool we walk you through in the Academy. It can guide you through this process of awareness and transformation.

Ask yourself:

For example, if I’m with my child and I’m not focused on the good or the outcomes, then I’m relating in ways that create contention and negativity. I’m not innovating. I’m not collaborating. I’m not being resilient. I’m not overcoming stumbling blocks and brushing myself off to keep going.

That inner state leads to actions—good or bad. My focus shapes how I relate to the world and ultimately what I do.

This third and final question assesses how I'm relating to outcomes:

Am I sitting passively, letting life happen to me? Am I being unintentional?

That’s a key element of being a Mission-Driven Mom: intentionality.

Mission-Driven Moms are deliberate. They think things through. They plant their foot, they know what they want, and they take small steps to get there. You predetermine where you’re going. Instead of reacting, you become proactive, like Stephen Covey describes. You choose your responses.

Like the men and women in concentration camps who had all their freedoms taken away—you still have the ability to choose how you respond. You always have the power to choose how you relate to yourself, to others, and to your experiences.

You can change your inner state by focusing on your intentions and desired outcomes. That change in your inner state changes how you relate, and ultimately, the actions you take.

These are the three vital questions I encourage you to explore. Journal about them. Get honest with yourself. Ask how you can be more Creator-focused.

I also recommend listening to my interview with David Emerald, which I’ll link in the show notes. It’s part of our Mission-Driven Stories series. David is the creator of the Creator Orientation (the opposite of the Drama Triangle). In that model, the three key roles are the Coach, the Challenger, and the Creator.

It’s a beautiful framework—we teach it in the Academy, and it was incredibly eye-opening and helpful for me personally. He gives great suggestions and practical insights.

Let me share a few things from a little booklet that provides even more powerful insights. She writes:

“In order to break free of victim consciousness, you must take charge of meeting your own needs. You must be willing to ask for what you want or need 100% of the time. This doesn’t mean you’ll always have to ask, only that you’re willing to. Individuating means learning to trust your inner knowing and taking full responsibility for creating the experiences of your life.”

You can no longer blame others—or bad luck—for what’s happening to you. Becoming personally responsible for your life is a big part of breaking free from the Drama Triangle.

And again, if you feel drawn to join us in the Academy, we’d love to meet you, get to know you, and walk this mission-driven path with you. We’ll give you the tools to break out of the Drama Triangle, discover your gifts, and lead in your home. You can learn more about that at themissiondrivenmom.com.

As we wrap up, I want to touch briefly on why we show up in certain ways in the Drama Triangle. This author explains it well:

“We each have a favorite place for entering the Drama Triangle, which we learned in our family of origin.”

Now, I don’t think this is always 100% the case—but often it is. And I can see it in myself.

She explains that parentified children—those who acted as caregivers or peacekeepers in the home—typically enter the Drama Triangle through the Rescuer role. They’ve been conditioned to be people-pleasing caretakers.

That was me. I’m number six of my dad’s ten children, but I’m the oldest of the five he had with my mom. So although I had five older half-siblings, I was often the oldest child at home. My dad was gone a lot, and my mom was dealing with her own struggles, so I stepped into a caregiving role early on. I took care of my younger siblings constantly, and I became the helper, the "little general."

The author continues:

“Parentified children function as little generals to avoid conflict, to feel important, and to stay in control. They often become teachers, ministers, doctors, nurses—people in the helping or healing professions.”

But if they haven’t truly stepped out of the Drama Triangle, they may form unhealthy relationships with their clients—because their own wounds remain unhealed.

That’s why I said earlier: if you’re seeking coaching or therapy, it’s critical to have a principled paradigm—one we can teach you in the Academy. Then you can discern who’s truly able to help you.

She warns:

“Counselors and other professional helpers can easily get caught in the Drama Triangle with clients—sometimes in ways that traumatize their clients further.”

This often happens because clients and counselors share similar wounds. The counselor’s unhealed trauma can provoke a mutual drama dynamic without either person being aware.

As many of you know, my husband has a degree in Marriage and Family Therapy. And while there were some wonderful people in his program, there were also those with deep, unresolved trauma.

So just be cautious. Be discerning.

The author also explains that:

“People who were repeatedly rescued in their families—especially by older siblings or grandparents—often enter the Drama Triangle through the Victim role. They use conflict and drama to manipulate others into taking care of them without having to ask directly.”

I see this clearly in my own family—and you probably do too. But we must grow up and grow out of the Drama Triangle.

We must become aware of it, learn about it, and consciously choose a different way of being.

“Those who were abused as children often enter the Drama Triangle through the Persecutor role. It gives them an outlet for their unresolved pain and allows them to pass on their abuse through a cycle of cruelty.”

This can happen in all kinds of abuse—emotional, physical, sexual—or even subtle manipulation. These individuals often find someone “weaker” to act out their desire for revenge.

Ultimately, this all comes back to living a mission-driven life—a life grounded in love.

As M. Scott Peck explains in The Road Less Traveled, love is the willingness to nurture one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.

That’s what we’re called to do.

We cannot have true love, deep connection, or unity if we’re stuck in drama. Drama erases love from our relationships.

And love is what we all long for.

Real love is only present when we take full responsibility for ourselves, meet our own needs, and only expect from others what they can truly give.

That’s why this work is so essential.

➡️ Grab the free audiobook at themissiondrivenmom.com.
➡️ Go listen to the David Emerald interview.
➡️ Watch his videos online.
➡️ Learn more on your own—or let us mentor you through it in the Academy.

The love, connection, and peace you’re seeking—it’s possible.

But you have to understand drama… and step out of it.

Step into being a Creator more and more. You can do it.

You can be the Mission-Driven Mom, the Mission-Driven Woman, you long to be. You can show up differently for yourself and others.

And this paradigm shift—along with the Three Vital Questions and other tools—will get you there.

Thank you so much for joining me today. It’s a privilege to share these ideas with you.

If there’s a topic you’d like me to cover on the podcast, or a question about mission-driven living, I’d love to hear from you.

Thanks again—and I’ll see you next time.

Make sure and claim your FREE copy of the audiobook The Mission Driven Life: Discover and Fulfill Your Unique Contribution to the World: https://www.themissiondrivenmom.com/

We want change SO badly! We want to solve the persistent problems we struggle with. We want to move past our roadblocks and begin meeting our potential!

But we feel so stuck!

In this episode Audrey teaches you one KEY SECRET that unlocks everything for you! When you understand the 3 tools to creating the quantum leap you long for, you'll be on your way to the transformation that makes everything else possible--especially discovering and fulfilling YOUR unique life missions!

_________________

Podcast Transcript (AI Generated)

 Welcome back to the podcast. I'm Audrey Rindlisbacher, author of The Mission Driven Life and Founder of the Mission Driven Mom. If you’re new to this podcast, you might want to keep up with the latest episodes, but also consider going back and starting from the beginning. We’ve reorganized some of them to give you a solid overview of the Seven Laws of Life Mission and everything we cover here on the Mission Driven Mom Podcast and in our academies.

You can also visit themissiondrivenmom.com and get your free audiobook of The Mission Driven Life. That book will help you discover and fulfill your unique contribution to the world. It’s a deep dive into the Seven Laws of Life Mission and provides the foundational background for everything we do.

The goal of this podcast—always and forever—is to help you understand how brilliant and unique you are. I want you to know that God has specific missions for you, and that you can pursue those missions by discovering your talents and gifts, and using them to serve your family and community—all while strengthening your family and bettering yourself.

It’s a beautiful experience that can unfold for you, your family, and your community when you step into a mission-driven life and get busy discovering and fulfilling the missions God has given you.

You can always expect us to talk about the Seven Laws and explore different aspects of a mission-driven life—things that will help you stay on that path and grow.

Today, I’m really excited to spend a few minutes talking to you about something that goes way deeper than most of the information you’ll find out there. It goes deeper than your attitude. It goes deeper than your behavior.

A lot of what we come across in the world of self-help and self-improvement focuses heavily on attitude and behavior. But today, I want to talk to you about something that gets to the root of what’s really going on inside people like you and me—people who want real change.

We want to improve our marriages, our finances, our ability to organize our lives. We want to like and love ourselves and have more confidence. We want to better meet challenges and overcome persistent problems. Because we’re those kinds of people—we’re growth-oriented.

But sometimes, what gets in the way is all the surface-level advice out there telling you to "work on your attitude" or "change your behavior." What we’re going to talk about today goes deeper than that. I call it a quantum leap.

When you understand what I’m going to share—and when you begin implementing the three tools I’ll give you—you’ll experience a shift where your attitude and behavior begin to change automatically. It won’t feel so hard to get up in the morning and be different—because you are different.

Let me start with a story from my own life—how I faced a problem, and how this deeper concept helped me find a real solution.

Years ago, I was struggling with feelings about some extended family members. From my perspective, they were doing much better than we were financially. Their businesses were growing, they were taking more vacations, having more things… and I wanted those things too. I’m an ambitious person, and I couldn’t figure out how we could get those results while still keeping my highest priority: being a full-time mom.

I felt stuck and frustrated. That’s what was going on internally. On the outside, I put on my best behavior. I geared myself up to have a positive attitude at family gatherings. I was kind, asked people about their lives, and tried to do all the “right” things. I was constantly working on my attitude and behavior—trying to forgive, trying to stay focused on my own goals.

But inside? I was judging. I was comparing. Sometimes, I would elevate myself morally and judge them harshly about things I didn’t really understand. It was all stemming from something deeper—what we’re going to call paradigms.

At the time, I didn’t understand that. I just knew I felt uncomfortable. I didn’t know how to engage in a way that was good for me and good for them. And despite all the things I was trying—praying, reading, working hard—I was still struggling. But I wanted things to be different.

So I began doing the three things I’m going to share with you today. One of them was choosing to have an open heart and mind—to be willing to consider new perspectives.

At some point along the way, I stumbled across a book—because I was also doing another one of the tools I’ll share: actively pursuing new knowledge around the areas where I felt stuck. I was reading books, asking questions, and trying to learn.

The book I found was Leadership and Self-Deception. I remember exactly where I was when the paradigm shift happened—because paradigm shifts are that powerful. I was visiting a friend, sitting on her porch in a rocking chair, reading that book. And suddenly, it hit me. I had an insight so powerful that I knew exactly what the problem was, what had been causing it, and what I needed to do next.

That’s what a paradigm shift is. It causes you to see the world in a completely new way. So new, in fact, that your attitudes and behaviors begin to follow naturally.

The word paradigm comes from the Greek word paradigma, which means "pattern." A paradigm is a model or mental image of the way things are. It’s the deepest layer of who we are. We develop our paradigms as we grow up, through the experiences we have and the things we’re taught. They shape how we see the world.

Paradigms are powerful—and you can see that in people whose paradigms are deeply broken. For example, consider a woman who was abused growing up and continues to enter abusive relationships as an adult. Her paradigms about herself and the world are so damaged that she believes this kind of treatment is normal.

She doesn't know how to get out of it. She doesn't know how to see herself, other people, or her interactions with them differently. These patterns are deeply entrenched. But you and I, looking from the outside in, can see what’s really going on—it’s a paradigm problem. She sees the world and herself in fundamentally broken and unhealthy ways.

And so, no matter how much she works on her attitude or behavior, she’s going to keep acting in alignment with the way she sees the world.

Another way to think about this is through the analogy of a map. If you listened to my podcast on What Is Truth, I shared some analogies for reality and truth—one of them being that truth is like a map. Just as Seattle is a real place, a map of Seattle is either right or wrong depending on how accurately it reflects the real city. And if the map is accurate, it will help you navigate Seattle successfully—you’re least likely to get lost and most likely to reach your destination in the fastest, most effective way.

The same goes for us. If we have maps—or paradigms—about the nature of reality that are broken, faulty, or distorted, we won't be able to navigate life effectively. Just like the woman who continues to go from abuser to abuser, we’ll stay stuck in our same persistent problems.

Stephen Covey says that all of us think we see the world as it is—but in reality, we see the world as we are. We project onto everything and everyone our own perceptions of right and wrong, how people should behave, what’s good, what’s bad—all based on the paradigms we’ve developed.

A paradigm shift is when we have a moment so radical, it’s like the scales fall off our eyes. We see everything differently. And once we see it, we can’t unsee it. And because we see things differently, we automatically start behaving differently. Suddenly, we don’t have to exert so much effort trying to fix our attitude about that thing—it’s just changed.

So, if we want lasting change, instead of only working on our attitude or constantly managing our behavior—and let me be clear, sometimes that is the right place to work—we need to look for patterns in our lives that keep repeating.

Maybe we argue with our spouse every Saturday afternoon.
Maybe our kids never do their chores.
Maybe we wake up feeling down and discouraged day after day.
Maybe we lack the confidence to pursue the things we really want.
Maybe our relationships always seem to fall apart.
Maybe we’re always, always out of money.

If we’re facing persistent patterns like these—recurring struggles that never seem to go away—we can be fairly sure that we’re dealing with a broken paradigm. And while principles will always help us climb out of that rut, sometimes we need to see the principles in a new way. We need a new lens. That’s why we must do the work of creating paradigm shifts.

Jesus promised that if we ask, we will receive. God loves to help those who are willing to help themselves. So how do we ask? We ask by doing these three things that lead to paradigm shifts:

Let me give you a real-life example from my friend and colleague Lindsay Wright, who’s been with Mission Driven Mom for a long time. You may have seen her in courses or recordings—she’s amazing.

Lindsay used to struggle with exercising consistently. She knew she needed to do it, and the more she learned about the principle of caring for her body, the more her conviction grew. But still—it was a grind. She constantly had to make herself do it. Her attitudes and behaviors didn’t flow naturally.

She was receiving some of the benefits of living the principle—because the blessings of true principles are inseparably connected—but it still felt like a struggle. So she kept searching for the paradigm shift. She kept immersing herself in environments and materials that reinforced that principle. And eventually, she saw it differently. Once the shift happened, everything became easier. Her behavior changed naturally—because she had changed the way she saw the principle.

That’s how a paradigm shift works.

In my own experience, the book Leadership and Self-Deception gave me a paradigm shift that was truly life-changing. I suddenly realized I was the one creating the tension in those family relationships—not them.

I was constantly comparing myself to them. And I realized that my behaviors and attitudes—while “good” on the outside—weren’t what mattered most. What truly mattered was how I actually felt about them.

I understood, in that moment, that even though I was the one who felt most uncomfortable in those interactions, I was also the one creating the discomfort. The other people weren’t going home and judging me or gossiping about me—I was doing that.

And no matter how polite I acted, what was being communicated to them wasn’t my words or actions—it was my feelings. What I really felt in my heart. That’s what they were picking up on.

So I realized: I couldn’t expect to have a good relationship with them unless I changed the way I fundamentally saw them.

That was the core of the paradigm shift. Not just for those relationships—but for how I saw the world. I knew I didn’t truly know them. I knew I was making assumptions and judgments that weren’t fair. And those assumptions were creating the wrong feelings, which were driving my interactions.

That’s when it hit me: Attitudes and behaviors alone won’t fix broken relationships—or any other persistent life issue. Only a change in paradigm will.

I realized that I couldn't just show up, be “good,” and do what I was supposed to be doing. I had to fundamentally see the person—honestly—and love them genuinely if I expected to have a good relationship with them. That meant I needed to get to know them better, and I needed to serve them. And those were things I wasn’t doing.

That paradigm shift helped me see everything differently—not just those specific relationships, but all my relationships. Since then, my behavior has changed. My attitudes have changed. In that moment, I instantly forgave them. It was like the scales just fell from my eyes.

I suddenly understood that half the things I had blamed them for had never even happened—or probably weren’t even thought by them. I realized I had been making up stories in my head. Everything became very clear.

Paradigm shifts change the map. They correct our internal map and reorient us to the territory of reality. They reveal key elements of principles we weren't seeing before, and they help change our attitudes and desires around those principles—permanently.

Lindsay had a similar experience when she finally had a paradigm shift around exercise. She came across some information about the science behind what exercise does for your body—what happens biologically. And for her, that was the shift she needed.

She realized: This is biological. It’s part of the fabric of reality. If I want to function properly, I have to do this. I can’t behave the way I want to unless I support my biology. That shift changed everything for her.

And paradigm shifts will come—because God loves you. He wants to help you correct your internal map. He wants you to see yourself and the world more accurately. He wants you to live according to truth and receive the blessings of living true principles.

Let me read you a few things from Stephen Covey, who taught me so much about paradigm shifts. This is from the beginning of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.

He writes:

"We think we see things as they are, but we don’t. When we open our mouths to describe what we see, we in effect describe ourselves, our perceptions, our paradigms. When other people disagree with us, we immediately think something is wrong with them—but sincere, clearheaded people see things differently, each looking through the unique lens of their own experience."

That’s what I was doing with my family members—I was judging, comparing, and filtering their behavior through my values, my expectations, my broken perceptions. And we all do that.

One of our MDM students once said that the biggest impact the MDM Academy had on her was that it "changed the lenses." She said it felt like someone wiped off years of buildup—like film or dirt—on her glasses. Suddenly, she could see herself and the world clearly for the first time.

Covey goes on:

"The more aware we are of our basic paradigms, maps, or assumptions—and the extent to which we have been influenced by our experience—the more we can take responsibility for those paradigms, examine them, test them against reality, listen to others, and be open to their perceptions… thereby getting a larger picture and a far more objective view."

This process happens when we embrace self-education—when we finally say:

“I’m tired of this pattern showing up in my life. My paradigm around this must be broken. I must be seeing something incorrectly. I want to break that pattern—so I need a paradigm shift.”

And that is exactly why we built the MDM Academy the way we did.

We’ve layered in powerful testimonies from multiple authors. One teacher presents a principle one way, then another teaches it differently. You read small, rich selections. You watch short clips. You hear voices sharing what this principle means to them and why it’s so important.

We’ve created a space where paradigm shifts happen faster and more frequently—because you’re being immersed in truth. You’re hearing from the best voices, the wisest minds, and you're surrounded by a community of people striving for the same thing. You're working with mentors who have those paradigm shifts and can reflect them back to you.

It’s an environment that invites personal transformation. Paradigm shifts happen because you've put yourself in a place where they can happen.

That’s also why people take courses or hire therapists and life coaches. They need their patterns challenged. They need their paradigms examined. They need someone to reflect their reality back to them so they can see it more clearly.

Now, not all therapists or coaches are helpful—some just keep us on the same hamster wheel. But the really good ones will challenge your thinking and ask the right questions so you can finally get off that wheel and experience forward momentum.

Another powerful paradigm shift I had in my own life was recognizing that I was a rescuer. I learned about the Drama Triangle, and it completely changed the way I saw myself and my parenting.

I realized I had been rescuing as a mom—and that it was deeply damaging to both me and my children. I began to hear voices, read books, and learn from the best sources. Over time, I began to understand the true consequences of rescuing. And that led me to the paradigm shift I needed:

I need to stop being a rescuer.
I need to become a coach instead.
And sometimes, I need to be a challenger.

And that shift—again—changed everything.

And the challenger—people can push back against the challenger. People don’t always like the person who’s coaching or challenging them. But that’s okay. I can take the heat, because it’s best for everyone if I show up differently.

I just recently had an experience with a child who had a really important deadline. I was very clear with them, leading up to that deadline, about what the expectations were if they wanted to claim our help in this specific situation.

When that deadline came, I said, “You didn’t do the things you needed to do by today, and you’ve had a long time to solve this problem. So, I’m saying no.”

That’s really tough to say. It’s tough to say to anyone—especially to your children—when it’s something good, something you really want for them. I wanted them to be able to go out and do this thing, and I knew I had the means to just open the door and make it simple. But if it doesn’t cost them anything, if they aren’t in it with me, if they don’t care enough about it to prepare themselves—then I should not rescue them. Because I’d be teaching them the wrong lesson.

I’d be getting in the way of reality working itself out in their life. I wouldn’t be teaching them that the law of the harvest is real. And they’re going to bump up against that hard reality over and over in their life. I’ve had a paradigm shift about this—and it has radically changed our home.

Let me share one last powerful paradigm shift with you as we wrap up. Then I’ll read something from Covey about what paradigm shifts look like so you can begin to recognize them for yourself.

Recently in our business—The Mission Driven Mom and our academy—growth had slowed. We didn’t want that to happen. We wanted to keep growing. In fact, we want huge growth. So, we started showing up differently. We tried to live the principles better, to look at what we were doing honestly, to invest more time in the right things. And those things were helping. We were definitely making progress.

But we needed more. We needed paradigm shifts—maybe several of them—because we long for this message to reach millions of people. And we’re not there yet. So we’ve got to close that gap. And the fastest way to do that is to experience the paradigm shifts that will change our attitudes and behavior quickly.

So, we made a big investment to put ourselves in the company of people who are much more successful than we are. We also paid for an online business school so we could educate ourselves much more quickly in the principles of success. We wanted help from people who live these principles, and who are seeing great results.

We wanted to be in their physical presence—to see the world through their lens and begin to adopt that lens. And it's working. You're going to start seeing growth as you do these three things:

Because when they do, attitudes and behaviors get a lot easier to change.

Here’s what happened for us. After joining this program and paying for the course, a book arrived in the mail from the organization we’re working with. I opened it and immediately knew it was going to change the way I think.

It was Benjamin Hardy’s brand-new book, The Science of Scaling. We got an early copy. And we had a radical paradigm shift when he taught us the difference between linear thinking and holistic thinking.

Now we understand—we don’t need to run our business in a linear fashion. We’ll see far more success, and more quickly, if we operate holistically: managing our time in holistic ways, thinking differently. Everything changed for us.

Our goals changed. Our timelines changed. The way we run the business, the team we’re building—all of it shifted. Our attitudes and behaviors changed. We became excited, energized, and encouraged.

Why? Because for months prior, we had shown our commitment to being different. We were doing everything we could to learn and grow. We were keeping our hearts and minds open.

If you do those three things—get in the right company, study truth, and stay open—you will experience radical paradigm shifts. And those shifts will change everything for you.

You’ll find yourself putting in more hours—but more joyfully. Working more efficiently. Being more consistent in the things that matter. Scaling back unnecessary things. Focusing on the most important things.

And you’ll start seeing real momentum. That’s already happening for us.

We now have more clarity and I’m super excited for the growth ahead—for all the people who are going to be exposed to the Seven Laws of Life Mission, learn how to live a mission-driven life, come into our Academy, and be changed forever.

Many will join our Clapham team after graduating the Academy, and go out into the world—supported and empowered—to make a difference with their gifts and talents, blessing their communities and beyond.

Let me be clear—paradigm shifts are not depressing.

Yes, they can sting a little. They might be hard to hear at first. You might feel that little internal prick of, “Ugh... that’s true. That’s hard.” But sometimes people think they’ve had a paradigm shift when they haven’t.

For example, someone gets terrible news or hears something devastating about someone they love. They get overwhelmed, start doubting their faith, and maybe even leave their religion. But that’s not a paradigm shift. That’s the beginning of a journey—and it still requires a lot of information, questions, details, and hard work.

A true paradigm shift is enlightening and empowering. It’s often painful—but not in a despairing way. It might involve recognizing that you need to change—but it comes with a sense of hope, clarity, and forward momentum.

