How to Reengage with Your Life

Are you off track? Do you find yourself setting goals only to have to reset them again? Do you find yourself frustrated that you have made promises to yourself that you just aren't keeping? Well, welcome to how everybody feels after about 2, 3, 4 weeks after the beginning of the year, or 2, 3, 4 weeks after setting a new goal. You aren't alone, but there's something that we can do about that. Years ago, I was in my car and I was driving back to college and I was reaching for a Hershey bar. That's a much longer story that you can read about if you'd like. It's in my book, She's Still There. It's chapter 5, to be more specific. But here's what I need you to know. When I reached for the Hershey bar, my car went off the freeway. That's the bottom line. I was okay. The car was not. An exit or two down, the car caught on fire. I don't even know if I put that part in the book. The point is, You don't want to drift. That's the point. You don't want to drift. And drifting is what happens when you set your intentions on achieving a goal or getting to a destination or moving forward in some way in your life, and then you find yourself a day later, a week later, a month later, a year later, somewhere completely different than what you told yourself you would do and where you told yourself you would go. Drifts are, uh, gonna happen. And it happened for me in that story because it was a long drive. I was trying to not be bored. I was trying to, uh, be interested in something that was over there, and I reached for it, and it caused me to get off course. Drifts happen because you lose sight of where you're really going and what's really important. Drifts happen usually on long drives, goals that you get tired of working on, um, plans that you get tired of being disciplined in. When you are looking at the thing that you told yourself or promised yourself or you said you were going to do, and you're just running out of steam. You get uncomfortable, you get bored, you get tired. Depending on the goal, it may feel a little like suffering. It feels challenging. Suffering may be a word that sounds like team too much, but if you get tired of aiming for the thing you said you would do and you just don't have the energy, you don't have the motivation, you don't have the desire— maybe the same desire that you did when you started out— that Feeling of discomfort is what causes us to reach for something else. The only way that you get to form new habits, if that's part of your goal, the only way that you will get to reach a goal that you have not reached before is discomfort. You're running out of steam and you are thinking, is it worth it? Does it matter? Who cares? When you get to that point, that's the point at which if you haven't started drifting, you totally will. I have homeschooled my kids. My last child is in school. He started school in the 10th grade, but I've homeschooled him the whole time. And one of the things that I learned to watch out for was, um, a kid who is discouraged. Because if you keep getting the problem wrong and you keep making a bad grade on the test, you start thinking, why am I even trying? Because no matter what I do, no matter how hard I study, I'm still making a bad grade. And looking for ways to keep that kid encouraged so they keep going and keep learning— I don't want them to get stuck on one problem. I want them to keep going because math is not about the totality of one problem or one grade on a test or one homework assignment. It is about working through that problem so that you can keep going to keep learning and to keep growing. What happens with many of us is we get stuck on one problem. We get stuck on the 5 pounds we can't lose, or we get stuck on the challenging conversations that we keep having to have with our spouse, or we get stuck on, I still didn't get that promotion, why am I trying? We get stuck on mental health challenges that we can't believe we still haven't been able figure out. And what happens is we give up. We give up in the year or in the month. We say, okay, I'll start over next month. I'm, you know, I've messed up and I'm not gonna even give myself the effort of these last few weeks. And so we keep kicking the can down the road with where we're going. I know that most men, at least the men in my life, are all about a road trip where you get somewhere. They don't want to stop, they don't want to get out, they don't want to sightsee. They're like, can we please get where we're going? And every time I raise my hand and say, but there's this thing There's this billboard. Can we get off and see a cavern? Can we get off and tour this museum? It's discouraging because they are like, I'm trying to get somewhere. It is discouraging to you when you have a goal if you keep getting off. So my question is, why are you getting off? What's happening that's causing you to drift away from where you said you would go? One of the things that causes us all to get off is distraction. And I want to read to you this, a little paragraph from Chapter 5. Many of us live distracted because we live busy. Maria Popova, in her weekly literature review Brain Picking, says, I frequently worry that busyness is the greatest distraction from living. As we coast through our lives day by day, showing up for our obligations