Tag: Practical Tips

Christian Living, Creativity, Practical Tips , ,

You Have Creative Gifts: Here’s How to Find Them

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If you’re reading this, you’re the recipient of someone else’s creative gift.

Somebody, somewhere, decided to come up with a written alphabet. Somebody, somewhere, taught me to write it and you to read it. Somebody, somewhere, got really into numbers and came up with a system for language comprised of 1s and 0s and somebody else somewhere else made it pop up on a screen as the written alphabet. While they were designing the tech, someone made them dinner and washed their socks. Someone else constructed the buildings where they worked. All of these people lived in different centuries and on different continents and probably never imagined the full effects of their efforts. They certainly couldn’t have known that I would be writing this and you would be reading it.

That is just one tiny sliver of insight into how much we benefit from the gifts of others. Spend a day just trying to think of all the people throughout the centuries and in your own life who worked so that you could be where you are, doing what you’re doing, right now. I guarantee you can’t help but be overwhelmed with gratitude.

People using their creative gifts is essential to the flourishing of others.

You using your creative gifts is also essential to your flourishing.

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Gaining Clarity, Practical Tips, Resolutions , , ,

5 Easy, Practical Steps to Get Rid of Bad Habits

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Do you ever find yourself making the same mistakes over and over? Or getting stressed about the same sorts of things, time and again? It’s hard to learn what we want to change if we aren’t in the habit of reflecting on our lives – but even if we are, we need to have the courage and clarity to get rid of bad habits.

Just getting rid of a bad habit out of the blue, on our own, isn’t easy: but it certainly can be easier if we take practical steps to remove some of the factors around why we keep making the same mistakes. (And by “mistakes” I don’t only mean morally bad decisions, but also behaviors that leave us feeling exhausted, stressed, or unhappy because they don’t serve the major priorities we’ve set for our lives.)

Here are 5 practical steps to help you get rid of bad habits, with clear examples of how to follow them easily.

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Examining Life, Gaining Clarity, Know Thyself, Personality, Practical Tips, Tendencies , , , , ,

Trading in Emotional Expenditure

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(“Why am I Always So Tired?” – How Discerning the Cost of Anything is Essential to Living Well, Part IV)

This is part IV of a series looking at how discerning the non-monetary cost of things in our lives can help us figure out why we’re so tired – and how we can live better. Read Parts I, II, and III.

Emotional expenditure is probably the trickiest of life-costs to consider. We know how to track our time, and we have physical indicators of how much energy we have (or lack): but how do we measure emotional expenditure?

Thankfully, (because as humans we are body-soul unities and not brains in jars) our emotions, while not physical in themselves, do have real physical effects. Just think of tears. We feel the emotion of sadness or joy and our eyes suddenly release salt water. Of course, some people’s bodies seem to process emotion more closely than others’ – and even the most highly sensitive people can be unaware of the cost of their emotional life.

What’s to be done? The first step, as with any life-cost, is becoming more aware of the affects of our own actions and that of other’s actions around us. We have to know ourselves well to know what affects us emotionally, and how we process and spend our emotions.

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Examining Life, Know Thyself, Practical Tips , , ,

Trading in Energy

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(“Why am I Always So Tired?” – How Discerning the Cost of Anything is Essential to Living Well, Part III)

This is Part III of a series looking at how discerning the non-monetary cost of things in our lives can help us figure out why we’re so tired – and how we can live better. Read Parts I and II.

Most of us think about the cost of a thing is how much money we have to spend on it. But really, it’s how much life we have to spend on it. Life cost can be considered, practically, in terms of time, energy, and emotional expenditure.

Energy is a life-cost closely related to time, but rarely considered on its own terms. We might know that a task will cost us 2 hours to complete – but have you ever noticed that the very same task can cost 2 hours one day and 45 minutes the next? That’s because how much time something costs can depend on how much energy we have to spend. (This isn’t true of all activities, of course: a 3 hour train ride is a 3 hour train ride, no matter how tired we are.)

Unlike time, energy is not a fixed asset. Some activities drain us, while others seem to leave us with more energy than when we started. If we’re paying attention, we’ll know ourselves well enough to be able to judge our daily energy gains and losses.

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Examining Life, Gaining Clarity, Know Thyself, Practical Tips , , , ,

Trading in Time

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(“Why am I Always So Tired?” – How Discerning the Cost of Anything is Essential to Living Well, Part II)

This is Part II of a series looking at how discerning the non-monetary cost of things in our lives can help us figure out why we’re so tired – and how we can live better.

In Part I, I wrote about shifting our definition of “cost” from that of mere monetary valuation to a more accurate weighing up of the amount of life something requires of us. How much life do we have to trade in to get the thing?

Most of us aren’t used to thinking of cost in terms of life: we’ve been trained from an early age to consider the price tag as an accurate representation of how much something is worth, rather than asking ourselves what the life-cost is to us.

There are three main ways to start thinking about life-cost: time, energy, and emotional expenditure.

Let’s talk about the life-cost of time.

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