You feel energized. You want to learn more. You can see that you’ve been seeing the world incorrectly—and now you see more clearly. It uplifts you. It excites you. It shifts everything in your life.

There may be a short moment of, “Wow. I’ve really been messing this up.” Like when I realized how I’d been treating my extended family. That was painful. But after that moment of clarity, I could never go back to being the same. I couldn’t unsee it. Even if I’d wanted to keep acting the same, I would’ve known, deep down, that the distance between us was my fault. That I was holding them at arm’s length.

That’s what Covey talks about in The 7 Habits. He shares a powerful story of having a paradigm shift on a subway. In that moment, he said:

“Suddenly I saw things differently. And because I saw differently, I thought differently. I felt differently. I behaved differently. My irritation vanished. I didn’t have to worry about controlling my attitude or my behavior. My heart was filled with empathy. Sympathy and compassion flowed freely. Everything changed in an instant.”

That’s the kind of powerful experience you can have.

And that’s what we’re facilitating for women in the MDM Academy. That’s why they experience so much growth in such a short period of time.

Women who complete all levels of the Academy are with us for two or three years—and they are fundamentally changed. They never see the world the same way again.

They know how to cut through the confusion in the culture. They know how to discern truth for themselves. They know how to find actionable principles and apply them in their lives. They know how to put their homes in order.

I recently asked a few of them what’s changed most. They said things like, “confidence,” “self-acceptance,” “clarity.” The transformation is real. It’s beautiful.

And it’s fueled not just by changing behavior or attitude—but by changing paradigms. By changing the way they see the world.

That’s what’s possible for you. That’s the journey you can be on—if you choose it.

So go out and find people who have what you want. Submerge yourself in the best books and resources. Keep your heart and mind open—and I promise you, God will give you the paradigm shifts you need.

He wants you to grow. He wants to bless your life. He has missions for you to fulfill.

Thank you so much for joining me today. And always remember:
You are unique and gifted.
God has special missions just for you.
And as you get busy discovering and fulfilling your unique contribution to the world, you’ll watch yourself blossom, your family strengthen, and your community be blessed.

See you next time!

Get Your FREE Audiobook of The Mission Driven Life: Discover and Fulfill Your Unique Contribution to the World: https://www.themissiondrivenmom.com/

As Mission Driven Moms, we LOVE truth, we seek it everywhere and strive to live it all the time! It's comforting to know that there is a standard of truth that has been constant throughout the history of humankind. We can take comfort knowing that right has always been right, and that will never change. 

In this podcast we head back into Ancient Egypt to find a robust religious tradition that had a beautiful impact on the every day lives of the people.

And guess what?!

This "Law of Ma'at" helped them live some of the laws and principles of life mission! We can learn much from their example, and we can become more mission driven by following it!

LINKS FROM THE PODCAST: 

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT (AI Generated):

Welcome back to the podcast!
I’m Audrey Rindlisbacher, the author of The Mission-Driven Life and the founder of The Mission-Driven Mom. I’m your host today, and I’m so excited that you’re joining me.

If you're new to this podcast, you might want to keep up with the current episodes, but I also highly recommend going back to the beginning. We've actually reorganized the episodes so that you can binge from the start and get a really solid sense of what we’re all about. As you do, you’ll come to understand the 7 Laws of Life Mission—how to begin living them, how they’ll increase your confidence, bring greater order to your life, help you discover your gifts and talents, and put you on the path to making a real, positive impact in your community.

That is our overarching objective here:
👉 You have a mission.
👉 You are unique and special.
👉 God has specific work for you to do.

And we need you. We don’t want to miss out on what only you can offer. That’s why we’re here—to equip you with the tools you need to live a truly mission-driven life.

You can also head over to themissiondrivenmom.com and grab your free copy of The Mission-Driven Life. We're giving you the audiobook completely free, and that’s where you’ll learn how to discover and fulfill your unique contribution to the world. You can also purchase the hardcover for just $16.99.

If this podcast has been a blessing in your life, we’d truly appreciate it if you left a review. Your feedback helps others find us, tells them what we’re all about, and increases our reach so we can support even more women on this journey.

I was recently interviewed on a couple of wonderful podcasts:

We talked about all things life mission, and it was such a joy to be on their shows. I’ll link those episodes below if you’d like to give them a listen.

A quick update on the book I’ve been working on this year—Truth Makes Us Free. It’s coming along! I’ve completed the first five chapters, which make up Part One, and I have a solid outline for the second half. Based on other commitments through the fall, I’m still hoping to release it by the end of the year—fingers crossed! We’ll be creating the cover soon, and I’ll share that with you. We’ll also offer pre-sales.

To help you understand a bit more:
This new book is a companion to everything we do here at The Mission-Driven Mom. It’s a deep dive into some key elements of mission-driven living—especially questions like:

When Jesus said, “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free,” He meant it literally. We can search out true principles and apply them to our lives in ways that absolutely liberate us. This book goes into detail about what truth is, how to better understand it, what the natural law framework looks like, and how we can be truly set free.

I also explore the mechanism that allows us to apply those principles to our lives. I introduced it in our last episode when we discussed the two consciences—that inner battle between the divine conscience and the social conscience. That “angel on one shoulder, devil on the other” situation that we all experience. We talked about how to begin ignoring the social conscience and nurturing the divine one—and how beautiful that process is.

That process is what uplevels our character. It’s how we learn to hear God’s voice and His guidance more clearly. And it’s how we become true truth seekers who live out a truly mission-driven life—which, of course, is the entire goal of this podcast.

So what can you expect today—and always—on this show?

We’ll talk about what it means for you and me to live a mission-driven life. We’ll explore how to better understand and live the 7 Laws of Life Mission, and how those laws guide us to the unique work God has for each of us.

With all of that said, I want to spend a few minutes with you today talking about something called Maat. If you know anything about ancient Egypt, you may have heard of this concept—and it’s truly fascinating. What’s even more interesting is how it directly connects with some of the principles we live by in the Seven Laws of Life Mission.

To begin, let’s look at Law One: Loving God. One of the key principles of that law is having a willing heart and mind. As we explore the concept of Maat, you’ll begin to see why willingness was so vital—and how the ancient Egyptians lived it so intentionally. You'll also see how they lived aspects of Law Two: Loving Ourselves, as they learned to govern their hearts and minds, and Law Three: Being Truth Seekers.

So, there’s a lot of good stuff here.

In ancient Egypt, religion was central to everyday life. Their beliefs weren’t just philosophical—they were lived deeply and consistently. One of their foundational convictions was that our time on Earth is just a small part of a much longer existence that began before this life and continues on into eternity. They had a profound belief in the afterlife. That’s where things like mummification, the Book of the Dead, religious scrolls, and their elaborate priesthood and pantheon of gods come into play.

Because they believed so strongly in life after death, they lived very differently here on Earth.

Today we’re going to talk about how the concept of Maat was all-encompassing for them and how it connects beautifully to what we do here at The Mission-Driven Mom.

So what exactly was their paradigm?

The ancient Egyptians believed in a pantheon of gods—male and female—who had children, filled various roles, and interacted with both the living and the dead. Among these deities, there was one supreme god who sat on a throne as king and judge of all. He was considered the Lord of Maat.

For those of you familiar with The Mission-Driven Life or who have participated in our Academy or events, this concept might sound familiar. It closely parallels what we call natural law.

The Egyptians believed that Maat represented the eternal laws of what is good, true, just, fair, and right. They believed there was a real, objective difference between right and wrong—and that it was our responsibility to learn what is right and live it.

What made the supreme god supreme, in their view, was that he always lived according to Maat. He perfectly obeyed these eternal laws. He was the Lord of Maat because he embodied it. His power and divinity were rooted in his perfect adherence to truth.

Think about that for a minute.

Imagine a society where people believe that:

That was ancient Egypt. They believed it was their duty to follow the example of the supreme God by living in accordance with Maat—to live in line with truth and justice, and to please God by adhering to those divine principles.

And here’s the most fascinating part of all:
They believed that after death, they would stand before that supreme God and be judged according to the law of Maat. Their lives would be measured against these eternal standards—the same way we would say people are judged according to natural law.

And this wasn’t just theory for them. They lived it.

We know this from ancient texts and traditions that go back all the way to the Old Kingdom—almost to the very beginning of Egyptian civilization, which lasted nearly 3,000 years. What we’re going to talk about today is part of their culture from beginning to end. Maat shaped their religious rituals, their legal system, their view of leadership, and their understanding of morality.

The ancient Egyptians believed that one day they would meet God and be judged. At that moment, their heart would be weighed against a feather. If you're watching on YouTube, I’ll include some images so you can see exactly what this looked like in their ancient inscriptions and scrolls.

In these depictions, there’s a god standing nearby, taking note—writing everything down—while the great God sits on His throne overseeing the entire process. In the middle, there is a scale. On one side of the scale lies the Feather of Maat, and on the other, the individual’s heart.

They believed the heart contained the conscience—your character, your level of virtue, and your intellect. And here’s what I find so profound: the Feather of Maat was a symbol of truth, justice, and divine order. It represented the standard of what is right. If you lived a life aligned with Maat—if you were good, just, and true—then your heart would be light, light as a feather.

But sin and wrongdoing weighed the heart down.

That’s why your heart could be weighed against the feather. If you lived according to Maat, your heart remained light. Your burdens were lifted, your soul was at peace. If your heart weighed more than the feather, it meant you had lived in opposition to divine law, and you were not ready to pass into the afterlife.

Isn’t that fascinating?

This symbolic idea of a “light heart” shows up across many traditions. You’ll find it in the Bible, in the Quran, and in other major world religions. They speak of having a soft heart, of righteousness bringing peace, of goodness making life easier, lighter, and more joyful. This ancient Egyptian imagery beautifully mirrors those truths.

Because they so deeply believed in this final judgment, the Egyptians wanted to be fully prepared. They wanted to be able to pass the test.

Now, in different periods of Egyptian history, they also believed that after death, you had to pass through various gates and give specific names or answers to get through. This is where the famous Books of the Dead come in. These scrolls—often buried with the body—contained everything the deceased might need in the afterlife: instructions, names, prayers, and protective spells.

What developed very early on was the idea that those who could afford it would work with priests—or, if literate, write it themselves—to create a personalized scroll to help them navigate the afterlife. A core feature of these scrolls was a powerful spiritual practice known as the “Negative Confessions.”

We have so many examples of these because they were carved into tomb walls, written on the inside of coffins, and later, included on scrolls placed within the wrappings of mummified bodies.

So, what were these Negative Confessions?

They were statements made by the deceased as they stood before God, affirming what they did not do during their life. The person would say things like: “I did not steal,” “I did not lie,” “I did not harm others.” These confessions were essentially proof of righteousness—evidence that the person had lived according to Maat.

But here’s the catch: they had to be completely truthful. You were standing in front of the all-knowing God. He would know if you were lying. So these confessions had to be uttered with confidence and integrity—a pure offering of a life well-lived.

The implications of this practice are so powerful—for the individual, their family, and for the society as a whole. When a culture teaches its people that they will be judged by eternal standards, and that they must personally account for every choice, it raises the level of personal responsibility and virtue. It shapes how people live their lives day to day.

When they spoke these negative confessions, they were saying to God:
“I lived according to the Maat. I restrained myself from wrongdoing. I sought to be good and just. I am worthy of entering the afterlife.”

I want to share a few of these confessions with you, because what you’ll find is that they align with your own moral compass. They reflect universal truth. I talk about this more in Chapter 2 of The Mission-Driven Life, and I go deeper in the upcoming book How Truth Makes You Free. You can also listen to my podcast episode, What Is Truth, or visit audrewalker.com and download the Truth-Seeker Starter Kit, which includes a recording of a Natural Law deep dive I gave at one of our MDM Celebration events.

Here’s the key point:
This idea of a universal moral law isn’t new—and it isn’t mine. It’s ancient. In the West, we call it Natural Law or Moral Law or The Law of Human Nature. In ancient Egypt, it was Maat. In Hinduism, it’s Rita. In Chinese philosophy, it’s called the Dao. It has many names across cultures and time periods.

But it is the same truth.

It is the moral framework by which men and women can live the best lives possible. C.S. Lewis described it as “the instruction manual for human beings.” God created us, and He wrote this moral law into the very fabric of our being. It’s written on our hearts.

We can know what is right and wrong by listening to our conscience—what I call the divine conscience. And we can nurture it, educate it, and allow it to govern our lives.

This principle—the alignment with Maat, or Natural Law—was so well understood and so thoroughly embedded in Egyptian society that I truly believe it's one of the key reasons that civilization lasted for nearly 3,000 years.

It was, and it truly was, the way a person was meant to live. Now, of course, there’s a lot more to the story. The ancient Egyptians weren’t perfect. They had slaves. They enslaved the Israelites. There was corruption. But even with those realities, just the fact that they knew the natural law—and believed they would be held accountable for their behavior, if not in this life, then certainly in the afterlife—is significant.

They believed they would have to confess what they had done—and, even more interestingly, what they hadn’t done. That’s what I love about the "negative confession" tradition. It proves they didn’t believe they had to be perfect, but rather that they needed to do the best they could to live according to as many of the principles of Maat as possible. That effort, that striving, would shape them into a certain kind of people.

Let me share a few examples of these negative confessions. We have many of them—hundreds, in fact. Here’s one from a tomb inscription; I won’t try to pronounce the name, but it's found on the right side of the facade. It reads:

“I have gone from my town. I have descended from my nome, having done justice for its Lord, having contented him with what he loves.
I spoke the good. I repeated the good.
I grasped the right manner, for I wanted the good for people.
I judged two parties so as to content them.
I saved the weak from one stronger than he, as best I could.
I spoke truly. I acted justly.
I gave bread to the hungry, clothes to the naked.
I lent to the stranded. I buried him who lacked a son.
I made a boat for the boatless. I supported the orphan.
I never spoke evil against anyone to a potentate.”

Now, if some bells aren’t going off in your mind right now, they should be—because those words clearly echo Jesus’ teachings.

In Matthew 25, Jesus says:

“Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, ‘Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.
For I was hungry, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in:
Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.’
… ‘Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.’”

Jesus goes on to say that those who failed to do these things will go away into everlasting punishment, but the righteous will enter into life eternal.

So the same ideas Jesus teaches—care for the weak, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, supporting the orphan—are right there in ancient Egyptian spiritual practice. According to their beliefs, that’s what made someone righteous. That’s what earned them eternal life. It’s incredibly compelling.

I found a great resource that compiles a number of these negative confessions and analyzes the values they reveal—I'll link it for those who want to dig deeper.

Now, I want to turn to my copy of The Book of the Dead. I want to clarify something: there isn’t just one single Book of the Dead. It’s a genre of funerary texts, and what’s commonly referred to as The Book of the Dead is a specific, beautifully illustrated scroll—about 77 feet long—belonging to a priest named Ani. His scroll is one of the most complete and elaborate we have, and it’s often the version that gets published.

Here are some of the confessions from Ani’s scroll—statements he would have made to the gods to prove that he lived in accordance with Maat:

“I have not done iniquity.
I have not robbed with violence.
I have done no murder.
I have done no harm.
I have not defrauded offerings.
I have not diminished oblations.
I have not plundered the gods.
I have spoken no lies.
I have not snatched away food.
I have not caused pain.
I have not committed fornication.”

So yes, they had strict sexual codes, and not committing fornication was an important declaration of moral conduct.

“I have not caused the shedding of tears.”
(This means he didn’t intentionally cause others emotional pain.)

“I have not dealt deceitfully.
I have not transgressed.
I have not acted guilefully.
I have not laid waste to plowed land.
I have not been an eavesdropper.
I have not set my lips in motion against any man.
I have not been angry or wrathful, except for a just cause.
I have not defiled the wife of any man.
I have not polluted myself.
I have not caused terror.
I have not burned with rage.
I have not stopped my ears against the words of right and truth.”

I love that one. It means he didn’t reject good counsel. He didn’t close his heart or plug his ears when truth and righteousness were being taught. He was open to learning and humble enough to be corrected.

“I have not worked grief.
I have not stirred up strife.
I have not judged hastily.
I have not multiplied words exceedingly.
I have done neither harm nor ill.
I have never cursed the king.
I have never fouled the water.
I have not spoken scornfully.
I have never cursed God.
I have not stolen.
I have not defrauded the offerings of the gods.
I have not plundered the offerings to the blessed dead.
I have not filched the food of the infant.
Neither have I sinned against the god of my native town

I have not slaughtered, with evil intent, the cattle of the gods..”

These confessions give us incredible insight into the values of ancient Egyptian society—and what they believed mattered most to the gods. It’s a powerful reminder that the natural law, the moral law, was understood deeply and broadly across civilizations. We may use different names—Maat, Natural Law, Rita, Dao—but it’s all the same framework. It’s the divine pattern for human flourishing.

And then Ani goes on. He includes these beautiful prayers. I wanted to read you a short section from one of them—this one addressed to Thoth, the Righteous Judge:

“Thoth, the righteous judge of the great company of the gods who are in the presence of the god Osiris, hear ye this judgment. The heart of Seth hath in very truth been weighed, and his soul hath stood as a witness for him. It hath been found true by ritual in the great balance. There hath not been found any wickedness in him. He hath not wasted the offerings in the temple. He hath not done harm by his deeds, and he uttered no evil reports while he was upon the earth.”

That’s what Ani hopes to have said about him at his final judgment—that he is accepted, that he is deemed righteous, and that he passes the ultimate test.

In one of the resources I found, the author makes a fascinating point. She demonstrates that even the gods were subject to the law of Maat—and that they also lived according to it. One passage tells us that the four sons of Horus lived by Maat, but the king merely aspired to it.

So there was this clear understanding that there was a division between gods and men. The key distinction was that men were trying to live according to Maat, while the gods embodied it. The king, then, was attempting to be like the gods by aligning himself with Maat.

Here’s a quote from that ancient source:

“Peppi is one of these four gods—Imsety, Hapy, Duamutef, and Qebehsenuef—who live by Maat, who lean on their staffs, who watch over Upper Egypt.”

Now shifting to a different text: The Instruction of Ptahhotep. This is Maxim Number 5:

“Great is Maat, lasting in effect, undisturbed since the time of Osiris. For one punishes the breaker of laws, though the greedy one overlooks this. While baseness may seize riches, crime never lands its wares. In the end, it is Maat that lasts. Man says, ‘It is my father’s ground,’ while baseness may seize riches—crime never lands its wares.”

These verses convey that Maat was viewed as a primordial condition—firmly founded and enduring. And when activated, it could overcome all forms of wrongdoing.

Maxim Number 19 elaborates:

“That man endures whose rule is Maat, who walks a straight line. He will make a will by it. One who is greedy has no tomb.”

There is also this striking image at the final judgment. I'll link some pictures and the YouTube video so you can see it. There’s a devourer—this terrifying creature—standing next to the god who weighs your heart. As you give your negative confession, if your heart is found wanting—if you haven’t lived according to Maat—the devourer consumes your soul. You cease to exist. That’s quite a consequence.

Here are some of my takeaways from all of this—from the ancient Egyptians’ beliefs and from this principle of Maat.

By making a list of all the things they had not done, according to natural law, they could confidently present themselves before the gods. They wouldn’t have to lie to God. They could stand before Him in honesty, shedding themselves in the best light, while still acknowledging that they were not perfect. They were striving to live by Maat as much as possible, every day of their lives, because they knew the final judgment was coming—and they didn’t know when.

That awareness—of a coming judgment—would produce a lot of self-discipline. Think about it: if you knew you were going to stand before God, and you’d have to say, with full confidence, “I did not do these things,” then that knowledge would influence your daily choices.

This system created an internal framework of personal restraint, one that hugely benefited society. Many of the people who left behind negative confessions were in positions of leadership. They had the means to hire priests or scribes—or were literate themselves—and chose to record how they lived. These leaders shaped culture. They were accountable for their choices and felt obligated to live rightly.

Imagine a society in which leaders are constantly taking care of orphans, feeding the hungry, avoiding murder, theft, and adultery—not because of law enforcement, but because they know they’ll stand before God. That would create a stable, virtuous culture.

One source put it this way:

“The soul is rewarded for living a good and virtuous life.”

That’s a foundational paradigm of Egyptian civilization—and one I don’t think we talk about enough. Yes, they were human. Yes, they did bad things. But their religion was deeply embedded in their culture. It compelled them to govern themselves. It gave them a moral structure. They believed they would have to answer for their behavior, and that drove them to self-discipline. That’s so cool.

It’s undeniable evidence of both the universality of the natural law and the power of a truth-centered life. And if you listened to my previous episode on “What Is Truth?” you’ll be able to connect the dots here. Maat is the natural law. It’s what the Egyptians called it, but it’s the same idea.

One thing I love is how this belief structure shifted the focus. They weren’t pretending to be perfect. But they were focused on living righteously. They were building a mental framework that aligned with natural law. And that’s what we need.

We live in a culture that has stopped asking, “What would God think of this behavior?” And because we’ve stopped asking that, we’ve lost a critical self-correcting mechanism. If we asked that question more often, we’d rein in the drinking, the promiscuity, the obsession with pleasure. We’d ask, “What can I say to God, that He’d be proud of?” “What did I do to honor His law?”

Of course, like any ritual, it could become trivialized. But the consistency of this mindset—over 3,000 years—gave Egyptian civilization a deeply rooted sense of right and wrong.

One last point. I hope it doesn’t sound repetitive, but I’m passionate about this:

There are so many lies in our culture right now. One of them is that ancient people only believed in God because they were afraid of natural disasters. The modern view paints them as primitive—doing rain dances because they didn’t know where storms came from.

But when you actually go back and read what they wrote, study what they built, and understand what they believed, you find a people who were highly sophisticated—morally, intellectually, spiritually. Take ancient Egypt, for example. The structures they left behind are astounding, and the religion they practiced was about far more than managing the elements. It was about moral alignment with eternal law.

Maat wasn’t superstition. It was a moral code. A spiritual discipline. A guide for living in truth.

People understood that the foundation of life—the foundation of living a good human life—was understanding what is right and what is wrong, and then living according to it. They also knew they needed to prepare themselves for eventual judgment before God. What that meant was that religion wasn’t the foundation—it was actually an outgrowth of the moral law they were trying to live.

This understanding influenced their daily lives. It tempered their behavior constantly. It demonstrated a relationship between men and the gods. Man wasn’t afraid of God, cowering in a corner, just hoping He would stop the hurricanes. Man was submitting to God’s higher law—trying to please Him with his behavior. He loved and respected and honored God as God, and he worshipped Him. He wanted to show that love and honor through his actions—not through human sacrifice or by just going through the motions.

This was a religion that was experienced every day. It was something you were expected to wake up in the morning and think about: “I have to live a certain way to please God and make sure that my eternal life becomes what I want it to be.” It was a very forward-thinking way of living, and it was all wrapped up in a perception of how humans ought to live—not in a fear of the elements.

I just want to make that clear, because it’s a big, fat lie whenever you hear that ancient people only believed in God because they didn’t understand natural forces.

Now, let’s move to our takeaways as we finish up today.

