Take Inventory - Thrive 2024 - Day 4

I want you to know that taking inventory is this idea of looking at your life. Now, in my book, She's Still There, I talked about gaining a new perspective on your life, looking at your G.A.I.N., your gifts, your abilities, your interests, and your nature, your personality, like your God-given design, and gaining a perspective on you because you're looking at you. Taking inventory involves looking at you, but it also involves looking at your circumstances, where you are in life, what's going on in the spheres of your life. It's about looking at, um, and taking inventory and asking yourself questions. And here's what I realized. I love asking questions. So I have a podcast. I like interviewing people, asking the hard questions, asking the things that are almost like across the line, but nobody has asked them yet, or at least not that I've heard. And I want to get them to tell me their deepest, darkest secrets and for us to have a moment because I want us to learn from each other. And some people off the top don't answer those deep questions and you have to dig a little bit. And questions are my thing. Here's what I realized, because my parents always said, you always have questions. My grandmother always said, she's always got a question. Why is she always asking questions? She always wants to know stuff. And then I realized questions are my gift. And here's what I also realized. We don't all know how to ask ourselves questions. And if you don't know how to ask yourself questions, then you're probably not that good at taking inventory of your life. That's okay. That's why we have books and speakers and therapists and counselors and good friends. What I'm going to do for you, cuz I love ya, is I'm going to go ahead and give you, um, some questions that you could ask yourself as a part of your life. So you might want to watch this, listen to it, jot them down, watch this again, um, just to run through some things that might get you going. Okay, you want to think about in your, in, in your life when you take inventory, you want to think about the areas of your life that you care about, that matter, or that you need to stop caring about, because if you don't start caring about them, uh, it's going to be a problem. Okay? And if you don't care about it and think about it, then your life will just go. Your time, which is your hottest and highest value commodity, you will waste if you don't slow down and take an inventory of your life. All right, let's talk about taking inventory. Let's talk about work. Do I like my job? Do I feel energized by my job? Do I want to change my job? Do I get praised for what I do? Am I operating in my gifting? Am I, um, constantly drained? What is my inner— what are my energy levels saying to me? Am I energized by being in my job and around the people I work with? Am I coming home every day drained? Like, these are the things that can tell you to take inventory of the work that I'm going to do. Because y'all, we spend too much time working to not be in the right job. Okay, now if you're 22 and you're on your first job, you're probably not gonna like it that much. Just stick with it. Just put in your time. You're going to learn something. Take it with you. So another thing is when you're thinking about what you want to do for work, it's like, what do you not do well? Because sometimes people will give you a job because you're there. You're there. You're like the body. Okay? You're like the body. They're like, you can do this. And you need to be able to communicate if you don't want to leave your job or leave your careers and say, you know what, listen, I don't think this is my zone of genius. I enjoy this. I'm good at this. This energizes me. I can do this. But if you want work to give you life, and if you're going to spend most of your life working, it should give you life if possible, if possible. And I know sometimes we have to do things to make our work something we enjoy. We have to take inventory and say, I hate what my current education level or current exposure level gives me to do. Right? There's nothing wrong with working at McDonald's. But if you decide, you know what, I don't want to work at McDonald's anymore. I want to work at Chick-fil-A. Well, let me tell you what Chick-fil-A is going to need you to do. Chick-fil-A is going to need you to have a my pleasure kind of demeanor. And if you're a person that don't like to talk to people, and if you don't like to smile, you're going to have to work on that to get a job at Chick-fil-A. So if you're like, I don't actually like working at McDonald's. This is not— while I don't mind serving up the burgers and the fries, these are not my people. I feel like the Chick-fil-A people are my people. When you take inventory and say, I think that I need to be around an environment that has more levity, then you may have to say that I've got to work on smiling. You see what I'm saying? Taking inventory says, am I in the right place? Relationships is another area you can take inventory of. All right, um, you can talk about romantic relationships, platonic relationships, relationships with your parents, with your children, uh, with your cousins and them, mama and them, uh, with your neighbors. Like, when you think about your relational life, right, the plane on which you live. Take inventory. Do I have enough people in my life? Do I have too many people in my life? Are the people that are in my life— am I for them and are they for me? Is everybody in my life people that I'm pouring out to, they're sucking the blood out of me, and I actually am not giving the time to friends that feed me too? Like, what is happening in my people atmosphere? Taking inventory of your life, because if you want to thrive in this season, you need to be well-placed relationally. And if you're not, then that's a signal of something that you need to do? That's a part of the choice. We'll get to that in just a second. Your emotional self. Are you just always just not happy? Like, always not happy? Are you sick of hearing yourself complain because nothing is ever right? Uh, have you constantly been in a state of straight-faced sad tears? And of course, if grief is a part of your recent story, of course you're going to be crying. But I'm saying like, okay, here's the deal. If you have to say Am I okay emotionally? I'm not sure. You need to go get that checked out. You know, you know how we will feel little pangs and little things and we'll dismiss them, but there's a point at which, you know, in your body something's not quite right. And you know, I