Dustin - Personal Development

You are a powerful person: God is in you and as a result you have importance and significance. You are God's son/daughter with God's Spirit living in you. In light of this reality you should develop yourself. Give attention to your growth.

Consider relationships with people above you, alongside you and under you. Think in terms of Paul, Barnabas and a Timothy.

We need a Paul - someone over us, older than us or more mature than us. We need to learn to 'puke up' rather 'out' or 'down'. Don't dump your anxiety, fear, insecurity, sin on those you're mentoring (down) or even always your friends (out) but rather on those above you or over you.

Mentoring others is important since as you mentor others it forces you to mentor yourself/look after yourself.

Goal setting

A good goals should be:

1. Controllable: within your reach and sphere of influence
2. Measurable
3. Attainable
4. Meaningful to you
5. Time based: set an end date. If it's a difficult goal set a shorter time span. If it's an easy goal, set a longer time span. That way you can review it. 
6. Shareable: who will you share it with?
7. Reviewed often. Daily, hourly, weekly?

Habits

We all have habits whether we are aware of them or not. 

How long does it take to form a habit? 21 days. It takes 7 days to recover a habit.

Building a habit is much harder than setting a goal. But they are much more powerful/effective. 

John Maxwell:

We over estimate what we can do in one day, but we under estimate what we can do with many days.

Pick one habit you want to set rather than five:

Spiritual development

Spiritual gifts. In the list of spiritual gifts there are some that are word based gifts that involve speaking, there are others that are action oriented: healing, miracles, discernment, generosity, helping, administrating. 

Piper makes the point that Paul's list of spiritual gifts aren't exhaustive. Instead he says 'a spiritual gift is anything that you rely on the Holy Spirit to do, and when you do it, it increases people's faith in God, and leaves them feeling encouraged.'

Emotional Intelligence

How to increase your EQ:

1) Tune in to your emotions so you can recognise them.

2) Separate yourself from your emotions. Make them your friends that you talk to. I'm not an angry person, I am experience the emotion of anger which is trying to tell me something: 'Anger thank you for this information you are trying to give me.'

3) Close your mouth until you have processed the cause of these emotions.

4) Ask why you're feeling this emotion in order to process the information your are receiving.

5) Locate the root of where the emotion is coming from.

6) Communicate what you learned to whoever is involved or can help you.

Learn to value the validity of another person's emotion even if it's an emotion that you don't think makes logical sense or is justified.

Stress and lack of sleep make you less able to manage emotions properly.