One of the most common negative confessions in ancient Egypt was that a person never doubted the natural law or the existence of God. They always knew He was real, that His law was real, and that they had an obligation to live according to Maat. This really demonstrates the principle of willingness that is part of loving God. They were willing to admit that God was God, that He was in charge, that it was His rules—not theirs—that men and women had to obey. And by doing that, they believed they could please Him and become the best people possible.

In their culture, the best people were the ones who followed Maat the most closely. That’s a hugely important lesson for you and me.

You could go back and listen to my Charlotte Mason podcast, where I explain some of the ideas from the first volume in her Home Education series. She’s amazing. And what she does is exactly what I want to do—what we’re all about here at the Mission Driven Mom: helping people understand how truth can make them free, and how they can live according to that truth to discover and fulfill their life missions.

Charlotte Mason explains that parents do their children a huge disservice when they act as though people who are pious and go to church are always, no matter what, living more of God’s laws than people who don’t—or who do so less frequently—or even those who say they don’t believe in God. Because it’s all about obedience to God’s laws.

She says that you can go outside, feel the warmth of the sun, and still deny that it exists. People can live according to God’s laws and still deny that those laws come from God. But His laws are always accompanied by blessings.

So our willingness—our humility and teachability—is always going to be the linchpin of whether or not we receive the blessings we seek, and whether or not we solve the problems that persist in our lives. Because the answers are out there. We can find the truth, and it can make us free. The question is: what is the condition of our hearts?

And that brings us full circle, back to the Egyptian view of the heart. The heart must be a willing, teachable heart.

Another principle this really exemplifies is Law 3: Loving Truth. The Egyptians were deeply interested in understanding virtue and core principles so that they could live according to them in their daily lives. These truths were present. They were clear. They were prolific throughout the negative confessions. There was no confusion about what was right and wrong—it was consistent. And, interestingly, it matches our ideas of right and wrong today.

Now, of course, some things—like not engaging in fornication—aren’t as widely accepted anymore. I talked about this in the last podcast. That’s because our social conscience has been distorted. But that’s something you and I can correct. And maybe… one of you listening has a mission to help correct that. That would be incredible to witness.

One last thing, as I mentioned at the beginning: Law 2, Loving Yourself. You can’t really love yourself unless you’re striving for self-mastery. And part of self-mastery is governing your heart and your mind—knowing that God is God, that He loves you, that He has gifts for you. He wants you to uncover those gifts and use them in His service. And He expects you to align your heart and mind with His laws and His will.

That’s how you partner with Him to do things that will have immense positive impact.

If you haven’t listened to many of the Mission-Driven stories on this podcast, I highly encourage you to go back and listen. You’ll begin to see the common threads these mission-driven men and women share: humility, seeking truth, disciplining themselves to live according to conscience. And the story of ancient Egypt’s history is aligned with all of that.

Which means they would have been happier—as their lives aligned more closely with true natural law.

So I want to end by reminding you that you are unique, and you are gifted. God has special missions just for you. You ought to get busy discovering and fulfilling them. And as you do, you’ll watch yourself blossom, your family be strengthened, and your community be blessed.

Thanks for joining me. I’ll see you next time.

The concept of the Two Consciences--what they are, how they work, and how to navigate them--has been one of the most helpful frameworks I've ever learned! It has enabled me to discern truth from error much more clearly and to better manage myself and my decisions with confidence.

While much more detail on this topic will be available in my upcoming book How Truth Makes You Free, I wanted to introduce you to this idea and enable you to begin utilizing it now.

I hope it blesses your life as immensely as it has blessed mine!

CONQUER Your Worries and "Mom-Guilt" Right NOW for FREE: https://www.themissiondrivenmom.com/

_________

Podcast Transcript (AI Generated)

Hey, welcome back to the podcast.
I’m Audrey Rindlisbacher, author of The Mission Driven Life and founder of the Mission Driven Mom. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m currently working on my new book, How Truth Makes You Free.

This book is divided into two parts. Part One walks through the framework of what it really means for truth to make us free. Why does that matter? What is the nature of truth? How does this framework work? And most importantly—what is the mechanism by which we actually know what’s true?

I’ve been working on that chapter lately: the mechanism. How do we identify truth? How do we discern it? There are so many fascinating stories around this. One of my favorites, which I include in the book, is the story of Shinichi Suzuki—yes, the same Suzuki from the Suzuki method. You can also hear it in his mission-driven story from a previous podcast episode.

Suzuki’s father owned a violin factory, but young Suzuki didn’t play the violin and didn’t really understand what they were even for. One day, at about 17 or 18 years old, he went to work at the factory. Typewriters were a relatively new thing, and there happened to be one there. He’d never used one before, but he sat down and started playing around with it.

Just then, the factory manager walked in, saw what he was doing, and panicked:
“Master Suzuki! You can’t use a typewriter without paper—it will damage it!”

Without missing a beat, Suzuki replied,
“Oh, I wasn’t typing. I just had my fingers on the keys.”

But he had been typing—and he knew it. That small lie hit him hard. He was immediately filled with remorse. “Why would I lie about something so stupid?” he thought. The fact that he was so troubled by such a small lie actually speaks volumes about his character.

He left the factory and went home, but he couldn’t settle down. Pacing around the house, completely uncomfortable with himself, he eventually decided to go downtown. He wandered into a bookstore and picked up a copy of Tolstoy’s diary. The book fell open, and his eyes landed on these words:

“The conscience is the voice of God, and a man who lies to himself is worse than one who lies to others.”

That moment changed his life. He determined then and there that he would always follow his conscience. He bought the book, took it home, and devoured it. From that day forward, he carried it with him and committed to living in harmony with his conscience.

He, of course, went on to become an incredible person.

I’ve said this many times before on the podcast, but there are countless examples of great men and women who, in telling their life stories, describe a pivotal moment like this—when they chose to listen to their conscience, to let it guide them to better actions and higher outcomes.

So what is the mechanism by which we know truth? It’s our conscience.

I was reading today and reflecting again on what an absolute miracle that is. I’ve spoken at many events and led countless groups through a simple activity where I ask people to take just one quiet minute and answer this question:

What is one thing I know I need to do moving forward in my life?

And every single time, without fail, each person—thousands at this point—has been able to name at least one thing. That, to me, is miraculous. That we can instantly know what to do, simply by being still and listening.

Listening to what?
To whom?
To that inner voice—your conscience—that is trying to guide you. And here’s the beautiful thing: when people go home and act on what they heard in that moment of stillness, their lives actually get better.

It’s one of the most amazing tools we have. It helps us discern what’s true, what’s false, and what to do next.

Now, Stephen Covey introduced me to something that took this idea even further: the concept of the divine conscience.

He shared the story of a friend who had been taught some strange things growing up. For example, if he ever ran a stop sign, his parents told him he had to drive around the block three times to “make penance.” You can imagine—if that was one of the lessons he internalized, there were probably a lot of others like it.

Years later, in a conversation with Covey, this man shared that story and then said,
“That’s why I think sometimes it’s best to ignore your conscience and just use common sense.”

That experience may have contributed to Covey developing the idea of the two consciences, which has become one of the most helpful concepts I’ve ever learned. I’ll dive deeper into it in my upcoming book, but I want to introduce you to the idea today because it’s incredibly powerful.

If you look up the term social conscience, you’ll find definitions related to social consciousness—the idea that we should care about society, right its wrongs, and help the poor and needy. That’s a good thing. But it’s not what Covey was talking about.

He made a distinction between the social conscience and the divine conscience.

That story about going around the block three times? That’s an example of the social conscience in action—a conscience shaped by social conditioning and upbringing, not by eternal truth.

And if you stop to think about it, I bet you can identify examples of this in your own life—times when you felt compelled to act a certain way, not because it was truly right, but because you were taught to feel guilty, afraid, or ashamed.

Covey’s distinction helps us untangle these internal conflicts.
It helps us ask:

Is this my divine conscience speaking? Or just my social conditioning?

And that question can change everything.

That need to go around the block three times—that was a manifestation of what Stephen Covey would call the social conscience. Society had taught that young man this strange habit. His family, his social environment, had ingrained in him something completely unnecessary.

In contrast, his common sense—what Covey calls the divine conscience—overruled that nonsensical behavior and helped him realize, “No, you don’t actually need to do that.”

So what does this look like in our day-to-day lives?

Well, there’s a mechanism at play. One way to describe it comes from Thomas Reid, who taught that natural law is written in the hearts of mankind by the finger of God. What he's essentially saying—and I could give you many quotes to back this up—is that there are things that are right, and there are things that are wrong.

And the first principle of natural law is this: Seek the good.

It’s in our nature—woven into the very fabric of what we are as human beings—to know there’s a difference between right and wrong, and to feel drawn toward what’s right. Even as young children, we have an innate sense of this. And even when children are raised in unhealthy environments, they often still know something’s wrong. That’s how powerful this intuitive sense is.

Covey calls this the divine conscience because it comes from God—a higher power—something outside of us. It leads us toward light, goodness, truth, beauty—toward what we ought to be doing, and away from what we shouldn’t. And when we align ourselves with it, life goes better. Anyone who has seriously committed to following their conscience will tell you the same.

The social conscience, on the other hand, is what we’re trained into. It’s what we’re taught as children, but it’s bigger than just our families. It’s the culture we live in. The social conscience is shaped by collective norms and expectations about what’s right, wrong, good, true, and beautiful.

So if we think of conscience as a mechanism by which we discern truth and determine how to behave, we can see that the divine conscience is grounded in what is intrinsically, objectively true and good—while the social conscience reflects whatever the culture currently believes.

And if you know your history, you know that the social conscience changes.

For example, a hundred years ago, premarital sex was universally condemned in Western society. There were even laws with punishments for it. Today, it’s not only accepted, but often encouraged—and many people engage in it without a second thought. Why? Because the social conscience is now loud and culturally dominant on this issue.

Now, maybe the first time someone crosses that line, they hesitate. They feel conflicted. But then they override that hesitation, and eventually, it becomes normalized for them—because that divine conscience was drowned out by the social one.

There’s an old sitcom—I can’t remember the name, but it starred Valerie Bertinelli. You might remember it. The show followed a single mom and her two daughters.

In one episode, the daughter has a boyfriend, and she’s considering having sex with him. She goes to her mom and asks, “Is this right or wrong? Should I do this or not?” And the mom says something like,
“I can’t think of a good reason why you shouldn’t… but I don’t want you to.”

It was such a striking example. The mother couldn’t appeal to God, to truth, to moral law—because they’d lost their faith. And the social conscience around her was saying,
“It’s fine. We’ve got the pill. It’s safe. Everyone’s doing it.”

But despite all that, both the mother and daughter still hesitated. That moment of pause? That was their divine conscience, still alive, still speaking.

In the end, the girl felt too uncomfortable and refused. The boyfriend broke up with her—and in doing so, revealed who he truly was. She wanted to wait, and that told her something important about herself and him.

So these two consciences—the social and the divine—are always in tension. It’s like the classic image of the angel and the devil on your shoulders. There’s an internal battle between what society says and what your soul knows.

And when your divine conscience is out of sync with the social conscience, it creates inner turmoil. The wider that gap becomes, the harder it is to find moral clarity. It becomes increasingly difficult to discern the truth.

That’s why Covey taught that the solution is to educate the divine conscience. To train it to become more and more attuned to what is real, true, and right.

When your conscience tells you to do something—or not to do something—and you listen, you strengthen your character. You become more virtuous. You align your life with divine law, with natural law, with those true principles that govern human behavior.

And in the words of Cecil B. DeMille:
“We cannot break the law. We can only break ourselves against it.”

There are many ways to educate the divine conscience—I'll get to those in just a minute. But it’s so important to first understand this:
The social conscience can be deeply oppressive.
It tells you:
“You should believe this.”
“You must support that.”
“You ought to agree with us.”

And yet, if you pause long enough to listen—really listen—you’ll often hear that still, small voice saying:
“No. Something about this isn’t right.”

Sometimes society tells us, “Let it go. You should tolerate this or that behavior,” even when it feels intrinsically wrong to you. And that’s a really hard place to be.

As we’ve discussed, a hundred or two hundred years ago in the United States, the social conscience and the divine conscience were far more aligned—far more in sync and in harmony. People were still people, of course. They still made mistakes and had weaknesses. But at least society wasn’t patting them on the back for doing something dishonorable.

Some behaviors are inherently wrong. But if we aren't taught they’re wrong—and if society keeps insisting they’re not wrong—and if we don’t educate our divine conscience—we’ll eventually just agree with the social conscience.

If we don’t pull back… if we don’t train the divine conscience… then we won’t have anything to hold up against the social conscience. We’ll simply go with the times, go with the flow. Whatever society says is good, bad, right, or wrong—we’ll adopt it.

Now, we do have a divine conscience written on our hearts. So we’ll feel guilt when we do something wrong. We’ll know we shouldn’t have lied… cheated… cut corners… whatever the case may be.

But if we don’t correct ourselves—if we don’t make the change, if we don’t tell ourselves the truth about how our actions were out of alignment with what we know to be right—then we begin to dead-end our conscience.

We wear it down. Beat it back.

You can see this in people who once felt bad about a certain behavior—but then, over time, stopped feeling bad. As they continued doing it, they worked themselves into a new normal.

So if we want to hold fast to objective reality—the natural law, the moral law given by God—we have to educate ourselves in it. We have to align our behavior with it, so we have something to contrast against the social conscience.

And it’s become clear to me that as we do this—we also influence the social conscience.

In some kind of cosmic way, we all have a responsibility for the collective moral climate. We’re all either contributing to it or being shaped by it.

I hate to bring up Nazi Germany again, but I think it’s important.
There’s a book—recommended by Jordan Peterson—I’ll link it in the notes. I can’t remember the title offhand, but it’s a study of ordinary German men. Most were in their 30s or 40s, average citizens with families and normal jobs.

They were recruited into the war. At first, they found the tasks they were given deeply uncomfortable. Many even refused to do them. They knew they were wrong.

But eventually, under pressure from their peers, their superiors, and society, they began to comply. Over the course of just a year or two, they grew comfortable with what they had once found horrifying—mass killings of Jews.

They went from average men who rarely touched a gun, to men who could march Jewish children into a ditch in the woods and gun them down.

This is how it happens.
We all participate in making the world better—or worse.
We either challenge the social conscience… or we conform to it.

We can be the kind of people who stand firm, who shine with conviction, who strengthen the collective moral compass. Or we can be the kind of people who go along—because we want to keep our jobs, because it’s uncomfortable to stand out, or because we’ve rationalized that maybe it’s not a big deal.

So how do we educate our divine conscience?

First, we recognize it as a mechanism given by God.

And if it comes from God, then we get to know God better. We build a relationship with Him. We read His words. We work to become more like Him.

Second, we study the lives of men and women who followed their consciences. We draw strength from their examples. We learn how they made courageous choices—and we do the same.

Third, we commit to small acts of conscience every day. And over time, those small things become big things. We sculpt our character through daily obedience.

Fourth, we learn about the conscience itself. The word conscience literally means “knowledge with”—knowledge held in common with God and with others. That’s fascinating to me. It reminds us that conscience is not private whim—it’s a shared moral knowing.

Fifth, we teach conscience. We push back against cultural lies. We speak truth. Even in small ways, we build strength to stand tall when the big tests come.

As we do these things—refining our divine conscience, growing in virtue—we receive the beautiful rewards of moral clarity and inner peace. But it doesn’t stop there. We also begin to impact those around us. Our influence spreads—from our family, to our community, to our culture.

And if enough of us commit to this—like Suzuki did, like so many great men and women before us—we can help bring the social conscience back into alignment with the divine conscience.

That was the great moral tension in America during the 1800s.
A terrible practice had crept into the nation… and the North and South stood on opposite sides of the moral divide.

The North stood against it, and the South defended it—forced slavery—and that moral conflict created a deep tension in our nation for the first hundred years. It was an ongoing battle over the social conscience, and in the end, truth prevailed.

📍 Hundreds of thousands of men and boys—Black and white—gave their lives to fight against that egregious practice. They fought to bring our social conscience into better alignment with a higher truth. That, to me, is something truly beautiful.

Over time, the social conscience was corrected. And then, men and women continued to rise—leaders who helped us see each other more clearly as equals, who worked to put all people on a level playing field. Slowly but surely, more and more opportunities opened up for Black Americans. And today, we’ve had a Black president, we have powerful Black leaders, entrepreneurs, and influencers—people who are making a global impact.

So yes, beautiful things happen when we do the work to align our lives with our divine conscience, to educate it, and then work together to build a healthier social conscience.

There are still many areas in our world today where the social conscience needs healing—places where it has strayed far from truth, beauty, and goodness.

And so, my challenge to myself—and to you—is this:

Start today. Educate your divine conscience. Live in greater alignment with what you know deep down to be good, true, and right. Recognize that you are the greatest beneficiary of that effort—and so is the world around you.

Another key way to do this is by finding true principles and choosing to live by them—in every area of your life.

That’s what the Mission Driven Academy is designed to help you do. There, you’ll receive The Mission Driven Life, which teaches the Seven Laws of Life Mission—an incredible place to begin if you’re ready to move forward with clarity and purpose.

Because ultimately, when each of us takes this seriously—when we educate our divine conscience and courageously follow it—we become the kind of people who can help heal the world. We can help make our society more good, more beautiful, and more whole.

Thank you so much for joining me today.
I’ll see you next time.

If you've ever found yourself losing it when your kid acted up...

If you've ever promised yourself you'd be more patient next time...

If you ever wish you responded better when things didn't go your way...

This podcast is for YOU!

Years ago, a simple way of looking at patient and bearing through hard times came to my attention and has been a tremendous help to me! And I KNOW it will help you too!

Ready to "Overcome the MOM-GUILT?!" Get your FREE mini-training here: https://www.themissiondrivenmom.com/

Transcript: 

Welcome back to the podcast. I am super excited for you to spend the next few minutes with me. We are going to talk about patience and how you can be more patient, even when you don't want to be and you don't know how.

There's a concept that I learned a few years ago that has been super helpful to me in understanding the connection between obtaining a vision and being a creator in the world and needing to exercise patience and how they're all connected. I'm going to give you some tools for that.

Before we get into that, if this podcast has been a blessing to you in your life, I would love for you to share it along and give us a review that helps others to know, uh, what it is that we're doing here and how it might benefit their lives.

All right, let's dive into patience now. If you have ever had someone tell you that you just need to be more patient, and it made you super mad then join the club, because I have been there many times.

Let's look at patience. Here's a simple definition you can pull from Google. It's waiting without becoming upset or annoyed. It's tolerating, delay, trouble, or suffering without anger or upset. And it's one of those things that we have a certain ability, a certain cap on our patience capacity, I would say, and it's hard to know how to get beyond that. I mean, what is patience? After all?

It's been considered a Christian virtue for a long time. It's something that is talked about in scripture quite a bit. It's something that we feel that maybe we should be. Or others should be, or we would like them to be patient with us, patient with themselves, patient with the process. And yet it's so hard to do. It's so hard to not get upset when things get hard.

So I'm going to tell you a little story here of something that happened in a workshop that will give you kind of a visual for how this tool of patience works.

“When participants enter the meeting room on the third day of the Living Art Conference, they find seven water glasses placed in a diagonal line on a table in front of the room. A pitcher filled with water is next to the line of glasses. The glasses are empty. Just before the class begins. I fill one glass with water. Nothing is said about this action, and most of the class does not seem to pay attention to the event that has taken place. Just before the morning break, I fill another glass with water.

Some of the participants notice, but only one person asked me a question about it during the break. ‘What are the glasses for?' he asks.

‘That's a good question,’ I answer nonchalantly.

‘You're not going to tell me,’ he asks.

‘That's another good question.’ I answer with a smile. He laughs and then goes out to have a cup of coffee.

The morning's work has been very exciting and the events filling the water glasses, the events of filling water glasses are very small by comparison. When the class convenes, I casually fill another glass with water. Nothing is said about it. I do not fill another glass before the lunch break. Most people hurry off to the dining room.

A few remain to talk about the content of the morning. No one mentions the glasses. When the afternoon session begins, I fill another glass with water. Two or three people snicker.

Someone asks, ‘When are you going to drink them?’ I just smile. Most people seem not to be paying much attention to the question or to my lack of an answer.

Then the class is divided into groups to conduct some experiments and nothing more is said about the glasses. An afternoon break is called, I do not fill another glass with water. During the break, someone rushes up to me to ask if she can have a drink from one of the glasses. No, I answer. Oh, she says, with a knowing grin, I wonder what she thinks she knows.

Rosalyn begins the next session just before she begins to lead the class. In an exercise, she fills another glass with water. ‘Hey, she can do it too,’ someone is heard to say in the late afternoon. Rosalyn calls a break. She does not fill a glass with water.

When Rosalyn comes back from the break, she finds that some of the water has been removed from one of the glasses. The water level in the glasses that have been filled was about the same across all the glasses when she left the room, now one glass is missing half its original amount. Roslyn pours water into it, bringing it up to the same level as the others, and begins the next part of her session.

Rosalyn leads the class through some remarkable techniques, and for the last part of the session, people discuss their insights and report their experiences. The energy is high and exciting. Rosalyn fills another glass with water, then calls the dinner break. There are seven water glasses in a diagonal line, six of which are now filled with water.

A few more people ask what is going on with the water glasses? That's a good question. We answer when we come back from the dinner break, we find that someone has left a little flower in one of the filled glasses and another glass has mysteriously lost about a third of its water. I add water to the depleted glass, bringing the water level back to its original level, and remove the flour.

Just before I begin the evening session, I fill the remaining glass with water employing great exaggerated formality. Most people cheer, some laugh. A few seem not to notice. Take out a piece of paper please and write down what you think has been going on with the water glasses. I say I collect all the answers in a small basket and give the basket to the first person in the first row.

‘Take out one of the answers and then pass the basket to the next person.’ I say, ‘Now read the answer written on the paper.’

The person reads. 'There are seven glasses that are filled with water. Over time, I think that Robert will place some music on them because there are seven glasses, just as there are seven nodes in the Diatonic Music scale.’

‘Thank you,’ I say. Then the next person reads the answers he has taken out of the basket. ‘Water symbolizes purity in life, and seven is a universal number. The glasses have been filled over time, which symbolizes the universe has filled with the fluid purity of life.’

‘Thank you. Next please.’

The next one says, ‘Seven glasses are filled with water throughout the day. This is tension. When all of the glasses are filled, that is a resolution.’

Then they go on with other answers that the people have. And I'll tell you more about this in just a minute, but I want to stop right there and talk about this answer that this person had. Tension is another way of thinking about patience.

If you envision yourself holding onto a rubber band and you pull that rubber band with your fingers or between your hands, and you pull it until it's tight and maybe even beyond where it's tight and then you hold it. That's tension. Tension always seeks resolution. So over time, as you hold onto this rubber band, you'll get tired of holding it. Your muscles will physically get tired. And you will want to let go. That rubber band wants you to release the tension on it. Your hands, your mind, even because this is a psychological principle, as much as as it is physical, wants that tension released.

It's important to understand that where there's no tension, there's no need of patience.

There are plenty of things in your life that are going on every day. And you don't have to exercise patience around them. They come and go. They happen. They don't bother you. You aren't tempted to get angry or upset or express negative emotion around something.