but being absent from ourselves, mistaking the doing for the being, distractions can seem so much more exciting than the rhythm of the everyday, the boredom of the expected, or the ongoing discipline to accomplish something worthwhile. But while distractions might seem to give you life, the reality is they can steal your life. I have a problem on my phone, y'all. I've got 5 pages of, of apps, and that's after consolidating some of those apps into groups. Then I'll tell you why I have a problem with the apps on my phone. It's because I have a challenge, and that challenge is commonly known as the Shiny App Syndrome. Somebody tells me, oh, I just downloaded this app. I'm like, oh, what app do you have? And then I go and download it, and then I have all these apps that keep me busy every time I go on my phone to do something that's meaningful, to distract me from doing something that's exciting. Many of you, many of, of us, we have shiny app syndrome in life. There are the things we have on our device, in our person, that are markedly what we're supposed to be spending our time doing. I am wired for connection. I am wired for connection with God. I'm wired for connection with humans, and I am wired to um, if I am connecting with God to hear from God so that I do what he wants me to do. But I have shiny app syndrome. I'm interested in doing what she's doing. I'm interested in accomplishing this goal over here. I'm interested in getting out of alignment with my goals because this would be more fun or this would be more enjoyable. I know that I have the goal of getting out of debt, but that outfit sure is cute. I know I have a goal of going back to school, but well, you know, there's this other thing that I'm interested in doing. I know that I have the goal of practicing the piano, or maybe I have the goal of going back and getting music lessons, but right now on Tuesday nights my friends are going skating, so maybe I'll start that in March. We have shiny app syndrome and we're distracted by the new thing or by the exciting thing. But if you are constantly distracted, in my case in this book, by the Hershey on the floor, or if you're distracted by the apps on your phone that keep you from working, or if you're distracted by the apps in real life in the form of what everybody else is doing, what everybody else is buying, or what everybody else is engaged in, you will never be engaged in the core of your journey, your destination, your work, your purpose, or your design. So I know that moving forward in your goal gets long, and I know it's uninteresting, and I know it can be boring, but you're deceiving yourself to think that you can get where you want to go if you keep getting off and taking detours. Now, this is the thing. The enemy wants you to detour. He wants you to detour, so he is the master distractor. But let me help you do some math. Here's what I want you to do. I want you to take your age and I want you to subtract it from the age that you would hope to be when you die. Realistically, don't tell me you want to live to be to 95 if everybody close to you died between 60 and 66. Okay, let's pick a realistic age. I want you to subtract that number. In my case, my mother lived to 70. I would love to say I'd live to 90. My, my grandparents lived, um, all to 80 or 97, 97 years of age, but my mom died at 70. So I'm gonna aim for past that. I'm gonna say, Lord, I'd like to live to be 92, 96, 98. But my mother didn't live that long unexpectedly. She was very healthy until she wasn't. So I'm gonna take 70 and I'm gonna subtract 53 from that. That gives me 17 years left. It's not a lot. I'm gonna multiply that times 365. That gives me 6,205 days. Seems like a lot, but I'm gonna divide that by 30 because that means I have a little over 200 months left. It's the month of February. If I were to put 200 slips of paper in a jar. Do you know how fast those are going to go? You have to be mindful of the time that you have because you don't have forever to get where you're going. If I left Dallas right now and said that I wanted to drive back to my alma mater, Texas A&M, and I stopped in Waco and got me some of that tea that they have in Waco, Alabama Tea Company, and if I got my favorite pizza at the Silos, and then if I wanted to go look at furniture, and then if I sat down in that their coffee house, which is so great, I love their coffee house. And then, oh Lord, don't put me in the pen store. If I leave with 3 hours to get to Texas A&M but I spend 2 hours at Magnolia, I'm not going to get there. I have used some of my time, um, to get to my destination by stopping along the way. Now it's a good stop, ain't nobody mad at Magnolia. However, it's a stop that takes away my time. And if I have only a little over— 206 months to be exact— left, then every time I hit the beginning of the month. And every time I set my goals, and every time I say another 10,000 words, make sure you have a plan for one of your grandchildren and spend time with them, and oh, by the way, make sure that you create your budget because your resources are limited and you want to spend that well— if I don't do that, I may not get to a financial plan, uh, and a financial setup that I actually want to have and that I want to leave for my kids. Every day and every month you take an exit, you're