need to probably go get that checked out. Okay. Your emotional life. Do you always feel bad? Are you feeling pretty good? Um, are you, uh, do you laugh sometimes? Not all the time, but sometimes. When is the last time you had a good cry? Because if you're not crying or getting mad every now and then, you need to handle it right. But the full spectrum of emotion needs to be free to live in you and to be displayed at inappropriate times and inappropriate, and inappropriate ways. So this is it. These are examples. I pull these examples from Psychology Today that says this is how you take inventory of your life. Uh, personal inventory though can involve other, well, other things. Um, it can involve, are you resenting anyone or anything right now? That's a great question to ask you. Ask yourself. You can ask yourself a personal inventory. What are the people in my life saying about me? Like, one of the things that people in my life are saying a lot about me right now is I've got a lot going on, which I do. But if everybody starts saying that, then the question I have to say— like, this is taking inventory— do I have too much? Is it too much? Is this— am I operating in my God-given capacity? And, um, Is that an honor for people to say that to me, or am I operating past my capacity and doing more than what God has asked me to do? That's taking inventory. There's no right or wrong answer. The only wrong answer is a dishonest answer. The right answer is the honest answer. And this is not like rocket science. Like even AA, Alcoholics Anonymous, for step 4, they take a personal inventory. It's a big part of drug and alcohol recovery. And I want to share this quote with you that I found, um, on a site that was sharing the AA steps. It says, taking a fearless moral inventory of yourself helps you get at the root of the issue. It's not about fixing everything all at once. Did you hear that? You don't have to fix everything. Inventory does not mean these are my to-dos. All of them at once today. All right. Instead, taking self-inventory helps you realize— here it comes— that you can't change the past, but you can equip and strengthen yourself for the future. Another way that you can take personal inventory of yourself is by taking personality tests. I'm a big proponent of StrengthFinders. Um, StrengthFinders, love StrengthFinders. Myers-Briggs, DISC, the DISC, There's so many different ones, but you doing these personality tests, what it does is it will— it's not that they prescribe who you are. What they do is give you language. They give you language. So if I say I'm a high D, which I am, what does that mean on the DiSC? What does it mean to have a dominant personality? What does that mean when I work with people who are not dominant, you know, who are S's or More I's. How does their— you know, what does that mean? How do I interact with those people? It gives you language. So when you're taking inventory of who you are, what you love, your zone of genius, the personality tests just help to turn on the light with things you know intrinsically about yourself, but that help you to take inventory so that you have language to communicate that in your marriage, with your friends, in your place of work. So I highly encourage you to pick up StrengthFinders or take a test of DiSC. Take the DISC, Myers-Briggs or DISC, and there's a million personality tests. And honestly, it doesn't really matter which one. Just go online and Google free personality test. I go to Amazon and grab StrengthFinders. It'll help. It'll help you. An interest inventory. What do you love? Like in this season of your life, what is bringing you joy? Like what did you enjoy? Was it cooking more at home, spending more time with your nuclear family? Did you enjoy getting back to reading? So many people have gotten back to hobbies of knitting or crocheting, taking inventory where he says, I want to thrive. So what do I love? You can talk about, of course, your spiritual health. How are you in Jesus? Like, are you reading the Bible? Like, really? Like, I know you're listening to the sermons, and every church in America is online now. And then if they weren't online, then they've got a podcast. I mean, there's a million things you can do to be fed the word of God and scriptural principles without cracking open your Bible. But are you actually cracking— how's your prayer life? Are you talking to Jesus? Like when everybody's looking at you and thinking that you're talking out to yourself and you might be losing it a little bit. Okay, who cares? Are you doing it? Are you talking to him before you talk to everybody else? How's your spiritual health? How's your intellectual health? How's your— how are you doing mentally? Are you reading? Are you growing? Are you developing? Um, no pressure, but take inventory. Do I want to be— what am I leaving on the table? What have I left on the table for the last year and a half that I want to bring back? Of course, friendships and finances is another one. How's your money? Is it funny? Did COVID teach you what you could live without? Don't let the new season— take inventory. How are you doing? Are you working without getting your nails done every week? And you realized after you soaked them bad boys off, you didn't need them anyway. Maybe, maybe not for everybody, but maybe for you. You say, I'm taking inventory, and I'm saying, actually, This was really good for me not to be spending my discretionary income in that way. I might continue with that. Taking inventory says, how am I doing with my money? Home and organization, taking inventory of that. Are you organized? Did you get rid of some of the piles? Did you create piles because you were home all the time? Okay, so do you see what taking inventory is? When there's a turn, when you're moving at the speed of light and there's a turn on the track, it's a lot more difficult to make that turn and stay alive than if you make that turn at a healthy speed. And what we are being thrown here in this season of our lives, y'all, is we are experiencing one of the greatest turns of our life. And if you try to take this turn going 100 miles an hour, that's not a safe way to do it. So that's why you need to slow down. Okay. So I hope that this idea of taking inventory has given you something to think about. It's basically slowing down and then making room to ask yourself hard, honest questions and to tell yourself the hard, honest truth. Now that the world is opening back up, what feels overwhelming or too much? What do you wish you could be doing or keep doing that now you don't seem to have the time to do?