But when you are, those negative emotions that either express themselves or want to be expressed are an indication that something is testing your patience, that there is some kind of tension in your life that you want resolution to, and this tension is uncomfortable. It's tiring, it's hard work.

Now tension is absolutely necessary in life. It is the key to all storytelling and storytelling is the most fundamental thing that we do. We tell each other's stories. We create our lives into a story and we communicate best, we remember best, what is put in story form. We are story creating and storytelling beings at our very foundation, and there's not ever a story told that doesn't have tension.

The whole point of a story is to create tension and hold on for the resolution. The end of the story is the resolution, and that's when the tension is released and the thing fills whole. And if you're with someone and they start telling you a story that's really interesting to you, you will remember and return to them to have that tension resolved for yourself because you need to finish hearing that story.

This is in the contrasts in the dark and light, and all of the opposites in the world. This is a fundamental element of art, that there is tension that must be resolved. In fact, there's tension in the physical world, and it's only through tension that we can do things like fly planes. So what's really fascinating about patience is that it is an element of personal growth that is often completely overlooked, but it's absolutely vital to our ability to become more because patience must be practiced when tension is present. And tension is only present when there's an expectation. When you are tempted to express negative emotions, it is a lot of the time, not always, but a lot of the time it is because your patience is being tested and the reason your patience is being tested is because you have a vision, a goal, or an expectation of yourself or someone else that isn't being met, and it creates tension and discomfort. You want the resolution of seeing that expectation or that goal or that vision resolved. And what's fascinating about this tension is that tension is the only way that growth is possible. Just as you must pull on a rubber band or push on something, if you'll think about any type of exercise for the physical body, it's a pushing or pulling type of exercise. Tension is created. Resistance is part of the process of breaking down the muscle so that more can be grown, and that is why if we want to reach better goals, if we want to engage in personal growth, if we want to become more than we are, patience is an absolutely indispensable part of that process, and it is tolerating the tension until the resolution comes.

And that means we are not exercising patience if we are emotionally upset that isn't patience. Patience is when we hold the tension without the negative emotion. Now, ideally the tension is what keeps things interesting when we understand exercising patience as a way of holding tension. Then we can start to see that it's the tension that's making the muscles grow. It's the tension that's making us more than who we were, and it's the tension that's keeping things interesting, and that's causing us to keep working. If we were completely comfortable and we had everything that we had ever dreamed of or desired, we would stop working. We would stop growing. We would stop practicing patience.

Holding tension is actually one of the most vital things that we can do to grow as individuals. This is the same concept as the law of the harvest.

Things only grow when there's delay. When you plant the seed, you must wait. You cannot change the law. You must hold the tension, but you can aid that seed in growing. By doing the work, and we'll talk about this more in a minute, the seed is most likely to be harvested, to become what you want to become when you're vigilant throughout the process. And that is how you hold the tension properly is you're anxiously engaged while you hold the tension. You don't just hold the tension and sit there. You hold the tension by doing the work that's necessary to the outcome that you're trying to create. And this is why it's so vital when you're practicing patience to work within your own center of influence. And we'll talk about that more in just a minute. Okay.

Here's a couple quotes about this that are really, really helpful.

“One of the most important life lessons, one that is essential to your life as a creator, is mastery of tension resolution systems.”

So what he's saying here is that you cannot grow as a person unless you learn. To hold tension, to practice patience by holding tension with optimism and excitement, and being forward-looking, looking forward to the result that you're striving to create.

“As you master tension resolution systems, you master the ability to engage in your own personal growth.”

You cannot become more tomorrow unless you choose to create systems in where you're forced, systems where you're forced to grow. Now, these can be systems other people have created.

We do this all the time when we sign up for classes. We choose to be intention. We choose to practice patience, to engage in actions that will cause our growth. And to delay our satisfaction, the resolution of that grade that we don't get until the final test. We force ourselves to work and work and work, and we engage in our own personal growth.

Here's another one.

“If you have not become intimate with delayed resolutions, you will not be able to achieve long range goals.”

This is what maturity is really about. The most mature people in the world can delay their gratification. They can practice patience for the longest periods of time. They literally have the most patience because they can hold the greatest amount of tension for the longest period of time. It's really a fascinating way to look at the growth that you want to engage in.

Now let's return to our glasses story. They did a debrief after the fact, and he actually had several of the students in his workshop. He asked them questions and broke down their response to the tension resolution system that he created. He created a situation for them that they did not understand, that they did not know how to resolve, or they had no option but to practice their patience and to wait and watch and see what would happen.

This is one example of how he breaks these down.

“The events of filling the glasses with water had no special meaning other than the construction of a simple tension resolution system. The order in which the glasses were filled was arbitrary. The amount of water in each glass was approximately the same. In fact, that was all that was going on. I told the class, even though that was factually true, an incredible learning experience took place. When we began to talk about what people did with this tension resolution system during the day.

During our discussion, some absolutely fantastic insights were brought to the surface. Much of the dialogue concerned what the class did when confronted with the unknown, we began to explore what different people thought at different points during the day.

‘I thought you were going to just drink a lot of water. At first,’ one woman said, ‘but then you didn't drink any water.’

‘What did you think?’ Then I ask her.

‘Well, then I thought that the glasses would be used later to make some kind of music. After I figured that out, I felt a lot better.’

’Why did you feel better?’

‘Because then I knew what was going on.’

‘But you didn't know what was going on.’

‘True. But I thought I did.’

‘But in fact, you did not know what was going on.’ I repeated.

‘Yes. So why did your speculations make you feel better?’”

(And we're going to talk about speculations in just a minute.)

She says, ‘because I don't like not knowing what's going on.’

‘Why not?’

‘I don't know. It just makes me a little nervous.’

‘What are you nervous about? Not being fully in control.’

Just as a side note, I gave a keynote at an online conference last week and I was talking all about the power of the natural law and true principles and how they can change your life. I can't remember how we got into it. Some questions were asked at the end, and I was talking about kind of this idea without really talking about it in depth about how my children are all across the faith spectrum, which we've talked about on this podcast before.

And what that requires of me is holding a lot of tension. We don't have the resolution in my family that I ultimately want, you know, and. I can't, I don't get to be in control all the time. And so what I talked to them about was just letting go and working on the relationship. And one of the women came back with, “I just don't see how I could do that because I just need to be in control.”

This is a huge theme for so many moms that I've talked to and that we've brought through the academy and that we've worked with. Believe me, I am a recovering rescuer. I want to feel in control. I want to think that I can juggle all the pieces and that with enough good teaching and enough good advice that everybody will just make all the perfect decisions, which frankly, the longer I live, the more I realize that I didn't have all the best answers in the first place, and probably not everybody would've been better off taking my advice all the time, quite frankly.

So this is something that I really wanted to hit on for all of us.because I know you moms out there are like me and you want to be in control.The way that you're trying to be in control and manage the tension that you're holding when you don't have outcomes in your home and in your life that you want is through speculation and giving yourself false perceptions that make you feel in control when you're actually not in control. That makes you feel like you know what's going on when you actually don't know what's going on.

So he says to the woman, “‘What are you nervous about?’

And she says, ‘Not being fully in control.’

And he says, ‘Why do you need to be fully in control?’

‘That's a good question. I suppose it's because when I was a kid, I never knew what was going on.’

‘And as an adult, sometimes you still don't know what is going on.’

‘True.’

'Is it okay that sometimes you don't know what's going on?’

‘Yes, but… well…

'When you think you know what's going on, what do you do with that information?’

‘I act appropriately.’”

That’s her answer. ‘I act appropriately.’ What I wrote in my book is, “But it can't be appropriate because you don't actually know. That's what's so ironic, and this is just a human, this is just part of the human condition. We want to know what's going on and we want to act appropriately, which is totally fine. But when we try to manage that need and when we try to alleviate the tension through speculation, we actually cause sometimes more harm than good for ourselves and for other people.”

So he goes on, she says, ‘I act appropriately’

He says, ‘What does that mean?’

‘Oh, it means I won't screw up.’

‘So you think you will screw up if you don't know what's going on?’

‘Yes.’

‘What makes you think that?’

‘There were times in the past when I screwed up because I didn't know what was going on.’ ‘Were there ever times when you screwed up, when you did know what was going on?’

‘Uh, yes.’

‘Were there ever any times that you didn't screw up and you didn't know what was going on?’ ‘Yes.’

‘Then I don't see the connection between what you know and whether you screw up.’

'Now that you mention it, neither do I.'

‘So you formed a theory about the glasses because you didn't know what was going on, and you feel nervous when you don't know what is going on. You think you might screw up by not acting ‘appropriately’ knowing what is going on, or at least thinking you know what's going on. Is an action you take to avoid losing control and avoid screwing up?’

‘Yep.’

‘What do you think now?’

‘I'm amazed. I never realized that about myself.’

‘Have you formed a lot of theories about life and about you and about the world?’

‘You bet I have.’

‘What do you think now? I think I'm going to pay more attention to what I really know and what I don't know.’

One of the things I wrote in the book here is we do this all the time in our relationships. We don't like not knowing what's going on, and it's painful to hold the tension. Not blaming. Not speculating. That's the truly mature way to operate, but it requires a capacity to hold tension. So then he goes on to talk to some of the other people, and in the end they come up with these kind of, basically these five ways that people were approaching this tension resolution, problem or system that they were faced with. See if you see yourself in any of these.

Number one, “many people speculate when something is unknown to them. The function of the speculation is not simply to satisfy curiosity, but to give them a sense of security and tenuity. Many of the people in the group came to realize that they often speculate and theorize about many things in their lives.”

And we're going to talk about what we can do instead of speculating, we watch something. The intent, the tension is uncomfortable. We don't have true understanding. And so we speculate. We come to quick conclusions. We create theories and we do this all the time when we gossip. You know, there was a situation in our family recently. We are hearing very third person about a situation that none of us has any firsthand information about the way that it's being fed to us sounds kind of familiar to another situation that happened in the family years ago. So someone in the family made a comment. They speculated and they theorized based on this very limited amount of information and the tension that should be held in a more mature approach to the circumstance, holding tension properly would've been to give this person that's in this situation that looks like their character is being compromised. The more mature thing would've been to hold the tension longer. To give them the benefit of the doubt and to not draw any conclusions yet based on the limited information that we have. But a few people started drawing conclusions immediately, speculating and theorizing by equating this person to a person in the past who genuinely was somewhat evil and vindictive, and did do things for the wrong reasons, and did really genuinely hurt people. We know that because the whole situation has born out and we all have firsthand evidence. We all know the truth. But now in this new situation with very limited information, people are starting to quickly speculate and theorize to manage the tension and the discomfort of the situation.

And they blame. They blame quickly. We do this, we hurt ourselves and we hurt other people in our unwillingness to be patient. To simply hold the tension of the current situation and not try to rush to the resolution too quickly in order to alleviate the discomfort that we feel.

Okay, here's another one way people handle tension.

For some unknown reason the unknown leads them to want more control, power, and authority. I mean, maybe they speculate too, but another thing that they do is to try to get control and people who were drinking the water and putting flowers in it were trying to increase their power over a situation they had no control over by intervening with something that was really none of their business. These weren't their glasses. It wasn't their water, it wasn't their conference. It was really actually none of their business, but they couldn't withhold intervention of some kind in a desperate need to feel in control.

The third group, there were others he said, who formed their sense of identity by what they know, how much they know or what is relevant to know. So some of these people were making it all about them. Their identity was in question when they were engaged in attention resolution system, in a situation that called for them to practice patience. And they weren't up for it, and so they started attacking themselves or thinking about themselves in different or weird or distorted or unhealthy ways.

A fourth were those who seemed not to notice any events regarding the water glasses, but as we explored further, we discovered that they indeed had noticed, but they could not understand what was going on. This created a conflict in them, and they attempted to reduce the conflict by becoming uninvolved. This is a way that I tend to manage tension, is to ignore it, to distract myself away from it, to pretend like it's not happening, or, to get my identity caught up in it, to blame myself about it, to figure out how I need to be different to resolve it.

And the fifth one was others carried around an ideal that they imposed on the water glass situation. “Many of the interpretations, such as water means purity and seven is the universal number are examples of this phenomenon.” So people had different ways, these five different ways that they noticed in this experiment of trying to manage a situation that called upon their ability to practice their patience.

So what do we do instead? Instead of trying to understand everything all the time, gain power and control over situations that are not ours to control, getting our identity all caught up in it or becoming aloof to things that we should pay attention to or that are that we should try to understand, or especially speculating. What can we do instead?

One of the things that the author says is in the creative process, which all of us, you and I moms, we're creating everything. We're creating dinner, we're creating our hairstyles. We're creating the aesthetic in our home. We're creating the environment. We're creating the faithful opportunities. We're creating our own character. We're we're creating the kind of person that we're becoming, and "tension is the engine that generates energy for action.” Tension is vital. We have to intentionally step into tension, which means we have to get better at practicing patience and instead of speculating by placing blame, by equating one thing to another when they don't equal each other. By pretending that something is what it isn't, or trying to control the situation.

Here's what we do instead.

The first thing that we do is we get really, really honest when we find those negative emotions coming up in us, when we see ourselves losing our patience, becoming aggravated, negative, and out of control, when we see that in ourselves, we want to stop, stop and take stock of reality. We want to be honest about what's actually really going on and what we actually really have control over because we don't have control over a lot. But we also have control over everything in the sense that we have complete control of ourselves. I would encourage you around this concept to go back to The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Read the first habit and to look at the circle of concern and the circle of control that Covey helps us to see and to recognize that the first thing we have to do is work on us. Work on you.

If you are frustrated at the way your children are behaving, if you're frustrated at the way your house looks, if you are worried about your finances, whatever those things are in your life that are causing you this emotional discomfort where you don't have resolution, recognize that the negative emotions mean there's something you care about. And the tension means that there's something you want. You would not feel these emotions of discomfort and negativity unless you cared about yourself. You cared about your home. You cared about your children. You cared about your marriage. You cared about your personal growth. That is a good thing. These are indicators that you care.

So embrace that. Recognize that you care, and that that's a beautiful thing about you. If you didn't care, you would be indifferent to everything. You wouldn't get up in a ruffle, you know, you wouldn't get upset about things. And the tension means those negative emotions, the anger and the upset are drawn from some kind of vision.

You hold an ideal a. An expectation, a goal.

So what you've got to do is get really honest about the fact that you care about something and that you have a vision of where you want to be, of where you want that thing to be, what you want your kitchen sink to look like of the way you want your children to behave. But you've got to get honest about reality and what it is in this ideal that you're holding this unstated, maybe even to this moment, unrealized expectation you're holding, get honest about it. Get honest about the fact that you keep getting frustrated with your kids, that you don't like their behavior, because you care about their behavior and you hold an ideal of what their behavior ought to be. You are having a hard time holding the tension between what the outcomes are right now and what you want them to be.

You want resolution. You want them to behave differently. You want to cross the finish line on the ideals that you hold. What are those ideals? What is it that you're wanting from them? What is this expectation or this goal that you may have never even realized that you're hanging onto? Journal it. Write it down.

Get super honest and clear about what that is, and look at it honestly, and spend some time in Covey and look clearly at your true locus of control. And then set a real goal. Something that's not this unrealistic ideal, but that's tangible and realistic for you and your children, somewhere that you can get to in the near or distant future through the next thing that you're going to do.

And that is take the baby steps. So once you've assessed the reality. Of why you care and what it is that you care about and the ideal that you're trying to get to, then you can set a better goal and you can have a vision. Now, the tension resolution system you're going to create is now going to be based in the reality of your life. It’s going to be based on things you can legitimately control. You’re going to stop measuring yourself and your kids against an unvocalized, sometimes even subconscious ideals that you didn't even realize that you had. And you're now going to have a realistic measuring stick of things that you can control so that you can actually make real progress, and you can actually hold the tension to a point of resolution that's attainable, and this is how your personal growth is attained.

This is how you alleviate unnecessary, unrealistic tension that's never going to go away for true patience as you act in diligence toward a desired vision. And what you're going to do as you work toward this vision is instead of speculating and theorizing, you're going to observe. You are going to notice positive changes.

You're going to take time every day to ask yourself the next right baby step toward your vision that's measurable, and then you're going to assess how you did today. The goal was that you were going to teach a principle to your children and then put some kind of clear benefit and consequence in place around that principle with your children.

Then mission accomplished. You took the baby step toward having a more harmonious peace filled home. Now, what do you need to do tomorrow to continue to work toward this vision? What's the next baby step? How do you need to act tomorrow? And how can you hold the tension and be proud of your own behavior and your own responses working on the peace that you actually have control over?

Okay. A couple thoughts to finish this up here.

As you learn to practice more patience by recognizing the negative emotions and then being honest about reality, assessing what it is that you care about and what it is you ultimately want. Then working on what's truly within the locus of your control. Observing instead of speculating, taking baby steps each day toward your vision, and then eventually getting there. You are engaging in a beautiful, creative process, and now you understand what it means to practice patience, how it is that you can hold tension until you have resolution. And that is the achievement of the goal that you're working on. And then you do that over and over and over again, and that's how you take control of yourself, of your life, of the life that you are creating.

Let's end with this.

“Most people do not think about forming the end result before they take action, but when you do, you can act with more direction, more efficiency, and more effectiveness.”

When you practice patience, you hold the tension that is the lifeblood of all growth in life, and you are choosing to increase your ability to hold greater and greater amounts of tension, which helps you grow more and more as an individual and it increases the impact that you're able to have on others around you, because now you can accomplish greater and greater goals through the mastery of your own patience.

Thanks so much for joining me. I'll see you next time.

Today is a NEW kind of podcast for you! This time I've taken a chapter from a book, read selections to you and interjected my thoughts and ideas alongside the author. 

The subject is a question that we each face in life: Is everything fate, or do we really have free will? And how much of our lives are we truly responsible for?! How do our daily thoughts and behaviors shape our future?

If you want a deeper dive into these questions and a look at how fate, free will, character, natural law, faith, and truth are all connected, listen in on today's conversation between me and author James Allen.

Here's a link to the book online to follow along: https://archive.org/details/masteryofdestiny00alle

If you like this podcast, and want more of this kind, please let us know!

Make sure to get your FREE copy of the first TWO CHAPTERS of my book The Mission Driven Life: Discover and Fulfill Your Unique Contribution In the World here: https://www.themissiondrivenmom.com/

Transcript: 

I'm super excited to be with you today, and I'm going to try something different that I haven't ever done before. I've picked up the book Mastery of Destiny by James Allen, and I've been reading it every morning for the last few days. There is so much meat in here and it talks about so many valuable things. If you want to go grab it, I'll link a copy of it. It's in the public domain. I'll link a copy of it in this podcast and you can follow along with me or you can just listen along as I read it. But I'm going to read it and then I'm going to comment. I'm going to walk through it just through chapter one today and talk about my takeaways from it, my thoughts about it, what I loved about it, and things that I'm practicing from it. This has so much good information and it fits so beautifully with what I'm all about, with the power of the natural moral law, and how we can grow and become who we want to become, but there are parameters around that, laws and principles around that. This book happens to be one of the bonus materials in the academy, so you don't have to read it, but you can. I thought we would just spend some time in it today, and it will give us the opportunity to talk about some really important concepts.

Before we do that, I just want to ask you if you're enjoying this podcast and it's been a blessing to you and people that you know that you will go ahead and leave a review and pass it along to whoever you think may benefit from it.

Let's get into this chapter and see how this goes. And if this is something that you end up liking, please let me know. Shoot us off an email or go in and comment on socials or whatever and just give me some feedback. Let me know if this type of podcast is something that you would like more of if this is beneficial to you.

So chapter one is called “Deeds, Character, and Destiny.” There's a quote right out the top by Ralph Waldo Emerson, that says “The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be.”

That was Emerson, and that's the beginning of this first chapter. Here we go. As I read along, I will pause and let you know what's James Allen speaking and what's me. This is is the beginning of the chapter.

“There is and always has been a widespread belief in fate or destiny that is in an eternal and inscrutable power, which apportions definite ends to both individuals and nations. This belief has arisen from long observation of the facts of life. Men are conscious that there are certain occurrences which they cannot control and are powerless to avert. Birth and death, for instance, are inevitable, and many of the incidents of life appear equally inevitable."

So this is me now. This is something that I actually talk about in my upcoming book, How Truth Makes Us Free, and actually just talked about recently in the “4 Types of Problems and Four Solutions” that there are certain things in life that we have no control over. And because of that, we feel like maybe we've been shaped and destiny has determined who we are going to become or fate has sent us in that direction. We actually do this a lot in our modern world with like therapy and psychotherapy. There's this thing where we're always talking about our childhood and what kind of childhood that we have. And I've gone there a lot too, like these criminals had this terrible childhood and all of that kind of stuff. And that is sad. It can help us make sense, maybe of why people choose certain things. But actually plenty of people who have been through those really hard things didn't choose to become a criminal. So it's not fate that connects the dots between the childhood and who we are today. But anyway, we do relinquish people of a lot of personal responsibility because of the way that we talk about our childhood issues and things that we've gone through and how hard our lives have been and we forget that everyone's had a hard life and has had things that are very difficult to overcome.

So this is back to Allen. “Men strain every nerve for the attainment of certain ends. So we have certain goals, certain things that we want to accomplish, and we're trying really hard to get there. And he says, gradually, they become conscious of a power which seems to be not of themselves, which frustrates their puny efforts and laughs, as it were, at their fruitless, striving and struggle. As men advance in life, they learn to submit more or less to this overruling power, which they do not understand, perceiving only its effects in themselves in the world around them, and they call it by various names, such as God, Providence, Fate, destiny, etc.

Men of contemplation, such as poets and philosophers, step aside, as it were, to watch the movements of this mysterious power, as it seems to elevate its favorites on the one hand and strike down its victims on the other, without reference to merit or demerit. The greatest poets, especially the dramatic poets, represent this power in their works, as they have observed it in nature, the Greek and Roman dramatists usually depict their heroes as having foreknowledge of their fate and taking means to accept it. But by so doing, they blindly involve themselves in a series of consequences which bring about the doom which they are trying to avert. Shakespeare's characters, on the other hand, are represented as in nature with no foreknowledge except in the form of presentment of their particular destiny, thus, according to the poets, whether the man knows his fate or not, he cannot a, and every conscious or unconscious act of his is a step towards it.”

So this is just, you know, these ancient Greek poets who talk about the man who is going to kill his father and marry his mother mother. And then he does everything he can to run away from his fate, and then he goes right to it. Or this is Hamlet, who talks with the ghost of his father in the middle of the night and tries to not be the one who murders everybody and that ends up doing it. So this is one perspective on life. And James Allen is right that in history, in our poetry, in certain places and spaces, we have had a tendency to talk about how we aren't responsible for where we're at in life, how we're not responsible for the choices that we've made. They're not our choices because we were fated for that to happen. We have good luck or bad bad luck. We have bad childhood or good childhood. We're set up for life where we're not. We're of a certain race. We're of a certain culture. We had privilege. We whatever, we're doing, you can, if you look very long, very hard in our culture, you'll see our modern version of how destiny and fate are determining things, of how how people aren't responsible for their actions, of how they got where they are, not because they're a bad person, but just because, unfortunately, certain stuff happened to them. That is a perspective of many, many people, and it's a way in which we as human beings kind of let each other off the hook. You know, you had a bad childhood. You're of a certain race. You were born poor or in Harlem or whatever. And so you aren't held to a certain certain standard or you aren't expected to be of a certain caliber person or the things that are in your life are not your fault.