not going to get where you want to go, and you deceive yourself, or you become desensitized because because you're so used to getting off and getting back on, you think that getting off and getting back on means you'll make it. No, you can exit and get back on all day long, and it take you too long to get where you wanted to go. Hey there, I hope you're enjoying this, and I hope you're getting the encouragement that you need right now. Listen, I would love to encourage you, not just on this screen or in your ear, and not just in this year, 2025. I'm already thinking about how I want to encourage you in 2026. And how do I want to do it there? I'd love for you to join me on the first Sister Circle cruise. We're going to take off and hit the DR, the PR, and a little bit of the Caribbean islands the last week of April next year. So if you're interested in joining me for a great vacation and to be on a boat with at least a few other women who love God and who have the same mindset, who are like-minded, go check it out. thesistercircle.com/cruise. There's discomfort in staying on the road, but in Philippians 3:10, the Bible says— and it starts at verse 7— whatever things, Paul said, are a gain to me, I count everything for loss. Why? He says in verse 10, because I want to know him, and I want to know the power of his resurrection, and I want to have the fellowship of his sufferings, even if that requires me being conformed to his death. That is like saying, because I want power like God had power, I want to know him, and he was uncomfortable even to the point of having to die to himself. He didn't want to go on the cross. He said, God, Father, not my will but yours. But if Jesus had to die to himself, if he had to be uncomfortable, but that gave him power to move away from dead things. I want that power. So anything that takes me away from that power, I count it as a loss. I'm not gonna be able to do that, and I'm gonna— here's the thing, y'all— I'm gonna feel it as a loss. Sometimes I think we get, we get messed up because I, I think we feel like the loss is an indication that we shouldn't separate ourselves from the things we want. That feeling of loss has become synonymous with, well, I should have it. Doesn't God want me to have good things? Doesn't And you want me to enjoy my life? What if that symbol and signal and feeling of loss was actually the indication that you're staying on the road? What if that's the feeling you want? Because the problem comes when we get off, when we unpack and we stay too long. The reason why you aren't where you want to be is because you got off and you camped, you got off and you glamped, you got off and you found a good hotel and you settled in and enjoyed the city. When that was never where you were going. So you drifted, that's fine, but you didn't get back on. There's nothing wrong with taking a rest. I've been sending emails, um, about being in rest, and, and actually, I want to make sure that you get those emails if you haven't. So one of the ways to make sure you get those emails is to make sure you're subscribed to my email list, because I'll be sending an invitation to get that mini A course of rest, okay? And I also want you to make sure you're on my email list because in my emails I'm going to be putting in this, which is going to tell you, are you awake? Are you falling asleep and drifting at the wheel? It's a little quiz I want to give you. But resting is not the goal. Moving in rest is. So when you get off to take a break and that stops you from moving, if that gets you off of the road of where God asks you to go, then you are settling in and you're wasting time. The feeling of loss, the feeling of, oh my goodness, this is hard, the feeling of surely this can't be the way— sometimes that is exactly the feeling that indicates you're in the right spot. Because what do you want? You want power. Why do you want it? Because you want to separate yourself, rise above what everybody else is doing. It doesn't feel good. If you want to be financially secure, if you want to walk in wealth, because God says in the word that we're supposed to be the lender not the borrower. If you want that, that means you're gonna have to separate yourself from how everybody else spends their money. Most people that I find that, uh, have excellent money habits, they live on— especially if they're in a two-income household— they live on half of what they make, so that if one person goes down, they're still good. They don't buy the house that they had to stretch to afford. They buy the house that one of them could afford, so that they still can take the vacations, they still can save money. And if one person loses their job, they're not afraid. But that means being uncomfortable. That, that means saying no to the things you want to buy. That means saying no to the trips that you want to take. That means saying no to the adventures that you want to have. Often you want to be separate financially, you're going to have to feel the pain of, I want that, but I'm telling myself no. You want to be separate healthily, you want to have a body that can carry you into the plans that God has for you, okay? That means you're gonna have to separate yourself. That is the pang of, I want that dessert, but I'm gonna say no. And you literally are