IIW Blog
How to Emotionally Agree with God
I recently did a post on how to come into agreement with other people; your spouse, your boss, your friends, whoever. This post presented the 3 parts of agreement, which I’ll summarize here. 1) Logical Agreement. Is this what you THINK we should do? 2) Emotional Agreement. Is this what you WANT to do? 3)...Read the Post→
3 Steps from Familiar Sick Bondage into Unknown Healthy Freedom
Often we choose bondage over freedom. Sounds strange, doesn’t it? Who would do that? We don’t do it intentionally. We don’t even realize we’re doing it. But we do. We do it when we choose the sick familiar over the healthy unknown. The dysfunction we grew up with is familiar. We think it’s normal, even...Read the Post→
Why Life is Sacred and What that Even Means
Sacred. What does that word even mean? We hardly use it anymore today. It sounds like a vegetable. “Yeah, we just planted some sacred between the beets and the squash.” But it’s a very important word. Because life is sacred. When our hearts lose the truth of that last sentence, we descend into the very...Read the Post→
How to Agree in 3 Questions
We know agreement is a key to any kind of successful partnership, whether it’s in business, a marriage, or a creative partnership. Unity is a powerful thing that can weather any storm. When troubles destroy a relationship, be it a marriage or a business or what have you, it’s not the troubles that actually destroyed...Read the Post→
Why We Really Don’t Want Fairness but This Instead
“It’s not fair!” said every person everywhere, at some point in their lives. Some of us live in that unhappy place of constantly striving for fairness and never seeing it. Some of us sink there when bad things happen. We see it all over our political system—the constant cry for fairness, for everyone to be...Read the Post→
How to Succeed by Deciding to Fail
At a recent writer’s conference (Jeff Goins’ Tribe conference), I heard a speaker, Joseph Michael, author of the online course Learn Scrivener Fast, say he was thankful for his failures. I’d always known intellectually that failures are good for you. As long as you learn something, failures are learning experiences. They’re a necessary part of...Read the Post→
How to Tell Yourself a Different Story
Recently we were at a conference and Janet ran into a friend who told her, “I’m so nervous about wearing something that looks good I brought 3 suitcases of clothes.” Now this young woman is gorgeous and would look beautiful in anything she wears. But that’s apparently not the story she tells herself. The negative...Read the Post→
How to Tell the Difference between 3 Types of Emotional Pain We Feel
Pain is something we don’t understand very well, especially here in the West. We avoid it, medicate, and ignore it, none of which actually fixes it. But pain is important. It’s telling us something’s wrong that we need to address. Pain is like the idiot light on your dashboard. What if the oil light comes...Read the Post→
4 Ways to Help Grieving People
As Americans, we don’t feel comfortable around other people’s grief. We don’t know how to act. We don’t have a healthy understanding of grief. Death is a legitimate part of life. We ignore it. We pretend it’s not there. We’ve abstracted it away, and we really don’t know how to deal with it ourselves, let alone...Read the Post→
How to Tell when It’s a Season to Heal
Do you ever get confused by the weather? Do you ever think the weather itself is confused? I’m looking out the window watching the rain fall on a completely sunny day! Yes, it’s dumping rain at the same time the sun is shining. Does it do that where you live? It does it here in...Read the Post→