So James Allen goes on, “Omar Khayyam's moving finger, this is a poem called “Moving Finger,” is a vivid expression of this idea of fate,

‘The moving finger writes and having writ moves on, nor all thy nor wall lure it back to cancel a line, all thy tears out a word of it.’

Thus men in all nations and times have experienced in their lives the action of this invincible power of law, and in our nation today, this experience has been crystallized in the terse proverb, quote, man proposes God disposes. But contrary as it may appear, there is an equally widespread belief in man's responsibility as a free agent. All moral teaching is an affirmation of man's freedom to choose his course and mold his destiny, and man's patient and untiring efforts in achieving his ends are declarations of consciousness of freedom and power. This dual experience of fate on the one hand and freedom on the other has given rise to the interminable controversy between the believers in fatalism and the upholders of free will, a controversy which was recently revived under the term determinism versus free will.”

And by the way, this was written in the early 1900s.

Allen goes on. “Between apparently conflicting extremes, there is always a middle way of balance, justice, or compensation, which, while it includes both extremes, cannot be said to be either one or the other, and which brings both into harmony, and this middle way is the point of contact between two extremes.”

So this is me talking now. What he's presented to us is that there are two ways of looking at human behavior and human outcomes, whether or not we achieve our goals, the kind of lives that we're leading. One says, it's fate or destiny, and the other says, it's personal responsibility. And that's why this book is called Mastery of Destiny. He's trying to teach us how we can be the masters of our destiny. We can determine where our lives will go. And he's trying to empower us to see that things can be different, that we don't have to blame our childhood or our parents or our poverty or our spouse for where we are in life. We have the power to make things different. The next thing he's going to say, is so profound. What he's talking about here is that, okay, these are two extremes. It's all personal responsibility or it's all fate and determinism. And if it's all one or the other, then there's some big group of people that are just fundamentally wrong about human nature. So who is it that's wrong?

This is Allen again, and he goes on, and this first sentence, I think, is so incredible. He says, "Truth cannot be a partisan, but by its nature is the reconciler of extremes.”

I love that so much. Reconciler of extremes. I really believe that.

Allen says, “…in the matter which we are considering, there is a golden mean…”

That's straight from Aristotle, who said, when he talked about the virtues, that there's extremes in every “virtue,” that we could be all one way or all the other, but virtue is in the middle. True virtue is the golden mean.

Now Allen is saying, truth is that golden mean. It's the reconciler of these extremes.

Allen goes on, “…it brings fate and free will into close relationship wherein, indeed, it is seen that these two indisputable facts in human life, for such they are, are but two aspects of one central law, one unifying and all embracing principle, namely, the law of causation and its moral. aspect. Moral causation necessitates both fate and free will, both individual responsibility and individual predestination, for the law of causes must must also be the law of effects and cause and effect must always be equal. The train of causation, both in matter and mind, must be eternally balanced, therefore eternally just, eternally perfect.”

This is Audrey speaking now. He's saying something so profound, and he's describing in kind of a new and different way the natural law, the law of human nature, the moral law, the eternal law, whatever you want to call it. He says that just as there are laws that cannot be broken in the material world, in the world of matter, so in the world of mind, because mind is ultimately who we are as human beings. Our mind is not our brain and our mind is not our body. Our mind is the controlling and directing force by which we utilize our body, our soul and our body working together. So there are laws, he's saying, that are in effect in the world of mind, the spiritual world, the inner world, that are equally just and equally perfect, and that this law of cause and effect is just as in physics, it's working all the time in the lives of our minds and thoughts and our actions, and that it's just in as perfect and just as those laws, as when it is working in physics and other places.

He goes on, “Thus, every effect may be said to be a thing preordained, but the predetermining power is a cause and not the fiat of an arbitrary will.”

So effects, this is me again, are not just things that happen willy nilly, too, us. They are attached to a cause. and it must be so. It is universally fixed and we cannot change it.

He goes on, “Man finds himself involved in the train of causation. His life is made up of causes and effects. It is both a sowing and a reaping. Each act of his is a cause which must be balanced by its effects. He chooses the cause, this is his free will, he cannot choose, alter, or avert the effect. This is faith. Thus free will stands for the power to initiate causes, and destiny is involvement in effects. So both of, this is me again. So both free will and fate are part of this natural law. This is a different new way of looking at how natural law is in action in our lives all the time. That we choose something, we choose with our thoughts, and we choose with our actions. That's our deed. That's our act. That's our free will and motion. and then there is an effect that is attached that we have no control over. So James goes on, it is therefore true that man is predestined to certain ends, but he himself has, though he knows it not, issued the mandate, that good or evil thing from which there is no escape, he has by his own deeds brought about. it may be urged, this is him saying that other people may make this argument. It may be urged that man is not responsible for his deeds, that these are the effects of his character, that he is not responsible for the character, good or bad, which was given him at birth. If character was given him at birth, this would be true, and there would then be no moral law and no need for moral teaching. But characters are not given ready made. They are evolved. They are, indeed effects, the products of the moral law itself, that is, the products of deeds, character results of an accumulation of deeds which have been piled up, so to speak, by the individual during his life.”

I've written something here at the top of this page about this cause and effect issue, about the personal responsibility to choose, and then the effect which comes about, which seems to be our fate. This is what I wrote:

Because there is a good and an evil, and because cause and effect are linked, when you, quote, pick up one end of the stick with your act, you pick up the other end, which is the effect of that act. We cannot know the exact effect that is attached, but we can rest assured that the good is attached to the good and the evil is attached to the evil. Choose good actions, and you can be confident of good outcomes, which are manifest predominantly in the shaping of your own character. Because we can't control or determine the choices of other people, we can only choose our own actions and forge our own character. We can't expect certain ends, certain effects to be attached to certain actions.

I'll go into more of this when Allen talks about the shaping of character, but I just want to make sure, as we have into this, that we clear away a little bit of dust because I've had to learn this the really hard way, and I hope to kind of shorten that learning curve for you. This is why I said that the effect on the other end of that stick when we pick it up is going to be the shaping and molding of our character. The strengthening of us as a human being, our personal growth, any neurons that are linked in our brain, any physical, mental, spiritual, or emotional strength, that we develop, we are developing daily all the time with our actions, and we're doing it for good or for ill. The good are those things that cause us to grow and become and develop and strengthen and be empowered. And things that are evil weaken there around doubts and fears and angers and resentments. They're a canker to our growth. They're an obstacle, they damn us. And so one of the things that we tend to do that I've done a lot is I've tried to create my own sticks. In other words, I've tried to tell God and the universe and the natural law, the effects that I want attached to my good actions. I want to say that because I did these good things, certain outcomes should happen in my life. And if I don't see those specific outcomes, then something's broken, then there's not good and evil. Then there's not a moral law. Then cause and effect aren't real. Then God doesn't love me. So on and so forth. Then religion isn't true, then, et cetera, et cetera. And that's what we don't get to control. That's what he's really trying to drill down into is that the effect effects are predetermined and they're predetermined in the way that we're shaping ourselves, because even God will not interfere with the free will of any other human being. They must strengthen themselves and they must bring about the life that they want to have with their own actions, picking up their own sticks, good or evil, and experiencing the effects of that choice reverberating forward in the future. We don't get to decide what those effects will be. We can just trust and know that this moral law is always an effect and it has been put in place by a just and loving God, and those effects will be for our benefit. They will be good if we pick up the good as we know and understand it. I'll get to the correction around that that God offers for us in just a minute when Allen touches on it. But I just wanted to make sure that we're clear the scope of what this is and what it isn't and what it can be and what it can't be.

Allen goes on, "Man is the doer of his own deeds, as such he is the maker of his his own character, and as the doer of his deeds and the maker of his character, he is the molder and shaper of his destiny. He has the power to modify and alter his deeds, and every time he acts, he modifies his character, and with the modification of his character for good or evil, he is predetermining for himself new destinies. Destinies disastrous or beneficent, in accordance with the nature of his deeds. Character is destiny itself. As a fixed combination of deeds, it bears within itself the results of those deeds. These results lie hidden as moral seeds in the dark recesses of the character awaiting their season of germination, great growth, and fruitage.”

This is me again. Many great authors, great men and women who have understood the natural law, equate it with the law of the harvest. And I don't think there's a coincidence that this is talked about so often in scripture as a way of understanding ourselves in the way that reality works, that we can see in the material world how the law of the harvest works, and the more fruit and the more abundant that fruit is, the longer it takes for those effects to accumulate on themselves themselves. An apple seed from seed to a full-blown tree with fruit, the great harvest, takes five years, three to five years at best, to be able to harvest hundreds and hundreds of apples. Well, that's quite a time delay. And that's why the law of the harvest is so important to keep in the back of your mind. You will not always, in fact, you will not usually experience the effect of your choice today today. You will experience the effect of that choice years from now, or months from now, or weeks from now.

Allen goes on. "Those things which befall a man are the reflections of himself.”

This is me. You really are the maker of yourself. You really are today, and I've heard many other authors say this the way Earl Nightingale says it is, you are today who you really want to be and where you really want to be, whether you'll admit that to yourself or not. Because who you are today and where you are today is the accumulation of millions upon millions of micro choices day in and day out that you yourself have made. And right now, as you look around in your own life, you see the effects of those choices and those things that you love about the effects you are responsible for and the things that you hate about those effects, you are responsible for in the sense that they could be different if you decided to be different. And this is so empowering because it means that there is so much more that we can do to change the life that we're living if we are unsatisfied with where we are. And that usually, in my experience, doesn't mean swapping out a husband or even necessarily changing out a major career path or any of those kinds of things, it means making daily small, different choices and letting the seeds of those germinate and grow.

Allen goes on. “That destiny which pursued him, which he was powerless to escape by effort, or avert by prayer, was the relentless goal of his own wrong deeds, demanding and enforcing restitution. Those blessings and cursings which come to him unbidden are the reverberating echoes of the sounds which he himself sent forth. It is this knowledge of the perfect law, working through and above all things, of the perfect justice, operating in and adjusting all human affairs that enables the good man to to love his enemies, and to rise above all hatred, resentment, and complaining. for he knows that only his own can come to him, and that, though he be surrounded by persecutors, his enemies are but the blind instruments of a faultless retribution. So he blames them not, but calmly receives his accounts and patiently pays his moral debts.

This is me talking now. This is karma or the law of reciprocity that we see written about and talked about for centuries and centuries and centuries in every major culture and every great spiritual work throughout history. This is the way in which we can live truth and obey God and harmonize with the natural law, because we know that good is always returned to us. We know that this law is in force and that adjusts God put it in place and that good is attached to the good and that we're forging our character with every choice. And that is why we can love our enemies and rise above all hatred, resentment, and complaining, because we know that as we choose good, good will come to us.

Allen goes on, “…but this is not all. Man does not merely pay his debts. He takes care not to contract any further debts. He watches himself and makes his deeds faultless.”

Now, I want to say something here. This is Audrey talking. And what I wrote here is that we cannot do this. We cannot make our deeds faultless. We are flawed human beings. We don't have all knowledge, and we can't always make perfect choices. We can choose to educate ourselves. We can choose to discover, uncover, and align ourselves with those principles that are part of this natural law. We can improve our finances. We can improve our marriage. We can improve our health through obedience to those principles of the natural law, and we can then claim for ourselves the good that comes of those good choices, that it might not look exactly as we imagined, but it will improve, it will grow, it will heal, it will be better, as we choose to obey and comply. But there is a sense in which we'll never arrive. We will never make all of our choices and actions faultless. That is why we need a God who atones, who corrects. We can constantly course correct by using that atonement and letting it cover the wrong act and correct justice. And sometimes it helps us avert some of the consequences of our wrong actions. Sometimes God is merciful enough that when we say this is all repentance is, when we say we're sorry that our actions weren't faultless, when we ask him to keep correcting us, to keep realigning us with his law, His mercy covers us and he can help us to avert maybe some of the disastrous effects of an action we innocently took because he's so merciful and loving, or maybe he softens those effects. Or maybe he shows us how we can make things better or learn from those negative effects. And those negative effects stay in force because we haven't corrected them by asking him to help us fix it. And that's all repenting is. It's simply a course correction. It's simply choosing to realign ourselves with what we know to to be most good and true and beautiful and asking God to help us get there. We can ask Him to help us find those laws that we can live that will keep us out of trouble in that area. Blaine and I had trouble in our finances for many, many years because we didn't course correct and align ourselves with true financial principles. And as we did that, the law of the harvest kicked in, and over time, month by month, year by year, our finances strengthened and strengthened and strengthened because we aligned ourselves with those laws, we delayed our gratification, and we let the law of reciprocity and the law of the harvest be in effect in our financial lives.

Going back to Allen, “While paying off evil accounts, man is laying up good accounts. By putting an end to his own sin, he is bringing evil and suffering to an end. And now let us consider how the law operates in particular instances in the outworking of destiny through deeds and character. First, we will look at this present life, for the present is the synthesis of the entire past, and the net result of all that a man has ever thought and done is contained within him,”

I want to pause for one more minute and just emphasize again, what I've said, and I'm not the originator of these ideas. This is what I've read over and over again from great men and women that I know and trust, that this law is immutable, we cannot change it. That as Blackstone says, as William Blackstone taught, that our happiness is affixed, that as we choose to pursue our real and true happiness, which means aligning ourselves with God's laws, that God has so loved us and so cares about us, that our happiness is attached to choosing the good. The good and happiness are attached to each other. And that doesn't always mean perfect feelings of happiness, but it means peace and contentment and other positive feelings, confidence and assurance, etc. So we are the result of all we've thought and done. It's contained within you and I in this very moment. And when we fully accept that, we take on the power that is ours to take hold of, to assert, to wield, and to make our lives different in whatever way, if we want them different.

Allen goes on. “It is noticeable that sometimes the good man fails and the unscrupulous man prospers, a fact which seems to put all moral maxims as to the good results of righteousness, out of account, and because of this, many people deny the operation of any just law in human life, and even declare that it is chiefly the unjust that prosper.”

One quick resource that comes to mind on this for me, this is Audrey talking, is, what is seen, what is not seen by Frederick Bastiat, who basically says says this same thing. He walks through what Allen is about to walk through, a hypothetical situation in terms of a man's relationship with work. And Bastiat does the same thing because he's an economist. He does the same thing with economics. And both men demonstrate that the moral law is always in harmony with our best interests, that we thrive to the highest level when we're the most good, that we think that the pathway to what we want lies through choices that hurt us or hurt others. We wouldn't think of them as hurting us, but we would know them to be wrong or be uncertain about whether or not they were right, that we see people prosper. Let’s say, for example, that are rich who cut corners or who break the law. But actually, this higher law always catches up with them and they feel the consequences of it. If they're struck down in life in the midst of their wealth, those consequences come to them in the next life. But they come to them in this life as well because there's almost no one that dies at the height of their wealth who obtain that wealth illegally or immorally, who doesn't have their reputation permanently stained because those things are found out upon their death. So this law of restitution and reciprocity is always in force. Now he's going to give us this hypothetical situation, but you could go read what is seen what has not seen and see it happen again. Bastiat gives that example there.

Allen goes on. “Nevertheless, the moral law exists and it is not altered or subverted by shallow conclusions.”

He says, sometimes we think that the unscrupulous man prospers and that he gets good results, and that this is why there's not a moral law. But it's not. I love how Allen says this. It's not altered or subverted by shallow conclusions. When people don't think deeply enough about it, and when they don't really work out the details, that doesn't mean that they're right. And this is something that lots of people don't want there to be a moral law. They don't want there to be a solid, all the time, good and evil. And so they come to show shallow conclusions, and often what I find is that they haven't thought about it deeply enough. They've only thought about it on a surface level.

Okay, Alan goes on. We're going to finish out this chapter the next few minutes. He says, “It should be remembered that man is a changing, evolving. The good man was not always a good man. Even in this life, there was a time in a large number of instances. when the man who is now just was unjust, when he who is now kind was cruel, when he who is now pure was impure. Conversely, there was a time in this life in a number of of instances when he who is now unjust was just, when he who is now cruel was kind, when he who is now impure was pure. Thus the good man who is overtaken with calamity to day is reaping the result of his former evil sowing. Later he will reap the happy result of his present good sowing. While the bad man is now reaping the result of his former good sewing, later he will reap the result of his present bad sowing.

Characteristics are fixed habits of mind, the results of deeds, an act repeated a large number of times becomes unconscious or automatic, that is. It then seems to repeat itself without any effort on the part of the doer, so that it seems to him almost impossible not to do it. And then it has become a mental characteristic.”

So that was Alan explaining to us that sometimes we think that habits are so fixed that we can't be different, that we have become a certain kind of person, but they can always be unworked. They can be rewound, so to speak. We can choose differently. So here's his example.

This is Allen. “Here is a poor man out of work. He is honest and not a shirker. He wants work and he cannot get it. He tries hard and continues to fail. Where is the justice in his lot? There was a time in this man's condition when he had plenty of work. He felt burdened with it. He shirked it and longed for ease. He thought how delightful it would be to have nothing to do. He did not appreciate the blessedness of his lot. His desire for ease is now gratified, but the fruit for which he longed, and which he thought would taste so sweet, has turned to ashes in his mouth, the condition which he aimed for, namely, to have nothing to do, he has reached, and there he is, compelled to remain till his lesson is thoroughly learned. And he is surely learning that habitual ease is degrading, that to have nothing to do as a condition of wretchedness, and that work is a noble and blessed thing. His former desires and deeds have brought him where he is, and now his present desire for work, his ceaseless searching and asking for it, will just as surely bring about its own beneficent result.”

This is me talking. I actually know someone in this situation, and I've actually seen this kind of thing play out. It seems extreme because maybe you know someone who always worked really hard and then got fired and then spent a year trying to get work, and this doesn't describe their circumstance. But that's not really the point that Allen is making. Allen is trying to make the point through this example, and Bastiat makes the point through a different example, and we could give a lot of examples that this law is just that it's always working itself out and that we get what we desire most. We will always get what we desire most. That is how the world is constructed, and that is why it is a just world, because your deepest desires will be realized. And so you have to be intentional about what those desires are, and you have to intend the life that you really want to have. It makes me think of all the times that we were involved in these different, like business circles. And one of the things that we would often be told is, you need to envision and you need to have affirmations. And more often than not, that envisioning in those affirmations were around monetary gain and physical things, cars and homes and outfits and travel. And people would blindly follow these financial wizards and these business gurus and follow their example and desire those things and envision those things and affirm those things to themselves. And then when they received those things, they found that other things in their life had fallen apart. In other words, they'd gotten what they desired most, but actually it wasn't the right thing to desire. We talk about this in my Mothers of Vision Masterclass. We did a mother's Vision event a few years ago. We recorded it. You can actually purchase it at the TheMissionDrivenMom.com. But I talked about this type of issue that we have to be careful what we desire. And because we will get it. And we'll find out that that actually wasn't what we really wanted. What we really wanted was something else. We wanted peace. We wanted good relationships. We wanted financial stability. We wanted a feeling of accomplishment or success. We wanted to be somebody or have, you know, attain like recognition or whatever the case might be, we just have to be careful because if we desire it enough, or if we desire nothing, we'll get nothing. Right? That's that's how that great law works. And his point in this example is that this man desired ease and he achieved it, only to find out that that wasn't what he actually really desired, what he, and he learned that it's better to want what God wants for him. And that's work, to be industrious, to be busy, to be contributing, to be serving in meaningful ways. That's what he ultimately really wanted. This is, you know, why retirement? People decline rapidly when they retire. And unless they stay busy serving in some other meaningful capacity, they unravel.

So this is the way in which we uncover the aspects of the natural law and come to see those things that are really best for us. We desire the wrong things, we obtain them, and then we learn that that's not actually what we really want. So he will stay in this condition until he's learned the lesson that it holds. I've actually read this many places as well, that we are in the conditions that we are in because of the people that we are and the struggles that we face are the struggles for us individually because there's things we need to learn. And the conditions that we dislike that we're in currently will fall away when we learn the lesson that those conditions hold for us. And often it's key principles that we can begin to align ourselves with.

Okay, Alan goes on and I'm going to finish out this chapter, I've got about a page left. He says, “No longer desiring idleness, his present condition will, as an effect, the cause of which is no longer propagated soon passes away, and he will obtain employment. And if his whole mind is now set on work and he desires it above all else, then when it comes, he will be overwhelmed with it. It will flow into him from all sides, and he will prosper in his industry.

Then, if he does not understand the law of cause and effect in human light, in human life, he will wonder why work comes to him apparently unsought, while others who seek it strenuously fail to obtain it. Nothing comes unbidden. Where the shadow is, there also is the substance. That which comes to the individual is the product of his own deeds.

As cheerful industry leads to greater industry and increasing prosperity, the labor shirked or undertaken discontentedly leads to a lesser degree of labor and decreasing prosperity. So with all the varied conditions of life, as we see them, they are the destinies wrought by the thoughts and deeds of each particular individual. So also with the vast variety of characters, they are the ripening and ripened growth of the sowing of deeds.

As the individual reaps what he sows, sow the nation, being a community of individuals, reaps also what it sows. Nations become great when their leaders are just men. They fall and fade when their just men pass away. Those who are in power set an example good or bad for the entire nation.

Great will be the peace and prosperity of a nation, when there shall arise within it a line of statesmen who, having first established themselves in a lofty integrity of character, shall direct the energies of the nation toward the culture of virtue and development of character.”

This is me again for a minute. Just think this is what was happening when America was founded. The men who were in charge were men who were striving for virtue and who were trying to make choices that improved their characters. And they saw that we needed a nation of people who were of great characters who pursued virtue. Today, we have leadership who may be virtuous in some regards and understand the importance of personal character, but to the degree at which they pursue that, and at which they encourage those who follow them to pursue that is the degree to which we will truly have liberty.

Allen goes on, “Knowing that only through personal, industry, integrity, and nobility, can national prosperity proceed. Still, above all is the great law. Calmly and with infallible justice meeting out to mortals their fleeting destinies, tear-stained or smiling, the fabric of their hands. Life is a great school for the development of character, and all, through strife and struggle, vice and virtue, success and failure are slowly but surely learning the lessons of wisdom.”

So that is chapter 1 of Mastery of Destiny by James Allen. If you liked this type of podcast where I read to you and interject my own thoughts and ideas in the middle of it, please give me some feedback and let me know that you would like more podcasts like this one. And I will start doing more of them as I study and write and come across things that I feel will be of benefit to you. I will produce more of these podcasts where we read and learn together. Thank you so much for joining me, and I will see you next time.

Another INCREDIBLE Mission Driven Story for you! 