looking at everybody else around the table and saying, oh, that looks so good, but you are separating yourself from the pain of, I want that. It, it's not comfortable. That means if you choose to do things in your life to get your body in order, you ought to want what you're saying no to. The pain of discomfort you count as a loss because you want power. If you want abundant life like John 10:10 talks about, that means you're going to have to say no. It comes because you're choosing to lose to gain power. But I want to give you some tools that you can use to jump start, to reinvigorate, to shock yourself into back on the road. Okay, I want you to shock yourself because habits, if you don't already know, it takes more than 21 days. The average is 66. It's more like 2 to 3 months to carve out new pathways your brain to do new things. Habits are basically automations. We live in the land of automations, and automations say this happens when I'm not thinking about it. But if you want to build that up, you have to create new pathways. And automations, even in my world, uh, in my content creation world, when we're making sequences in ConvertKit and making sure that if you put your name in here, you get all these emails, that those automations take time to build. Now, once they're built, they run, but you have to take the time to pause to build it. Okay, I want to talk to you about what, uh, an intervention is. Okay, so an intervention is when you talk to someone about their struggle or addiction or their current pattern and you ask them to move towards treatment. You ask them to move towards help. You ask them to, uh, to move towards a solution that on their own they are not uh, they're not choosing. You don't argue, you don't yell, you don't make them feel bad, you don't vent your anger. It is simply about hosting or holding an event by people who care, family or friends, to a person who's struggling to say, hey, we love you, but you have a problem. Now, you can't force them to do anything, but you can say, come out of hiding, stop hide— stop operating in shame. We see you and we know what's happening, and we're going to ask you to do something drastic to change your course. One of the girls in the, uh, inner— well, she was an intern last year, uh, Kiafa. She was showing me how she gets her planner, um, the 2025 planner that, by the way, yeah, yeah, we sold out of it. You can get a digital copy, but this is it. And she was saying it's working. She said no planner before has worked. Now, as much as I would love to claim that it's the planner Um, there are other reasons why it's worked, and I'll get to that in a minute, but she did decide to pause and make a plan. I put together a whole playlist on my YouTube channel. It's called the Dream Builders Workshop, where I take you daily through a journey of giving your space— your, yourself time and space to think about what it is that you want, and then walking you through how you set up a plan. So number one is Kiyafa planned. And she sent me a video to say, I'm still planning, I'm still planning. You do have to have a plan. You do have to know where you're going. If you don't have a plan— if you said, I want to lose weight, I want to save money, I want to get a degree, I want to, I want to meet and marry my spouse, I'm trying to make sure I declutter my house— if you have a goal and you don't have a plan, you're not going to get there. So your first interruption is make space to plan. I don't care whose planner you have. But the second part of the interruption is what makes this work for Kiafa and what will make it work for you. You need accountability in the places, the people, or the things that set you up for success. A planner is a thing. It's a thing. Your lists are a thing. Your habits are a thing. So you want to have the things in place, but a lot of times those things don't work well if you don't also get your place together, your environment, and your people together. So one of the things that she has done is she's planning in community. So they meet every week and they share their goals, and every month we have what we call check-in circles. And those check-in circles are designed for women to get together and talk about their goals. We share our top 3 because something happens when you write it down, something happens when you share it, and something happens when somebody sees you and says, hey, I see you, you're holding and hosting an intervention for yourself. I see where I'm going, and I need a plan. I need a plan, a goal, and a plan that goes with that. And then I'm going to put that plan in a place of accountability. I'm going to make sure I have what I need to plan— a notebook, a pen, a journal, whatever. I have the people that I'm engaged with, and then I have a place. You've got to set yourself up for success. So what do I mean by that? If you're going to plan, that planner, that notebook, that spot at your kitchen table, that chair in your living room, it needs to inviting. You need to have a setup where you can write. You need to make sure that you have set your alarm, that the space— the place is clear. The intervention for yourself means saying, what do I need in place to move this forward? Let me give you another example. If you say you're wanting to lose weight but it hasn't been working