When Madeleine was taken at age 10 to the French Alps and dropped off at a boarding school, when she thought she was just out for a picnic, the pain was very deep. Quickly discovering that she would be called not by her name, but by a number, while being ostracized and mistreated by students and teachers alike, her inner strength was all she had. Her resolve to keep her journal and keep writing through it all helped make her become the amazing author we know and love!

Madeleine L'Engle is a woman who I always wanted to learn more about. The more I learned, the more fascinated I became, and the more I could see the 7 Laws of Life Mission active in her life! 

Her story is full of heartache, disappointments, struggle, as well as inspiration, wisdom, and joy! Join me for an exciting journey through her life and another witness that even YOU have a mission waiting for you!

Make sure at claim your 2 FREE CHAPTERS of my book The Mission Driven Life: Discover and Fulfill Your Unique Contribution to the World to learn more about how the 7 Laws of Life Mission that can transform your life: https://www.themissiondrivenmom.com/

Transcript: 

I am really excited to be joining you today on this podcast to share with you some things about the life of Madeleine L’Engle, her mission-driven story. She was an amazing woman.

Her book, A Wrinkle in Time is in our Mission Driven Mom and Mission Driven Teen academies. And I knew what a profound book it was, how much I've learned from it. Every time I go back to it, I learn more. But learning about her life and how her writing was an ongoing life passion that dovetail also with her spiritual life and her experiences there. She also had just a fascinating upbringing. I’m really excited to share all of that with you today, and we can see how she lived those 7 Laws of Life mission and what a huge difference it made for her. And what a huge difference those laws can make for us.

Before we get into that, I just want to ask you to write a review. It really helps others know the kinds of things that we cover here and what they can expect. It’s a really nice way to share it along.

Now, Madeleine L'Engle was born Madeleine L'Engle Camp. Her mother was Madeleine Barnett, who was born and lived in Jacksonville, Florida. She had a pretty, kind of a upper middle class upbringing. She studied piano in Berlin. She had somewhat of an education. And she was a little bit older when she met Charles. In fact, she was 26 years old and Charles was 28. She was considered an old maid back then. This was in 1906. Charles Wadsworth Camp was Madeleine Ling's dad, and he was a novelist and a journalist who was from New Jersey and had studied at Princeton.

When Charles came to Jacksonville to his sister's wedding, that's when he met Madeleine and they fell in love and were married and he whisked her off to New York City. So New York City is where Madeleine L'Engle Camp was born, and she considered it home all her life. It was very comfortable for her, and as she grew older, as we'll talk about in a minute, she became very involved in cultural aspects of New York City as well.

Now Charles and Madeleine traveled around the world. Charles traveled for his writing and he would often take his wife with him. They were involved in high society, the world of art, nightlife. They often had parties or dinners in their apartment. They didn't have a lot of money. They were living off of Charles' writing. But he would get things published now and again, and cover their expenses and keep them comfortable. And they got into a pattern of sleeping in late. And then Charles would write, and Madeleine would play the piano for several hours. And then they would go out to plays, to operas, to symphonies, or have friends over to drink and eat and chat late into the night. This was kind of the pattern of their lives, and it was established for a long time before Madeleine came along. Charles actually went over to World War I as a writer. He came back in 1917 and wrote a novel card called Dark Frame, about the war because it had a huge impact on him. And then when the United States entered the war, he actually enlisted and spent, oh, a little over a year in World War I and Madeleine, his daughter, said about that the, the impact of the war on him, that the war killed him, it just took him 17 years to die. He frequently struggled with depression after the war, even though he was really quite a charismatic, confident, charming kind of a man.

Charles and Madeleine had been married 10 years when Madeleine finally got pregnant and he was off in World War I when she gave birth to Madeleine L'Engle Camp in on November 29th, 1918. They had an ancestor, I can't remember who that wasMadeleine L'Engle. And so she was named for that ancestor and for her mother, Madeleine. And of course they loved her dearly. She was the only child they were ever able to have, and they were good to her. They loved her, but their lifestyle was really set. They were used to doing the kinds of things that they did. What this meant was they saw a little of her because children wake up early and they go to bed early. She would be up with her nanny or whoever was caring for her while her parents slept. And then her father would need quiet and solitude for his writing, and her mother would be on the piano for long hours. Then often in the evening they would have friends over or they would be off on their excursions in the city again.

Now her mother was a great storyteller and Madeleine would ask her often to tell her stories, and one of the things that she said about stories was their huge impact on her, in the middle of all this, not seeing her parents a lot. (We’ll talk more in a minute about how school was such a challenge for her.)

She was given a little Bible and she said this about it. “I'm particularly grateful that I was allowed to read my Bible as I read my other books to read it as a story. That story, which is a revelation of truth, people are sometimes kept from reading the Bible itself by what they're taught about it, and I'm grateful that I was able to read the Bible with the same wonder and joy with which I read The Ice Princess or the or The Tempest.”

She also said that stories were a big part of what brought her spiritually closer to God. Her parents, I'm sure, did believe in God. They didn't really go to church much. She had a nanny called Mrs. O’Connell, or Mrs. O, who felt that her childhood was too sheltered. And so Mrs. O would take her on lots of excursions in the city and show her lots of things often in secret, so her parents didn't know. She would sometimes take her to church with her. One of the things an author said about her in one of the biographies I read was, “So how does a lonely child come to understand that she is uniquely loved by God, that she, like each of us matters through stories. Madeleine asserted through the writings of authors like George McDonald through the kinds of books that she herself would go on to write one day.”

She spent a lot of time reading, especially as school got more and more, emotionally difficult, which we'll talk about in a minute. She spent time in her favorite books, especially in children's novels. She fell in love with them, and she spent a lot of time reading and writing. She often said that George McDonald had the biggest influence on her.

George McDonald also had a huge influence on CS Lewis as well. George McDonald is also a fictional character in The Great Divorce by CS Lewis. He's actually the person that takes the main character around this waiting room of heaven and is the wise guide for the protagonist in that book. One of the things that one of the biographers said about George McDonald was he saw storytelling as a moral enterprise.

This is George McDonald, “In physical things, a man may invent. In moral things he must obey and take their laws with him into his invented world as well.” That's because the storyteller is not ultimately the source of storytelling God is, and for McDonald, we cannot avoid accountability of the original storyteller for the moral universe he has created.

McDonald also said, “The best thing you can do for your fellow next to rousing his conscience is not to give him things to think about, but to wake things up that are in him or say to make him think things for himself.”

So George McDonald had a huge influence on the way that Madeleine L'Engle saw the world and shaped her even as a young child. He saw the moral universe as something that is lawful that we don't make up, but we bring into the stories that we tell, and that's exactly what Madeleine L’Engle and CS Lewis both did.

They saw those natural laws as immutable and unchangeable, and they sprinkled them throughout the stories that they told, helping those stories be a moral anchor for the reader.

She loved children's novels. She spent a lot of time in them. As she got a little bit older, her parents disagreed on her education. Her father wanted her to have something more rigorous and traditional, whereas her mother wanted her to have lots of freedom.

She and her mother, when she was in her early elementary years, traveled to Europe a couple times. Her mother's parents had divorced her father, Bion had run away basically with his mistress and left his mother back in Jacksonville. And this grandfather Bion to Madeleine lived in Europe with this common law wife and was a very wealthy banker. And so they traveled to Europe a couple times to visit this grandfather and a couple uncles that were there and to see other things around Europe.

Eventually it was time for her to go to school. She started school, but school was rough. Her first school was okay, but by the fourth grade when she switched to a new school, a pattern of thinking about herself began to emerge. She had one leg that was longer, so she wasn't athletic at all and she always felt really awkward and backward and kind of ugly, especially in fourth grade.

When she moved to this new school, they didn't trust her or really like her, even her teacher, which is really pretty tragic. Instead of doing her homework, she would read and write a lot and she says all the way up to her college years, there's, there's comments in her journals about how she felt it was a better use of her time to actually read and write on her own and not worry about her schoolwork.

She also wrote lots and lots of poetry and became quite good at a young age.

But there were two sad stories, especially from this time that give you a sense of what she's going through. On one occasion, she asked to go to the bathroom, and she asked several times for her teacher whether or not she could go and use the restroom, and the teacher kept telling her no. Finally it became so urgent that she peed her pants in class. And this was, as you can imagine, incredibly mortifying and embarrassing and came to the attention of the principal. There was a meeting held between the principal and the teacher and her mother. And what's awesome is that her mother defended her and told her that she would, because Madeleine is saying, I asked to go to the restroom and the teacher is lying to the principal saying, no, she never asked me. Her mom believed her, which I think is great.

A little while later, they had a school-wide poetry contest and Madeleine submitted a poem and they wouldn't believe that she had written it. They just thought that she was too stupid. She wasn't an outstanding student. She didn't get good grades. She was kind of awkward and all of those things. And so they just literally didn't believe her that she had won this poetry contest and her mother was indignant. Her mother went around the house and gathered up a whole bunch of other poetry that Madeleine had written and brought it to the school to prove to them that she had actually written this poem.

One of the things that Madeleine said about this time in her life when she was struggling in school, but reading and writing at home and engaging in story time with her mother was possibly as a defense against the troubled everyday world of my childhood, “For nourishment I learned to rely more and more on the private world that I discovered in books.”

This goes on for a couple years. She feels inadequate, unattractive, is struggling to get by in this school, and her father becomes more and more ill, and the doctors finally tell him that he needs to move to a different climate, that the smog of New York is not good for him. One of the reasons why he was ill from the time he came back from World War I was because he was in a unit that was gassed and it did permanent damage to his lungs. He always coughed and became sick and eventually died I think, of pneumonia.

So they decide to move to the French Alps which is really kind of cool because it's less expensive to live there. And they do have some family in Europe, right about this time. There's also the stark market crash of 29, and so they're a little bit insulated from those world troubles over in the French Alps.

So they go there, but they're very, very unhappy. The parents are fighting all the time. They just can't get their bearings, they can't make the money that they want. They have very little, I'm sure they miss New York. I don't know what all of the combination of factors were, but they were even more unhappy.

Now it's time for Madeleine to go back to school and her parents, without her knowledge decide that she's going to go to boarding school. So they tell her one morning that they're going to pack a lunch and go out on this picnic, and they literally drive her to this boarding school and drop her off. They don't even really tell her goodbye. I think that they were kind of cowardly, to be honest, and scared of having a hard conversation. They didn't want to admit to her that they didn't know how to handle it with her home. That. They felt like this was the best option for her and bear the discomfort and the anger and the frustration they would experience from her. They didn't even hardly say goodbye. They just literally left her there.

It was a grueling transition for her. It was so painful. Her granddaughters who wrote a biography aboutabout the time when they realized that this is what had happened to her.

They asked her, “Weren't you outraged?”

And Madeleine said, “It wasn't so bad after a while, and I learned a lot. It helped me become a writer.”

She said that because one of the paradigms of this boarding school school was that it wasn't good for anyone to be alone. She was always rooming with several people and never allowed to be alone at all. She began to learn how to write. With other people around and with lots of noise and commotion going on, which she said really helped her writing. And when she finally did go home for a Christmas vacation, she found her parents withdrawn and unhappy.

It says, “Her father was ill and his typewriter sat unused. Her mother played Bach on the piano with fury. They were too wrapped up in their own worries and sadness to give her much attention.

'How did you get over that?’ Her granddaughters asked her.

She said, ‘I tried to understand them. I wrote stories trying to imagine what it was like for them. I learned to inhabit other selves, other ages. It helped put things in perspective. And now that I'm older, I still do that.’”

So I'm sure that it took a while for her to forgive them and get over what felt a lot like an abandonment. But she tried to understand their perspective. In fact, one of the other really sad things about this boarding school was that they wouldn't even use the girls' name. They gave each girl a number and only called them by their number. The place was cold in more ways than one, but also physically cold, and she was told how clumsy and forgetful she was. She never got very good grades. She was having nightmares of war. She was ostracized by these girls because the school year had already begun and they had already formed their friend groups. It took a long time, but she eventually settled in, became more comfortable, and got her bearings on this really difficult situation that she was in.

One of the things that happened from a very early age, she started keeping a journal. And it's funny because there's a couple places where she talks about how she was keeping the journal with an eye towards someday publishing it, but she got mad at people who told her that she was doing that, but she kept a journal religiously. She drew pictures in them, she poured her heart out in them and she practiced her writing in them a lot. That's what they were for. And there's a lot of, you know, and, and she bound them and kept them.

It is really pretty fascinating how she thought and talked about her writing. I'm going to read you some journal entries in a minute from her time in America, in a boarding school there. But during this time, she eventually settled in. She learned to really love skiing, and she fell in love with the Alps. She was inflicted with iritis, which is an inflamed iris on a few occasions in her life. It may have been a way that her body expressed stress when she was really stressed, but that was  a hardship to her as well. But she managed.

She was there for three years and then her mother got sick as well as her father.

They just decided their only option was to move back to the United States. And this time they were moving in with her mother, Madeleine's grandmother in Jacksonville. And because they loved New York so much, and they were older at this point they must have been in pretty desperate financial straits.

In order for them to be willing to move in with her mother, they decided that she would go to boarding school again once they were back in the United States, and this experience was much better than the one in Switzerland. She again, was seen as awkward and didn't get fantastic grades, but she made herself a part of things. One of the things that she wanted to do right away was be on the student council and you had to be voted on, and so she worked toward that and here's a journal entry about that.

“Tomorrow I'm going to be installed. O diary, I am so happy. I'm so thankful that I have been received on student council. Now that I'm on the council, I must work hard and try and get on the board.”

They’ve included one of her poems that she wrote here as well. I'm just going to read you a few of these journal entries so you can get a sense of what she was like. This is during her 14, 15, 16th years, and in fact, she did so poorly at this boarding school that they weren't sure she was going to graduate. Her dad made her stay an extra year, and she was afraid she wasn't going to pass her final exams, which I'll talk about in just a minute. She was definitely still doing the journals, still doing all the writing on and not putting her heart into her schoolwork. She just never did. She just never put her whole heart into it because she wanted to write from the time she could remember this particular.

Here's a journal entry.

“I am rewriting an old story that I wrote last year called Pippa and hope to make something fairly decent out of it. Also, a collection of poems called “Peter Thinks.” And when I’m finished, I'm going to send it to the publishers. I know that many people get a stage when they want to write, but it is no stage for me.

I was born with the itch for writing in me, and oh, I couldn't stop it if I tried. I have always written why. If I look back to earlier journals, I see pages on my desire to write. When I was a tiny child, I was never so happy as when scribbling rinds, oh, I have to write. There is no doubt about that. And in this journal as in my first one, real one, I'm going to copy the wonderful verse from the fringe.” This is a poem that she writes in there and then she says,

“And now I do swear a vow. I, Madeleine L'Engle Camp, do solemnly vow this day that I will climb the Alpine path and write my name on the scroll of fame.”

That's from this poem that she wrote in here, which means that she will do whatever she has to do to become great at writing and to become a famous writer.

That’s really amazing for a 14-year-old girl to write. Here's another one about her roommate.

“I'd be happier with another roommate, but I don't want to worry mother and father, but I don't like Mary. She just gets on my nerves. She has no enthusiasm, no pepper vitality. She hardly ever speaks above a whisper. And she isn't in the least conversational or original or human, and she hasn't any backbone. And these are qualities I like in a girl.”

So she's very honest and straightforward. One of the things that you find in these journal entries that her granddaughters have included is her honesty about herself. Her self-evaluation is an ongoing quest. She's really tries to see herself and her weaknesses clearly. Here's another entry.

“I am, to put it mildly discouraged. I have tons of work to make up in Latin and algebra, and so I have to drop one of them. And so just as I'm getting interested in Old Caesar, I have to put him behind me. Ms. Mcbee says that I can take the culvert system this summer and make it up and so graduate next year. So far so well and good, but father doesn't want me to graduate next year. He thinks 17 is too young and it isn't. Oh, it isn't. I think 18 is too old, but I suppose it would help to get a more extensive education. And then I won't graduate from college till I'm 22, and then I want to go to the art student league and then study abroad and I'll be middle aged before I finish my education.”

Here's a couple more journal entries from from these years at Ashley Hall.

“I am much too shy. It is mother's despair and mine too. Incidentally, I hate my shy awkwardness in being introduced to people. Once I get to know them, it isn't so bad. And Lenora has often told me I'm a very interesting conversationalist, but I can't be sure of that. It seems to be that I either talk too much or too little.”

“I must stop losing things. I say things occasionally that I shouldn't say. And another thing I do occasionally that I hadn't thought of before, but that is very serious and that I must never do again, is that when I haven't studied a lesson well enough, I exaggerate on the amount I have studied. A lot of people do, but that makes no difference. I haven't been doing it lately because I have been studying, and I didn't realize that I was exaggerating when I did. But it is a form of lying and I've always prided myself on being strictly honest.”

She also told herself she made a vow with herself that she would never read trash books. And here's a couple other short journal entries from this time.

“Oh, if I can only succeed and be a poet and author and an artist, I must, oh God, give me the determination and the will to work and the talent. I wish I dared say genius. I will say it. Please give me genius.”

Another one,

“Louisa May Alcott had an awful temper and we both have the same birthday. Maybe that has something to do with it. Louisa succeeded and I must too.”

So she's saying these kinds of things to herself during these really formative years evaluating who she is, trying to be super honest about her own struggles and heartaches. She’s really trying to level herself up, make rules for herself about her own behavior and be accountable to herself and to other people, and becoming a better person. But especially that longing and desire, that ache to be a writer and to have that career is just amazing. At such a young age, she heard the call and knew what she was called to do.

She was at school and her father became ill and they told her to come home. And so she took the train home. And on that train, she kept saying this prayer over and over again. “Please God, do whatever is best for father. Please do whatever is best.” Well, she was expected to be stoic and to not cry and to not grieve. And that was incredibly hard for her because she was a very passionate girl, but she was able to do that for her mother. But she just had such an ache in her heart and so much difficulty getting over the loss of her father and missing her father like crazy. So this is what she said when her father died when she was 17 years old.

“I had not encountered a theology as wild and strong as St. Gregory’s when father died. I had to struggle alone, and all I knew was that Father's death caused me to ask questions for which I could find no answer. And I was living in a world which believed that all questions are answerable. I too believe that all questions are answerable, but not in scientific terms or in the language of provable fact.” She also said, which I, this is probably one of my very all-time favorite quotes of hers. After a troubling conversation with a cynical peer who questioned whether Madeleine's father did in fact still exist somewhere after death, she found herself affirming or at least demanding, that we should not be abandoned by the God who made us. And here's her quote.

“I did feel and passionately that it wasn't fair of God to give us brains enough to ask the ultimate questions if he didn't intend to teach us the answers.”

I just think that that's so beautiful. Here's a girl who spent almost no time in church, who's just read the Bible on her own for her own enrichment and to understand that, to engage in these stories, these and the moral values that are replete in them.  Here she is at her father's death, asking herself the ultimate questions about. “Is he still alive somewhere and is there a God? And where are we headed after death and why are we here?" And striving to start trying to find some of those answers.

So here's a few last journal entries from that senior year.

“One reason that I don't spend as much time on my lessons as I should is that when I think of a poem, I simply have to write it. And I have ideas for so many poems and stories too often, but I do think that writing poetry and stories and reading books in my free time instead of studying is far more valuable to me than if I did study for I have to succeed in my writing for father's sake as well as my own for it meant so much to him and he just missed success by bad fortune and not enough enough discipline.”

Another one.

“I do want to go to college, but I can't leave mother alone next year and whatever I do, I must never let her think that it is a sacrifice to me for me to give up college. But I do want to go. One thing, most of the greatest writers never went to college. Oh, I must, I will succeed.”

So this theme over and over and over again, this ambition and this drive to write, not just for herself, but to give her writing to the world and to somehow succeed in that regard. She did end up passing her final exams at school even though she was petrified that she would not. It was, she was really, actually, really worried about it. And then they decided that she ought to at least take the college entrance exams. So she studied for those and took them. And then she and her mother took off to Europe for a couple months to see family again and to just travel and enjoy each other's company. When she got back, she found out that she had passed the exams and her mother encouraged her to go to college. As difficult as it was for her to actually do that, she didn't want Madeleine to sacrifice that for her.

So she went off to Smith and there she met her best friend Marie, who was an actress. They were inseparable. They loved each other dearly and spent all their time together that they possibly could. They roomed together. They had a really great time in college. She dated around some, but nothing really happened in the way of men while she was in college.

After college, she and Marie wanted to pursue their dreams.Marie was an actress and she had dreams of being on Broadway and she had some point, I can't remember when, had met Ava La Galliene. I'm probably saying that wrong, but she was the founder of the New York Civic Repertory Theater, and she was the most famous actress and director of that time. Marie had this little tiny connection with this really important woman who kind of maybe barely remembered who she was.

Madeleine was going to write and Marie was going to act and Madeleine did some acting as well. And they graduated from Smith and they were off to New York City. They got this little apartment.

Madeleine's mom was very unhappy about it, but she did have some means because the grandmother had died, the mother had inherited what was left of their property. She sold off their beach house, which was Madeleine's favorite place in the world and got herself an apartment. In the meantime, her father, Madeleine's grandfather Bion and his common law wife moved back to Florida and they were in the same apartment complex with other family, which was nice.

When Madeleine went home, she could see them all and it gave her mom some family close by, but she wasn't happy with Madeleine going to New York, but she decided that she ought to support her, so she gave him some furniture and a little stipend to help subsidize her earnings.

They got jobs. Madeleine did some tutoring. They worked in acting troops every summer for a few years. They got other jobs in town, got some acting jobs every now and again that paid. And Madeleine, interestingly enough, her mother was really un unhappy that she was in New York and not in Florida with her. And it's interesting because Madeleine's mother was unhappy because Madeleine was in New York and not in Florida near her. But Madeleine really tried to make it as easy on her mother as she possibly could, and she wrote her a postcard every single day. When she was trying to comfort her mother as to why they were in New York and why they were doing what they were doing, this is one of the postcards that she wrote,

“March 21st, 1942. Mummy, dear Darlings, if we didn't keep always the intensity of dreaming we have when we're children, we couldn't even write or act or paint or compose or play or whatever it is we do. It makes things harder for us, yes, but it also makes them better. If we are more unhappy than other people, we're also more happy. I wish you could understand that it would keep you from worrying about lots of things. Loads and loads of love, hugs and kisses, Madeleine.”

She really tried to be attentive to her mother and let her know that she was on her mind constantly. But her mother was just perpetually sad about how far away Madeleine was and worried about how she was living.

So Madeleine writes a play called Ilse and they believe it's a really awesome play. Marie is trying to improve her acting career and get better and better acting jobs. They both want Madeleine's play to be produced. They're young and they're idealistic, and their dreams are big and they are unbelievably persistent.

There's a lot of things about Madeleine Lingle that I really admire, but her persistence is incredible. She was always committed to writing. She never put down her pen. She was always devoting to, to not just writing, but to being published.

These two were tenacious. They really wanted Miss LeG to see Ilse and to maybe produce it. They knew where she was performing in a play. And every night for weeks and weeks, they stalked the theater. They would go there before the play started and after the plates started. In all kinds of weather, they would just walk up and down the street trying to run into her because they wanted to talk to her. I guess they'd passed the play to her and they wanted to see what she thought and they couldn't get ahold of her. So summer theater came on, they had to leave. They went off to do summer theater, and when they came back, they had a revised version of Ilse that they wanted Ms. LeG to read. And again, they started stalking the theater, trying to get a message to her.

Finally, one night, Marie was able to talk to her attendant, who gave permission for them to come backstage and visit with Miss LeG after the play that night. But then the assistant totally forgot about it. And when they wanted to come back and see Ms. LeG after the place, she wouldn't let them. So they stood around, waited around, waited around, and finally when she came out, they ran into her and they said, can we talk to you? We wanted to send you in this note not to read Ilse if you have, because we have an updated version and we want to make sure that you read the updated version because it's better. The girls were really funny. Miss LeG found them very entertaining. They got a cab together, they went home together. Turns out Miss LeG lived like a block from them. And so they started interacting a little bit more. And during one of those early interactions, Ms. LeG was complaining that she had all this correspondence that she couldn't answer. All these people were writing to her all the time and she didn't have time to answer them. And she said it would be so much easier if I could type, because of course not not everybody has a typewriter at this point in time, and definitely lots of people can't type. But Madeleine has had a typewriter since she was 10, and she's been writing all these years. So she is a really good typist. And so she tells Miss LeG, well, I can type. And Miss LeG is instantly excited and hires her on the spot.

Now, the consequence of this was, and the way that that Madeleine put it, was it was the beginning of her associations with people in the acting higher up, people in the acting world, and Miss LeG and the beginning of the end of her relationship with Marie.

When she described the relationship with Marie was this,

“The beginning of our association with Miss LeG was the end of Marie's and my friendship, though we didn't realize it then, because right from the start, I was the one with Miss LeG and Marie was not, I was the one whose talent she believed in, whose personality was interesting to her. I don't know who was more stunned at this, Marie, or me. I had been completely accustomed to thinking of Marie as the superior, one of the two of us, the beauty, the personality. I felt that people accepted me first because I was Marie's friend, and second for myself.”

So as time goes on over the next year, year and a half, they grow more and more and more apart. Marie is really jealous and she's dependent on Madeleine because of Madeleine's stipend from her mother. Madeleine's the one with the apartment, and now she's the one with a relationship with Miss LeG. And eventually their friendship could not bear the situation and they broke things off. So she keeps writing, she keeps working for Miss LeG, and she writes a novel called The Small Rain.

She's proud of this novel. She feels good about it, and she starts handing it around to publishers. And in 1944, Vanguard Press accepted her book to publish it, and they actually even gave her an advance, and that allowed her to stop worrying about acting and taking other jobs and just go through and make the changes to the book that they wanted her to make.

This is really, really a cool time for her as she's working on the book and it's going through the process of being published.

In the meantime, she goes back to the acting company and a man named Hugh Franklin joins. He's just a little bit older than Madeleine, and they are immediately intrigued with each other and interested in each other. They travel and do some acting together, and the relationship starts to blossom. But then when they return home, Hugh does some things and Madeleine interprets them a certain way and the relationship goes kind of cold and she's sad about it. Then they don't talk for a while and he goes off and travels and does his acting again, and she keeps writing. Then later, like almost a year later, he finally calls in the fall and they strike up their relationship again and it just goes really well from there. They start dating in the fall and they're married by the next January, and then that March The Small Rain is published.

Now here she is, she's married and she's got her first book published and she's really starting to come into her own. All of her hard work is really starting to pay off. Her book gets good reviews and they continue on with their lives in New York while Hugh is acting, but within a pretty short period of time, they've kind of become disenchanted with the city. I'll read you a journal entry from Madeleine about. The decision that they made to leave New York City.

“More and more we want to get out of the city, away from artificiality. The longer we work in the theater, the more we realize it is the place we want to work, and the more we realize that it is essential for us to make many friends out of the theater.”

In other words, they want to work in theater, but not have that be their friend circle, she goes on.

“We have got to the point where this company bores us to hysteria. Although alone, they all are all interesting, nice people. When they are together, they seem to set up a reaction to represent everything superficial and artificial. And after an evening of being clever, always with a little edge of smirk to the cleverness of brilliant service conversation, we come out feeling wasted and soiled. People ought to stay apart if this is what happens when they get together.”

So by late 1946, they decide to buy a farmhouse in Goshen, Connecticut near some friends, and then they have their friends in Connecticut and they have their friends in New York City and they're going to go spend weekends and summers in the country.

But then Madeleine becomes pregnant and it's more expensive to live, and so they eventually give up their New York apartment and live in Connecticut full time. Well, she has a hard time in the pregnancy. She's hospitalized for a little while with complications. She eventually heals up. They have a little girl and they name her Josephine.

Then she writes another book. She turns her play Ilse into the novel Ilsa. It’s about Jacksonville and I think some anecdotes and family stories made their way into this book and it's published and it really hurts her family's feelings. So when she goes home to Jacksonville, she's snubbed by the family that she loves. They think that she was rash and married too quickly, and they don't like what she wrote in her book. They feel kind of exposed and it's embarrassing to them. And so she's really wounded and hurt by this. She can't understand why they're upset about her book and why they can't just be happy for her success.

Time goes by and Hugh is struggling to get work. And for a while at first, he's gone a lot doing his acting, and then it dries up a little bit and he's having a harder and harder time getting work. In the meantime, she writes another book And Both Were Young, which is published in 1949, and also has good reviews.

So time is going by in the 1940s, late 1940s, and she's writing and they buy the general store in town so that they can have a more steady income. He was really trying to do his duty as a husband and a father. They run the general store together. They have this little girl, she writes another book, Camilla Dickinson, which is a coming of age novel. One of the key themes in this novel is that you are responsible for your own happiness. And during this time, Madeleine wrote a little bit of her philosophy around her writing, as now she has a few novels under her belt. She says,

“What do I want to do with my writing? Again, that's a question I find difficult to answer to myself. I can feel what I want to do, but I can't put in words that satisfy myself. I don't believe in propaganda writing as a form of art. But I would like my books to make their readers want to be more than they are to reach higher. I want to make them the readers aware of the wonderfully exciting and unlimited possibilities of man. Perhaps I'm a romantic because I don't want to make them disappointed in their surroundings, but with themselves and not too much of that. Really what I want them to feel is: look how wonderful I can be if I only will and I will! How wonderful everyone can be!”

I loved that so much. How she talks about what she wants her writing to do for her readers.

In the fall of 1951, she becomes pregnant again and they have a little boy named Bion after her grandpa, his great-grandpa. it’s a really difficult delivery. She's hospitalized again and they discover that she won't be able to have any other children, and they wanted at least five or six kids. This was very heartbreaking for them.

They settled into their life in Connecticut. They had joined the local church there. She was a choir director and an occasional Sunday school teacher. Her faith was really blossoming and her family and home life. She, and in her writing, she was coming closer to God, working out her the own theology and really feeling more comfortable with herself, more of who she really was and who she really wanted to become.

So for the next few years they ran the general store and Madeleine was so busy with her two children and the general store and trying to fit writing into her schedule. This was something she said about that time:

“Let me realize that I cannot accomplish a full day's work in a couple of tired hours at night. Let me realize that I cannot write a valid book without at least as much labor as it takes to produce a child.”

She's just really struggling to make the time to write as much as she would like to and to get her ideas and stories out into the world. They do this for a few years and finally they start burning out.

She feels really different than the other women in the town. She's the only one doing something like having a career, pursuing something aggressively outside of just motherhood. She's got the story and she's got her writing, and her writing has dried up a little. She hasn't gotten books published. They haven't been as popular as she wanted them to be, and she's starting to feel more and more discouraged.

She says:

“Each day I feel a little more desperate. A another part of it is that my faith in myself as a writer is what makes life in Goshen bearable. It's nothing to do with or against Goshen, but basically I'm a big city person and though I know we're better off here than in New York, I'll never, no matter how wildly I succeed on the outside be anything but a misfit on the inside…"

So she says, I miss people. I miss the culture. I miss the intellectual stimulation, the simple appreciation for music or pictures of books and missing that makes her feel resentful of where she's at in life and desperate to leave.

She says: “I'm in desperately in need now of encouragement, not discouragement."

So finally they decide that this isn't working for them, and Hugh just really wants to act. That's what's in his blood. That's who he is. That's what he really longs to do. And Madeleine realizes that she gets to do what she wants to do with her writing, and Hugh doesn't.

So they decide to sell the store. They take a road trip across the country for a couple months and live in a tent, and they have just a lot of quiet time. She does a lot of thinking and journaling and writing. This is where she's also reading a lot of science books. And she comes across the concept of a tesseract, which she writes about in her journal. She's thinking about all of this, all of these scientific discoveries and, and this science fiction idea starts to develop in her mind. She writes bits and pieces of it down. She said she was in Arizona driving through the countryside when the ideas of Mrs. Watts, at Mrs. Who and Mrs. the other one, Mrs. Witch, came to her mind that are the three representatives of the Trinity, basically, but they're the “witches” or whatever in A Wrinkle in Time. The idea of this book starts to form in her mind, and she actually goes home and writes it pretty quickly.

Let me go back and just clarify. I forgot a couple things that happened before they left the Connecticut home for the camping trip. One was that they had some friends die, a husband and a wife that they were really close friends with, died within a few months of each other, and they had a 7-year-old daughter, Maria that the family was very close to. They took her into their home and adopted her. They also built an office above the garage for Madeleine to write in. She spent a lot of hours there and her granddaughters would later visit her there. She had her journals organized and her books, and it was a quiet space. In fact, her granddaughters said that they were the only ones allowed in there.

It was called The Tower, short for “The Ivory Tower” because she went up into her ivory tower to write.

They realized that they needed to let Hugh have another opportunity at acting, and so they went on this trip. She writes A Wrinkle in Time, essentially had a different name at the time, and they settle into an apartment in New York.

Hugh looks and looks and looks, finally lands some work, and they live in New York and vacation in Connecticut pretty much for the rest of their lives. This gives Madeleine a nice balance. She gets to see the friends in the different places. She gets to have the quiet of her writing room in Connecticut and also the city time that she so longs for, and she can be with Hugh while he's out doing his acting.

Now what's fascinating is that here she is an accomplished author. She's been a published author for at least 15, if not almost 20 years at this point, has several novels under her belt, and has publisher. She writes this book, A Wrinkle in Time, and she starts sending it in to publishers and they start turning her down.

The first rejection came from her own publisher, Evelyn Shrift at Vanguard Press, and this is her journal entry when she got that rejection:

“While I was there she turned it down with one hand while saying that she loved it, but didn't quite dare do it as it isn't really classifiable. I know it isn't really classifiable, and I'm wondering if I'll have to go through the usual hell with this that I seem to go through with everything I write. But this book I'm sure of as I wasn't of A Winter's Love or even of the Austins. I know Mrs. Whatsit is a good book, and if I've ever written a book that says what I feel about God and the universe, this is it. This is my Psalm of praise to life, my stand for Life against death.”

When I read that, oh, it just brought tears to my eyes because this is the book that her soul was in. This is the book where she poured out everything she knew, everything she loved, everything she'd learned. It's by far her most famous and most popular. It's what she's known for, although she went on to write books in many different genres, young adult fiction and adult fiction and nonfiction. It just is amazing to me that this is how she felt about this book. And the reason that it was rejected was because the world was becoming more and more secular. The Christians beat her up and the non-Christians beat her up. This is Madeleine's explanation about this time:

“In the world of literature, Christianity is no longer respectable. When I'm referred to in an article or a review as a practicing Christian, it's seldom meant as a compliment, at least not in the secular press. It's perfectly all right. According to literary critics to be Jewish or Buddhist or Sufi or pre-Christian druid, it is not all right to be a Christian. And if we ask why the answer is a sad one. Christians have given Christianity a bad name.” Thus the editorial gatekeepers at publishing house after publishing house practice their own form of censorship in advance. They wouldn't even publish it.

That last little bit was not her quote it was the author talking about what she said. Here's another one to kind of give you a sense of why this was book was so hard to get published. This is a fellow artist Philip Yancy:

“I had my own share of criticism over the years, and it's not easy to take, but here are people she, Madeleine has much in common with, and yet they're calling her a heretic or a witch and banning her books and libraries. And that hurts. It hurts at a deep level and you have to come up with a way to deal with it. And she came up with a way.”

Atheists or the secularists and materialists told her that it was too Christian, it was too spiritual. It had too much God in it, and the Christians told her that it was new age, that it wasn't dogmatic enough, that it wasn't according to all the right doctrines, and everyone just beat the book up before and after it was finally published.

In the end, it was through connections that she had in the publishing world and relationships that she had with other people that finally got it published. Here's what she said when she was in the middle of submitting it over and over and over again to publishers:

“Each rejection, no matter how philosophically expected, is a wound perhaps. The thing about it that bothers me the most is that the editor in returning it to Theron said he felt that it should be at least cut in half, and he thought Theron should do this before sending it to another publisher. And Theron was all for talking to him on Monday and seeing if he'd be interested in it and if I'd cut it in half. [Theron is her agent.] I'm willing to rewrite and to rewrite extensively and to cut as much as necessary, but I am not willing to mutilate to destroy the essence of the book. I told Theron to go instead and talk to him if he was determined to, but this was how I felt and I added that one has to keep some integrity. I won't destroy my book for money, for some editor who completely misses the point, which this one obviously did.”

She goes on a little later:

“This clipping came on Thursday and was a relief rather than a joy. Things have gone badly with my writing for so long that I can hardly believe that it is possible that something may go right and it is the basic inner faith that eventually it will, that keeps me going.”

So eventually after dozens of rejections, we don't even know how many because he's, her story changed a lot. She finally got someone to really look honestly at it, John Farrar. I'm going to read you a couple journal entries about finally getting a publisher to take the book:

“I had a talk with John Farr this afternoon, which was also hopeful. He is not only a good friend of Hester Stover's, he's a good publisher, and Hester talked to him about me and he knew and remembered the small rain and looked through three other of my books and I'm to come talk to him. And as Hugh says, this is much more the way things get done than when a manuscript is sent in cold by an agent. He knows and likes Theron too. And then I told him that Mrs. Watts it, that's how she referred to a Wrinkle in Time because it didn't have that new name yet. And then I told him that Mrs. Watts, it was difficult to classify, but if that, but if I had to compare it to anything, it would be one of CS Lewis's parables. He said that CS Lewis was right up his alley, so he is to make an appointment. He called me from home and I'm to come in and talk to him and someone else in the office about it. Oh, I can't help hoping. I can't help hoping.” So she brings the manuscript in on the 16th, January 16th, and on January 18th, she hears from her agent:

Mr. Farrar likes What'sit. And the juvenile man there likes it, but they're a little afraid of it and are going to give it an outside reader to report on. So my first reaction, I'm afraid, was frustrated rage. I'd so hope that they'd liked it, say so and buy it. But at least I still have hope and I will just have to wait and see if there is karma mines certainly patience.”

And this last one:

“Happiness is as numbing as unhappiness. Bion came into our room this morning. (There’s a teacher's conference so no school), and said, ‘Mommy, Theron says, I'm to wake you up. He wants to speak to you. It must be very important.’ Farrar is taking Mrs. Whatsit”

And then the rest is history.

She’d had some books with good reviews that had some readership. She had a little bit of a name in the publishing world, but with A Wrinkle in Time she became unforgettable. That was the book that shot her to fame and fortune. She never worried after that about being able to publish whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted speaking engagements and other opportunities came all the rest of her life. In fact, she and her close friend were both successful authors and both she and this friend at the age of 88, almost 89, had rigorous work schedules. They were still writing and publishing all the time, still very involved in the book world, in the author world, and still very in demand as speakers.

Really, really amazing how she spent the rest of her life. She was in her forties when A Wrinkle in Time was published. So for the next 40, 50 years, she was in demand as a writer and having the success that she'd always longed for and wrote whatever she wanted.

Of course, A Wrinkle in Time won the Newberry Award and there are lots of people who talked about how it would've never won it today, that they're proud of them for giving it the reward because the book actually quotes Jesus and it quotes great authors and it has some very spiritual themes. But of course that's one of the things that I absolutely love about it.

So looping back to now look at the broad picture of who she was as a woman, as a mother, as a writer, she was very much called to do the work that she did. She very much lived those 7 Laws of Life Mission.

This is what an author said about her:

“She was like Lewis, a lay evangelist, or more specifically an apologist who attempts to explain the possibility of Christian belief to skeptics and nominal believers. Her calling was first to those who don't know God in Christ. In the words of L'Engle scholar, Donald Hega of Calvin College, she perceives the mission of all Christians to be evangelical concluding nonetheless with her mission, that her mission is not to alienate non-Christian readers by antagonizing them…One of her editors recalls in a way, Madeleine was always preaching in her books in conversation. She had a mission and a part of the editorial work was trying to pair down some of that down in her fiction.”

So those that worked with her and edited her stuff, knew that she had a mission, knew that she had a message, knew that there were things that she was trying to say. She did not want to ostracize those who did not believe, but she wanted to elevate them. As we've read in her journal entries, she wanted to elevate them. She wanted to lead them on a higher plane. She wanted them to look honestly at where they were at and want to be more. She wanted to inspire them and elevate them and, and bring them home to a belief in God and a thriving faith.

1- She definitely loved God and all her life. That faith grew and grew and grew. It was staunch. It was immovable and strong. It reverberated. Many people in the Christian world are really, really grateful to her for buoying up heir faith at a time when it was difficult to maintain it.

2- She definitely loved herself, although she had bad patterns of thought about who she was as a person. She still continued to engage in increasing self-discipline. She definitely looked for her talents and put in the work to develop them. She definitely made sure to take care of her own needs, and she recognized that she had a temper and that she was impatient and she worked really hard to govern her heart and mind. That is a theme all throughout her journals that she's striving to be a better woman. She really wanted that self-mastery. She never arrived, but she becomes a better person over time.

3- She definitely loves truth. She talks often about truth. In fact, there's a really great YouTube video that I'll link here where she talks about truth in story. The YouTube video talks about how we can see the truth best in story and that facts are not truth. She was really, really a truth seeker and felt that what she was doing was sharing truth and bringing truth to light. One biographer said:

“Story at its heart is one of the primary modes in which God speaks to us, and thus, it's one of the primary vehicles of God's truth, but it's also formative truth.

The best, most ennobling stories have the power to shape our actions.”

This is a quote from Madeleine herself, "Rather than taking a child away from the real world such stories are preparation for living in the real world with courage and expectancy.”

We know that she was very shaped by George McDonald, who was himself an ardent preacher, and who taught the moral framework. Through his stories, Madeleine followed that same path, taught the moral framework in her stories, and tried. And it wasn't just something that she happened to do, it's something that she was consciously doing because she wrote often about the importance of truth through story and truth through fantasy and that she was trying to help people actively come to truth. She was aware of principles. She tried to live by those. That's why she stopped herself from reading trash books or tried to live more in harmony with those things that she knew to be true.

4- She also loved humanity. She is one that never tried to isolate or ostracize any reader. She tried to draw them in to a beautiful community and to make them part of the bigger picture of what she was trying to share. She obviously worked hard to, she didn't just get an education at school, which she was at pretty rigorous classical schools, but she was reading and studying the classics, absorbing the great stories, and making them part of her, and was self-educating all of her life. She also just loved people and she was good with people of all denominations and of all backgrounds and of all creeds and races and cultures.

One biographer said:

“Both CS Lewis and L’Engle had the knack for creating rippling rings of community and connection. They were friends with Christians, atheists, agnostics, and everything in between. Indeed L’Engle as a one-time president of the National Author's Guild Counsel counted among her colleagues some of the household names in the publishing world, including authors like Judy Bloom and Lloyd Alexander. Yet this world rarely overlapped with the Christian nonfiction she published with people like Lucy or the Evangelical speaking circuit. She traversed, her secular colleagues knew she was a Christian, but the extent of her influence was likely underestimated, especially since the only Christians such mainstream authors tend to interact with were those fundamentalists intent on shutting their books down.”

She had a network of people that she worked with that she loved, that she called her dear friends, that were of all persuasions and all races and all belief systems. That was a key way in which she really loved humanity. She served them. She saw herself as a servant leader, bringing truth to the world through her writing. And she was determined to hear the call and hear the call and hear the call. And for her it was writing, writing, writing, writing, writing, writing.

5- She answered the calls of being a wife, the call of being a mother, the call of whatever was needed. But ultimately she left this legacy of many, many good books that teach a lot of truth. In fact, much of her nonfiction helps convert people to Christianity on a regular basis. And the novels that children can love and adore.

Clearly she answered the call again and again. She heard it.

6- She courageously executed. She was tenacious. She walked the streets in the rain and the sun and the and the sleet to see a woman to try to get a play produced. She sent her book to publisher after publisher after publisher. She believed in her own writing when nobody else did. Even the people who had published multiple other books of hers, she sent it to other publishers until she saw it through. She knew that this is what God had asked her to do. She has many journal entries where she talks about how she can't not write. She tried to set it down to put it away, and it was just something that was part of who she was and she could never, ever stop.

That's the mission-driven story about Madeleine L'Engle. And I really do adore her. It was a joy to read these books about her, to see her spiritual journey and her life journey, to understand that she did hurt people and she did offend people, and she did struggle in many ways with her own self, her own confidence, her own relationship in God, her relationship with her family.

These are all the struggles that you and I have as well. But we can step into our calling as she did. We can tell God we're ready. We can prepare ourselves the best we can. We can dive into those 7 Laws of Life Mission that I outlined in The Mission Driven Life and that we mentor you through in the Mission Driven Mom Academy.

You can hear the call. God has a call for you. You can hear it, and you can execute on it, and we will be here to support you every step of the way. Thank you so much for joining me today, and I will see you next time.

If you are feeling frustrated with how your days are going. If you are overwhelmed by the prospect of "getting more done." If you want to engage in more personal growth but have no idea how you would possibly fit this into your life...

This podcast is for YOU! 

This simple idea transformed my life, as I learned to focus NOT on my time but on something far more powerful and unlimited instead. This secret to changing the dynamic of our lives from overwhelm and frustration to optimism and accomplishment, has changed the lives of many women who have learned and practiced it in the MDM Academy. 

NOW I'm giving you this secret too! And I know if you'll change your focus and practice this skill, you will increase our confidence AND your capacity 10X!

For more tools on how to overcome the worry and overwhelm, go grab your FREE MINI-TRAINING "How to Conquer Your Worries and Mom-Guilt": https://www.themissiondrivenmom.com/

Transcript:

I'm excited to spend some time with you today. We're going to talk about how you need to stop managing your time and manage something. Instead, I'm going to talk to you about how you can take this frustration that you may be feeling with. How your day to day activities are going, how frustrated and overwhelmed you might feel with how you're showing up for yourself and for other people, and how you can move in a better direction.

You have the power right now to really make things significantly different, to feel pleased with how you're showing up, to have more optimism, more positivity, and to just feel better about yourself and about how you're performing in your life. Before we get to that, I want to ask you a favor. If this podcast has been helpful to you and blessed your life, it would mean a lot if you would pass it along and if you would leave a review.