out, okay, so have you hosted an intervention for yourself? Have you hosted an interruption for yourself? Do you have a plan? Did you pick something? Are you set up with accountability? Do you have the things you need? Is the stuff you're supposed to be eating in the house? Do you have community around it? Because community matters. Is your environment set up? Because I can guarantee you, if those Oreo Thins are still in the back— don't ask me how I know— in a Ziploc bag, even though you're hiding them from the kids, you know where they are. You are not set up for success. And I know you paid for that, and I know that it would be traumatic, but going to get those and throwing them in the trash, that is an intervention. That is an interruption. Community says, I go to the Weight Watchers group because That is my weekly interruption. Community says I get on the scale and I share my weight with somebody, or I meet somebody at the gym. That is an intervention. The gym is an interruption. A class that you take— these are the things that you put in your life to keep you from falling away. So let me give you some other things. You need a plan, you need accountability, and you need some disruptions in your life. If your basic plan is not enough of a bolster and an interruption The reason why it's so difficult to stick new habits is because your brain is wired to old patterns, and sometimes you have to shock yourself awake. When I am waking up my children, if I come and gently say, you know, my gentle parenting voice, good morning, happy Monday, don't you have to be at school? Okay, are you gonna wake up? I may try that the first time. If I come back the second time, I'm not coming like that. I'm flipping on lights, I'm pulling back sheets, okay? I am blasting the music because what I trying to do? I'm trying to jolt you awake. I'm trying to get you out of your current rhythm. This is what— this is what you have to do for yourself, okay? An alarm is nothing more than something that jolts you awake, because if you were getting enough sleep and if you had trained your circadian rhythms, you'd get up on your own. I wake up every morning at 5 AM. You want to know why? Because years ago I was training for a marathon. I woke up every morning at 4:10 to be dressed by 4:25 to leave home at 4:30 so I could meet my running group at 5. Because I had a plan and because I had accountability, I set up a disruption not just in getting up with my alarm, but to my whole schedule. And you want to know what I have now? A habit of waking up at 5. This needs to be something that jolts your system awake. Break. We know about fasting. If you didn't know, fasting is a way to not only give your system a rest, your physical digestion system a rest, but it also, after a minute, starts shocking your system. Your body will actually, when you fast, depending on how long you fast, start eating itself for fuel. It cleans itself. Your body is a self-cleaning mechanism that when you give yourself a break from doing its job of digesting food a fast wakes certain things up. It takes me about the third morning on a fast, whether I'm doing a juice fast or a water fast or fasting from sugar or carbs or salt, like something that I'm used to being in my diet— there's all different kinds of fasts— but about the third day, my brain starts waking up. And what do I mean by that? It works easier, it works better. It's like getting all the, the junk— it's like changing your oil. It makes your engine run smoother, but that's a disruption. It's a disruption. And all of a sudden, the sugar that I've been craving, or the carbs that I've been craving, or the salt that I've been craving, or even a little shrinking in my stomach, the amount of food that I'm wanting to eat, that disruption causes me to approach food differently. Sometimes in order to reach your goal that you have a plan for, that you have accountability for, you need a disruption. Now, I don't want the disruption to send you off. You need guardrails to that. But the question you should ask yourself is, what's the disruption? Last summer we had Summer of Sisters and we did a 21-day financial fast, and we asked everyone to set a goal. And for 21 days, it was a disruption. Say no to the thing that you're not going to do. Say no to the thing that you're not going to spend money on so you can get your finances in control. There are, uh, there's a love dare, right? People have done that as a disruption in their marriages. I had a friend that one time set a goal and she said, for 30 days I'm not going to say one critical thing to my husband. Let me tell you why then that was a habit that she kept, because she realized that in the absence of criticism and in the abundance of encouragement, the temperature in her marriage changed. Now she couldn't do that one day at a time. She had to like shut it off, shut off the valve, fast from it. In order for you to get out of the rhythm that you've been in, you've drifted away, in order for you to change the narrative I'm gonna need you to get comfortable with being uncomfortable. I'm gonna need you to say discomfort is the road that leads to power. I'm gonna need you to say the abundant life I want and the power that I desire is going to come at a cost of me having an action plan. And that action plan literally means have a goal and set a plan. Get my planner, somebody's planner, a notebook, a spiral notebook, something. Write that stuff down. You're going to need accountability. Because you will veer, you will drift. That is the plight of the human condition. And you do need the places and people and things intact to help you stay on track. But when you know that you've been struggling— this is what a disruption looks like on a road trip. It was my daddy looking at us and say, did everybody use the bathroom? Get out. And he made an announcement because we're not stopping until 3 hours from now. And he would tell us, when we stop, we're going to get Chick-fil-A or McDonald's or whatever the case would have But he prepared us, get out, use the bathroom, stretch your legs, because I'm not stopping again. And we knew that he meant that. And because he put the fear of God in us, we did what we had to do, and then we got back in the car. It is time for you to get back in the car, to set your plan clearly if you didn't have one, to get the things that you need for accountability in place. You're going to have to be naked and a little ashamed if you want people to see you and know where you really are.. And then you need to have some planned resets. Fast once a month, pick a day. It's good for your spiritual life, it's good for your body. If you know that you have the tendency to get off course with your money, choose a time that you need to set the budget and put your budget meeting on the calendar. Like, these are disruptions, interruptions that will keep you on track. Now, if you failed, I want to pick you up before I end, okay? Let me give you some examples of failure with people who are very successful with their Simone Biles is reported to be one of the most decorated gymnasts in world champion history. She has, uh, the most world gold medals. But y'all, in 2011, she didn't make the U.S. Women's Junior National Team. She just didn't make it. And in an interview with Sports Illustrated, she said that that loss encouraged her to train harder. If you're feeling like you're at a loss, this is an invitation for you to train harder. Sha'Carri Richardson— she made history in 2023 after winning the women's 100-meter at the Track and Field World Championships in Budapest. But y'all, some of us have forgotten that, uh, she failed to qualify in 2022 in the World Athletic Championships. And, and not only that, but she was given a 30-day suspension and therefore unable to participate in the 2021 Tokyo Olympics. But those failures didn't stop her from getting back in and competing. She went on, and when she came back, she beat Florence Griffith-Joyner's 35-year-old 100-meter dash. J.K. Rowling, she's the author of the Harry Potter series. She was rejected 12 times before that manuscript made its hand into a publisher's hand that was willing to work with her. Not only that, it's now a billion-dollar franchise. Not only that, but she had to use her last welfare checks, y'all, to print her own manuscript to shop it around. You don't stop, you keep going. Steven Spielberg, we all know who he is. He has directed so many Oscar-winning, winning films. Films and cult classics alike. But y'all, when he was an amateur child filmmaker, he did not impress the film school at the University of Southern California. In fact, the school reportedly rejected him 3 times. He didn't have a degree, but that did not deter Universal Studios from ultimately hiring him, making him one of the youngest directors back in the '60s, according to his biography. Later, he did get an honorary degree from that same university in '94. Now he's trustee of that same university in 1996. As of 1996, my invitation to you today is to keep going, but to keep going, and maybe you have to do some things that jolt you awake. What would jolt you awake that would so shock your system that would cause you to hyperfocus on what's important? When I reached for that Hershey bar and found myself in the middle of the road drifting off the freeway, when I was sitting, y'all, in the median praising God that I didn't go on the other side of the freeway and get hit by oncoming traffic. I did not have a problem staying awake for the rest of that ride. When I pulled over a few exits down and realized that my car was on fire, y'all, I had to— it's a whole— that's a whole nother story. But I remember thinking when I finally got back to school, I could have blown up on the freeway. And that caused a shift in the way I looked at my journey in school. School. God saved my life twice on the same road trip. So am I gonna waste this opportunity that I have to be in school and finish my degree? No, I think not. What would cause you to wake your system up so that you quit wasting time? Get your plan, get your accountability in place. But when you realize that you are drifting off, have a plan for a reset, a disruption, a guardrail so that you quickly get back online to stay on track to reach your goals. Because it doesn't matter how often you've fallen off. If you want to win that medal, finish that degree, get that book out into the world, have the dream that you have in terms of your career, don't let where you failed, where other people have failed you, or where other people have said you're not welcome here, Determine what you can do.