That helps other people to know the value of this podcast. And of course, if you've not been over to the mission driven mom.com, go check it out. We'd love to have you opt in for any of the things we have there for you for free. You can learn how to overcome your worries and turn them into forward momentum.

You can get a 7 laws cheat sheet. If you've never read my book you can also get two chapters of it for free. So head on over there and check that out.

Today we're going to talk about how you can show up better for yourself and for your family, and for your loved ones and, and all of that stuff. So, in order to start, I want to just take a moment and I want you to think about a typical day in your life.

This is all about you. Thinking about, how does your day look? When do you typically get up? What do you usually do first? What kind of schedule do you have? Do you have to go to work part-time or full-time, or not at all? Are you taking care of children full-time? Are you doing half and half?

Some of our audience, I know even homeschool, so that might be the circumstances that you're in. Who are you caring for? What appointments do you typically have in a day or in a week? What are the demands on you? And just kind of step back from your own life. Act like a third party observer. And watch your life for a moment, those things that are daily being expected of you by the people around you and the things that you expect of yourself.

Now, hone in a little bit, look more closely, how are you feeling during all these activities? When you get up, are you energized or are you groggy? Do you feel excited about your day or frustrated or worried or overwhelmed when you come to breakfast or make breakfast? When you interact with your family, when you go to your appointments, how is that looking for you?

How are you showing up in all of those places? Are you at your best in these appointments and in these interactions? Do you wish you could be accomplishing more? Do you feel like you're falling short? Do you get frustrated, overwhelmed, or just wanna check out entirely at some point or at multiple points during your day?

Well, if you are like me, then the answer to some of those questions is yes. It's hard to show up the way that we wanna show up for ourselves and for other people all the time. And what you've been told, maybe perhaps this is what I was told for a really long time, was that if I could just manage my time better, I would feel better.

Things would go better if I got up earlier, if I scheduled things better, if I kept myself to the timeframes that I had laid out for myself for different activities. If I didn't try to get so much done in a day. You know, back in the day, this will kind of age me, but I owned a Franklin planner and that thing was not cheap and my husband and I really tried to use those religiously well.

The consequence of what we've been thinking about and describing in terms of our day is if you're less than satisfied with how these things are going for you, here's the problem that we create for ourselves. Not only do we feel frustrated and overwhelmed by how the day is going and how it's looking and how we're showing up, but then the, the added consequences of that is how we end up feeling about ourselves.

Because then we feel like, well, I just didn't get it all done and I'm just kind of a loser and I can't really ever hit my goals and we have a lower self-confidence. We start really feeling lost in motherhood, in the responsibilities of our lives. We want to accomplish more, but we really feel overwhelmed.

We're frustrated, and so our self-image is really damaged. We have more negative self-talk. Sometimes we fall into self-pity. Sometimes we start to feel resentful of other people or ourselves or God or whatever it is, and it just doesn't have to be that way. This doesn't have to be the story of your day-to-day life.

I want to introduce you to a new paradigm.This is in comparison with the old paradigm of time management. This is something that, Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz came up with, and it's so fascinating. It's one of, of course, many things that we do in the MDM Academy that helps us to have a better relationship with ourselves.

So I want to go through the old paradigm. In other words, the things that we're being told by the world or maybe the ideas that we were brought up on that are telling us how to manage ourselves, how to manage our lives. It looks like this. We should manage our time. We should avoid stress. Life is a marathon and we just need to keep going and going, Downtime is wasted time. Rewards fuel performance. So if we get rewarded enough, then we'll want to do the work. Self-discipline rules. We just need to have more self-discipline and more willpower, and then we'll accomplish everything that we've set our minds to and the power of positive thinking. We just need to have the right thoughts all the time and think the right things about ourselves and other people, and do our affirmations and our vision board and all of that thing, all those things, and then we'll get where we wanna be and we won't feel this way about our day anymore.

And that's just not true. Those paradigms are not helpful. I hit up against that time and time again. I thought that that's how I was supposed to live my life. Well, the new paradigm is very different. It's the reverse, basically the opposite of each of those things I listed.

So instead of managing time, we manage energy. We seek stress rather than avoid it. I'm going to talk to you about why that's actually the case and why that's so important. Nobody out there. As for, I want very few people, maybe Loehr and Schwartz are telling you that you need to seek stress, but it is the key to growth. Life is a series of sprints. We actually do best when we're project based, when we push really hard for something that's meaningful and then we rest and rejuvenate.

There are important reasons for that too. Downtime is productive time. Purpose fuels our performance, not rewards. It's the purpose and inherent meaning of what we're doing that makes us want to do it. Rituals rule, not self-discipline. When we put the approach appropriate rituals in our lives, we will have more and more of the results that we're really longing for.

And it's not the power of positive thinking, it's what they call the power of full engagement.

So I want to stop really quickly and define some terms because that's really gonna help us to understand what it is that we're talking about. First of all, energy. What's energy? How would we manage? We know what time is. You know, time is the clicking, the ticking clock, and once it's gone we can't ever get it back and we only have so much of it. And what's really cool about energy as compared to time is it's actually limitless. There's not a total amount of energy that we can bring to the table. We can continue to increase our energy levels, but time is always limited.

So what is work? Work is activity involving effort that's done in order to achieve a purpose or result. Attention is applying the mind and the body to something selectively narrowing or focusing of consciousness and, and receptivity. And what is stress? Stress is pressure or tension exerted on a material object.

This whole paradigm of managing energy instead of time is so revolutionary because when you are focused on the energy that you're bringing to your day, everything shifts. The best way of thinking about this change in paradigm from. Managing time to managing energy and from avoiding stress to seeking stress and to living in terms of marathon and living in terms of sprints.

And rather than having self-discipline to building rituals. Instead, it begins by understanding or at least being reminded of how muscles are built. You probably know this, I'll just quickly remind you. Anytime we want to build a physical muscle in our body, we have to stress it. We have to strain it. We have to overexert it.

We have to take it beyond its comfort level. And in fact, often this involves pain. We have to choose to be in pain and to lift weights or do activities that put strain on those muscles that they haven't had before. And that strain on the muscle causes it to tear these little tiny micro tears. Are created in your muscle, that's the source of the pain.

You're actually tearing your muscle. And then as you rest the muscle, the body goes in and repairs it. It adds amino acids to the myofilament, and this causes them to grow in size. So if you want growth in your muscles, you have to get out of comfort. You have to choose pain. You have to intentionally strain, struggle, and be in discomfort, and you have to let those muscles be torn and then you have to give your body the necessary nutrients so that the amino acids can properly repair the muscle, and then you have a bigger muscle. And with that bigger muscle comes increased capacity. Now there's things that you can do, real things in the real world that you can do now that you couldn't do before you volunteered to be in discomfort, before you stepped into stress.

The revolutionary idea that these men are presenting is that in every area of life, the key areas where we need to care for ourselves and truly love ourselves, require this same process.

This is something that Tony Schwartz said.

“It’s not how many hours you put in that determines how productive you are. It's how much energy you're able to invest during the hours you work.”

Now, remember, work is simply doing the tasks that are necessary to bring about a desired end. And stress is when we intentionally cause strain and tension on something.

So this is what this means, which is really, really cool, is that if we want to show up better, if we want to be more optimistic, be more full of energy, we simply go through the process emotionally, mentally, and spiritually, that we go through physically with our muscles, we seek stress, and we rest. We go beyond our comfort zone. We do something that's intentionally hard for us, and then we rest and relax and let our body, mind, soul, emotions repair. And that is how we increase our strength, our spiritual strength, our mental strength, and our emotional strength. And the way that we can do that consistently is through, instead of trying to have a lot of self-discipline every single day, we run in sprints.

So we do projects or activities that are intentionally hard for us. Like that time you set aside to go to the gym and intentionally be in pain so that you can have increased capacity and better physical health the rest of your life. And we do the same thing spiritually, mentally, and emotionally. We set aside time and we run a sprint, an emotional sprint, a spiritual sprint, a mental sprint, and we push ourselves way beyond our current levels of capacity.

And that's where the pain comes in. The emotional pain, the spiritual pain, the mental pain, and then we rest. And instead of trying to live life like a marathon, we live it in these sprints and rests. And one of the ways that we can maintain that process is putting rituals in place. Now, I don't have time to get in today into this whole process.

This is something that we really deep dive in the academy and learn how to do. But I want to go over the four principles of this process with you. Principle number one. In order to have more energy, you have to draw on all four sources of energy, physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual. These are all absolutely vital, and instead of trying to have the perfect day all scheduled out, if you'll nurture your energy levels.

By seeking stress in these four areas, you'll have increased capacity, you'll have reserves to do more. I was looking over some testimonials yesterday that I thought I might use in this podcast. Several of them talked about how they were doing a lot when they signed up for the academy, and they just thought, “Well, I'll just go at my own pace. It'll take as long as it takes.”

But what they found was that when they added more to their life and they learned tools like this, and they pushed themselves mentally, emotionally, and spiritually, that they had increased capacity out on the end, there was more that they could do. They got more done than they thought that they could do because this process really works. This is how we really grow. This is what it takes.

Now the second principle is that energy capacity diminishes with overuse and underuse, so you have to balance the expenditure. With intermittent energy renewal, just like I was describing before, you have to push yourself beyond the boundaries.

I'll give you some examples in just a minute, but let me give you the last two principles.

The third one is something I've been mentioning several times that we must push beyond our normal limit limits training in the same systematic way that we do physically in these other areas of our lives.

And the fourth principle is that we need positive energy rituals. These are routines that help us manage our energy, and they keep our energy high throughout the day and throughout the week and throughout our lives.

So here's an example. Let's say, and I have been in this situation that my emotional and perhaps my, even my spiritual reserves are at a low. And the reason that I know that is because I feel negative. My thoughts are negative. My emotions aren't negative. I'm getting up in the morning or I'm going throughout my day and I'm noticing that I'm having negative thoughts, negative energy output, and so I know that. That's an indicator to me that something is wrong spiritually or emotionally, or both. And when I evaluate what those negative emotions are and I look carefully at the thoughts that are associated with them, when I actually take the time to sit down and journal and evaluate that, then I begin to see that my thoughts are directed. Or coming from a space where I'm upset with someone about an event or about something that they've done, what this tells me is that there's something wrong with my emotional reserves. I don't have the emotional reserves to go through my day without just collapsing into some kind of self be or negativity. And if that's happening ongoing, then I know I need to increase my emotional capacity and something is blocking me. Something is in my way. Now, this might have to do with my relationship myself or with someone else, but as an example in this specific situation, it may be that I need to forgive.

It may be that resentment is a block to me and I'm hanging on to something in the past, and it's doing damage in my day-to-day right now, and I'm allowing it to block me from having more positive emotions about my future. That means I need to go through the process of forgiving. And that's hard. That's difficult. That's something I've been avoiding. I have to push through. I have to live those principles. I have to practice them, and that's pushing myself. And so I set aside time, over the next few weeks or even few months, to push myself beyond my comfort zone to do something emotionally difficult to do the work of walking through this situation with myself or with this other person to truly and completely forgive them.

And as I do that, I'm pushing my emotional capacity and I'm enhancing my ability to do this in the future. I'm increasing my ability to live principles of forgiveness, and the next time I need to do this, it will just be that much easier to see the situation more clearly, to let go more quickly, to move through the forgiveness process, uh, more speedily because I'm increasing my ability to be able to keep my emotional energy higher.

So this might be the case in the spiritual realm if I'm feeling like I don't have any good goals and the future looks bleak and negative. Emotions are a good indicator of anything that can be wrong. Those and negative emotions and negative thoughts are indicators of something's wrong spiritually or physically or mentally or emotionally.

And so journaling, evaluating, again, we walk you through this in the academy. That's a place where you can go to get more of this. Point being, when you identify that area where your energy is low, the block that's in your life that's causing you to not have the energy that you want to have, then you work on that by pushing past the limits of where you're comfortable and what you've done in the past, and increasing your capacity to do more of that thing.

Spiritual reserves get really low. Spiritual energy is low when we don't have a lot of meaning and purpose, when we're not actively working toward. Noble goals and worthwhile outcomes that we care about. When we don't have those in place, then it zaps our spiritual energy and we wind up negative again.

And then we might go through the motions every day, but our life doesn't look the way that we want it to. And like we thought about in the beginning, if you're having more of those days than you want to have where you're feeling overwhelmed or negative or depressed, or whatever. It may very well be the case that you need to learn to increase your capacity. I've had many women come into the MDM Academy who didn't realize that their mental capacity wasn't met, that they actually felt like something was missing in their life and they couldn't put their finger on it, and it was causing them to feel frustrated and upset, and it was that they weren't being pushed mentally.

And the Academy was a place where they could really learn a lot of new information in a short period of time where they could push beyond the limits of what they might naturally read and read more difficult things and use better study skills and push their mental capacities. And as they did that, their reserves increased.

Again, they could do more than they could do before. So it's important for us to remember that the cadence of any given day is, the first few hours of the day are the hours where we naturally have the most energy. There are ups and downs, there are cadences. There's an ebb and flow to the day. But as the day goes on, energy reserves will decrease and decrease as we deplete them.

Now, the more energy we bring to the table through what we're doing with our physical body, through what we're doing for our spiritual needs, our mental needs, and our emotional needs through the capacities that we've built by pushing ourselves and inviting stress, and then taking time to relax and release.

That's the amount of energy. That's the package that we've created. That's the energy that we get to show up for that with that morning, and that energy will only last, to the intensity that we use it, and it will decline throughout the day. That's why it's so important not to try to have really hard, difficult discussions with people late at night people often end up sleeping on the couch.

When you're pushing yourself in any way, when you're inviting or choosing stress, like a hard conversation or forgiving or writing goals and creating a vision for your future or repairing a relationship or increasing your physical energy, you’ve got to set aside the time to do that. Then rest and rejuvenate from it.

So there's two parts to this process. One is what they talked about with rituals. We want daily rituals that keep our energy, get our energy levels up, and then they're higher throughout the day. But we also need events, too—the sprints where we push extra hard for a time and then we relax and kind of spring back. If you think about a rubber band, once you've pushed it really, really tight, when it springs back, it will be larger. That's you as you sign up for sprints, as you choose to go in and give yourself extra stress and then relax from it, you will find your capacity increased.

One of the things I hear people saying a lot is that, they already feel so stressed right now. They could never take on more stress, but it's choosing things that will increase your capacity. That's what you've got to do. So if you're really overwhelmed with your day right now, you probably don't have good enough morning rituals that get your energy to a higher level for that day. You’re probably also increasing your stress, whatever the circumstances are that you're going through, if you're saying that you feel really stressed and that you can't take on more stress. It’s probably because your stress is of a negative nature and you are contributing to it knowingly or unknowingly by the negativity that you bring to it.

Actually, this is choosing positive stressors that will help you understand your talents and abilities and develop them, or that will help you heal a burdened relationship, or that will give you vision and clarity for the future, or that will help your body to heal so that it, you have more physical energy as well.

You have to make the time and space to stretch yourself in those capacities. Choosing those sprints is where you've got to journal and evaluate and figure out what's a roadblock for you or what is an area where you're going to choose stress to increase your capacity. The other element of choosing rituals, putting rituals in your life that keep your energy up day by day.

That's where you do things each morning to remind yourself of all the good things that are going on in your life and to get you yourself mentally, emotionally, physically, and spiritually ready for the day. The way that I do it is first thing in the morning. I make sure that I do a thorough stretch because I am, still healing my hip. It's so much better. I can do so much more than I could a few months ago because I've been so vigilant with diet and with the stretches and with all of the protocols. So I make sure and do that and then I control my diet throughout the day and I make sure I get enough sleep. So those are rituals that help me have maximum physical health, even though I'm in the middle of repairing huge, injuries and things that are wrong with my body. Then I make sure that I read some quality material and am inspired by great men and women. All of the study I've been doing for my book, How Truth Makes You Free is really a mental boost every morning. It's so exciting to read from great men and women who talked about truth, who lived inspiring lives. Their life rubs off on me and I want to be more like them. It's really a huge mental boost.

Then emotionally, I make sure that I go through and do my gratitude and my true statements every morning so that. I'm reminded of why life is good and this is a wonderful place that I want to be at, and all the things I have to be grateful for, and all the things that are true about me and about my family, and about the world that get me recentered.

Then spiritually, I connect with the divine. I make sure that I read words from scripture that have the most elevating power. Of any type of writing, and I let God speak to me through those words and speak to me through prayer and time and meditation with him, and that that helps me get my energy levels really high.

Then I do my hardest mental work as early in the day as I possibly can.

I put rituals in place to keep my energy high all throughout the day. I choose activities intermittently throughout my life that stress me and then release. Sometimes I've had to do the work of forgiving someone. Sometimes I've signed up for classes so that I could develop a talent or so that I could push myself mentally. Sometimes I have worked really vigilantly on my thoughts and my daily emotions and had rituals and patterns and a goal set around that. Sometimes I go out and I spend time alone and I think about my future and I connect with God and we make plans for the future. That's another thing I do in the morning is a little bit of envisioning, looking over my goals or thinking about where I'm headed and, and how what I'm going to do today is part of a bigger plan that I've created that's meaningful for me and for the people around me.

All of those things get me ready for the day. It doesn't have to take a lot of time. If I'm in a hurry, I can do all those things in less than an hour. It's just doing a little bit of those every day. And then, like I said, all throughout my life, I've gone to conferences. I've taken courses, I've worked with mentors, I've signed up for things, or I've given myself a task and been accountable to someone and just chosen to keep pushing the envelope, to keep stretching myself and then relaxing.

That is how energy is created and maintained. And if you will focus on managing your energy, not your time, you’ll find that as your capacity increases, time becomes more and more irrelevant because you can get so much more done in such a shorter period of time, because you don't have all of your negative thoughts and emotions getting in the way because you think more clearly, because of whatever it is that increases your capacity.

If you paint enough, you will just be able to paint something or draw something way faster than you could a few years ago. If you played the piano consistently, if you dribble a ball, it doesn't matter what example that I give, if you do it enough, you’ll get faster. If you have a ritual of going out and setting goals and thinking about your future, the more you do that, the better you'll get at it, and the more you'll fine tune those. You’ll be clear, and then you'll live with more intention, and then you'll have more reason to get up in the morning, and then you'll be more positive and optimistic with your children, and the mood and the atmosphere in your home will be more productive and everyone will work more kindly and well with each other.

It's an upward spiral of increased capacity and productivity. But it isn't through all of the perfect scheduling. Now, I schedule too, I still have a planner. It's not that I don't plan in my planner. It’s not that I don't think about what I need to do today, but I'm less focused on the amount of time it will take.

Even with this podcast. I need to get ahead because I'm going to be out of town so I needed to record several podcasts in a short period of time. I went through my notes and I prayed over what would be good information to share, and I pulled some books from the shelf and I sat down and worked. In about an hour, I was able to create the outline for this podcast.

And now I'm recording it and posting it in another hour or so. And. I couldn't do that many years ago. It's because of all the ways that I've pushed myself in the past and all of the things that I've read and all the books that I've marked, and all the things that I've taught and, and practiced and have been meaningful to me, and all the ways in which I've increased my capacity.

I've spoken thousands of times publicly at this point. Through all the videos and all of the conventions and all of the online conferences that I've spoken at, I've just become more and more articulate. I've practiced that skill so much that I can record this once and not have to record it again. I promise, this is the way of personal growth. This is the way that you can keep your energy optimistic and realistic, and that's what you want. You don't want to live in a fantasy world where you think everything's going to be perfect all the time. You want to see reality for what it is. But you want to hope for the best and expect the best and and plan for your future and all of those wonderful things.

I want to read to you, as we finish up, a few quotes from a couple other authors that I really, really love that have to do with this whole process.

Tom Rath, who at 16 was diagnosed with a genetic disease where his body, doesn't have what it needs to fight tumors. So he's had cancer on and off all his life and multiple surgeries in the battle of physical health. And he says that,  ‘…mission-driven people often spent a lifetime putting everyone else's needs before their own,” which is wonderful.

You're mission-driven men and women, and you want the world to be a better place, and so you're striving to be a servant leader who puts others' needs before your own. But we have to remember that what I've been talking about today is your real needs. It's what I explain in my book, The Mission-Driven Life, around the three principles of self-love. You must meet your own needs. You are the only one that can meet your own needs. You're the only one that can focus on your energy and get your energy higher. No one can do that for you. And your needs aren't more important than anyone else's, and their needs aren't more important than yours.

Tom Rath says.”Even if you're determined to be the least selfish person on the planet and do nothing but serve other people, you need daily energy to do so effectively.”

There's a story of Mother Theresa. You can go listen to her mission-driven story on this podcast, but there was a moment where she was serving in this calling of helping the poor in Calcutta. She went out there every day to try and help the people. She brought her own lunch with her. It was hot outside and it was demanding physical conditions. Often the children would steal her food from her, she wouldn't have sufficient water, she wouldn't have sufficient food, and so she would sometimes pass out. And then eventually she became very sick and a nurse had to come and teach her how to better take care of herself. She had to learn this principle that her energy was not going to remain high unless she nurtured herself. She was always nurturing herself spiritually. She knew what her goals were. She knew what she'd been called to do. She knew what God wanted her to do, but she couldn't serve in that capacity and unless her energy was high, and for her it was the emotional and physical reserves that she desperately needed. She could only do that by taking better care of herself and making her needs a priority.

Tom Rath says, “People who have very high energy levels in a given day are more than three times as likely to be completely engaged in their work that same day. If you want to make a difference, not just today, but for many years to come you need to put your health and energy ahead of all else.

“When you need to be your very best for work, family, and friends, start by ensuring that you have adequate energy to be fully charged.”

You need to be there for the people that you love. They're depending on you. When you show up negative and crabby, you don't know who you are. You don’t have a lot of confidence. You are feeling lost in motherhood. You don't have goals for the future. You don't have a soul centered in your worth as found in God when you aren't focused on connecting with him regularly, and when you aren't pushing yourself to go beyond your current comfort levels. You cannot become the person that you want to be, and you cannot solve this problem of having enough energy.

I want to end with this wonderful quote. This is Greg McEwen. He talks about how important it is in our lives that we hone in on what's most important, and we do only those things that are most important.

“It's about getting the right things done. That doesn't mean just doing less for the sake of doing less. It is about making the wisest possible investment of your time and energy in order to operate at your highest point of contribution.”

Doing only what is most essential, working on these elements of energy, nurturing your own energy, is what is most important. Everything will change when you are at your peak, even if you do less. As you do more of building your energy, it will accumulate into a life of greater purpose that's more optimistic and exciting and energized. One where you have a better sense of yourself and more confidence. One where you know who you are and where you're going.

Where the people around you find the light in your presence and they are inspired by your example. One where you manage your energy on a daily basis and you sign up to push yourself and stress yourself so that you can be more than you are today.

That's the life we all want to have, and that's the impact we all want to have. And it starts with managing your energy. So eat your veggies, go for a walk, make time for prayer. Go be alone and plan your future. Do all those things that are essential to fuel your energy, and you'll find that you'll stop saying, “I don't have enough time," and you'll start nurturing your energy instead.

Thank you so much for joining me today. It was a privilege to share these principles with you, and I hope they have a hugely positive impact in your life. See you next time.