When Fighting A Bad Habit, Don’t Resist It & Try This Instead | Rick Warren

Life is too important to waste your life. He says, when I fight, I fight to win. To get past it, you gotta go through it. That's true in so many areas, but it's particularly true with failure. The way you think affects the way you feel, and the way you feel affects the way you behave. If you want to change the way you act, you start back here with your thoughts. No matter what you do, somebody's not going to like you. No matter, you cannot please everybody.

He's an American evangelical Christian pastor and author. He's the founder and senior pastor of the Saddleback Church, the 8th largest church in America. His book, "The Purpose Driven Life," has had sales of over 30 million copies, making him a New York Times bestselling author. He's Rick Warren, and here's my take on his top 10 rules of success. And as always, guys, as you're watching the videos, if you hear something that really resonates with you, Please leave it down in the comments below and put quotes around it so other people can be inspired as well. Also, as you are writing something down, it's much more likely to stick in your head too. Enjoy.

I'm not just playing around. I'm not just beating the air. I'm not shadowboxing. I'm not just goofing off. Life is too important to waste your life. He says, when I fight, I fight to win. I wanna win in my marriage, I wanna win in my finances, I wanna win in my career, I wanna win in my spiritual growth, I wanna win in my character. I don't fight to place, I fight to win. You see, every time you make a decision, what we're talking about here is clarifying your values. Every single time you make a decision, You are basing it on unspoken values. You have a grid in your mind. You've never even thought about this most likely, but you have a set of values in your mind and every time you make a decision, I'm gonna do this and not do that, I'm gonna buy this and not buy that, I'm gonna spend my time and effort and energy on this and not on that, you are showing your hidden values. The problem is most people have never figured out what they are, where they came from, and whether they're valid or not. So really the secret to success is clarifying your values. This is a skill you need to learn. What is valuable to me and what is not valuable? Every time you make a decision, you reveal your values. My question is, do you know where your values came from? Are they, how are they working out? Is your life working out with those values? Do you know where you picked them up? Are they working for you? Your values in life determine your stress, determine your success, and determine your salvation. Now, you may not realize this, but your values could be causing stress in your life. Unclear values cause confusion. They cause confusion in your life. Conflicting values in your life cause tension. Unclear cause confusion. Conflicting values cause tension. False values create deception. And the wrong values create dysfunction. There's not a single guy who's ever learned how to play football by reading a manual on it. Not one. It's no, let's just go out and start throwing me some passes. Let's go out and shoot some hoops. Let's go out and then play catch. Let's go out and drive some golf balls. You learn by doing. And when there's a problem in your car, say, let me get under the hood here, I'll figure it out. Here's the carburetor and all. No, no, no, I don't need a manual. What do you think, I'm a man. Just let me play around here. Or you say, you know, I've got 50 wires coming into this audio system and I need to figure out how to, I don't need a manual, I'll just play around with it. I'll figure out how to install this app. I'll figure out how to boot up this computer. And you just do it by doing it. You learn by doing. You don't make excuses for the failure, you grieve it. You feel the pain. You don't brush it off, you don't downplay it. You feel the pain and you don't rush to feel better. Now listen, this is a principle of life I'm about to tell you. To get past it, you gotta go through it. That's true in so many areas, but it's particularly true with failure. To get past your failure, that failure in your life, you gotta go through it. You can't go around your failure, you can't go over your failure, you can't go under your failure, you can't ignore your failure. You need to grieve the failure. You need to feel the pain. Now we don't like feeling bad, but grief is a good thing. Grief is the way we get through the failure and grief is the way we learn the lessons. So often we wanna just, when we fail, we wanna just forget it, push it aside, stuff our emotions, and then immediately go to the next thing. When you stuff your emotions, when you swallow your emotions, your stomach keeps score. It's kinda like what if you took a can of Coke and you shook it up for a long time and then you put it in the freezer? What's gonna happen to it? It's gonna explode eventually. It's gonna come out sideways. And this happens in your life when you don't deal with your emotions properly. This is why sometimes 6 months after failure, a marriage falls apart. Or 6 months after somebody gets laid off work, there's another problem. There's a physical health problem, things like this. Because you've shaken up the can and you've got all these emotions feeling inside of shame and regret and fear and insecurity and all the things that come with failure and you're not dealing with them. And so you shake it up and you say, we're just gonna put this in the refrigerator and try to forget about it and we're gonna freeze it and it's gonna explode and it's gonna come out sideways in an affair or in wrong behavior or in impulsivity or an addiction or all kinds of other things. I have seen this thousands of times. In people's lives. You don't minimize it, you don't rush to feel better. To get past your failure, you've gotta go through the failure. Examine your own conduct. And what you do is you look and you say, what was I good at at each stage in my life? And what did I enjoy doing at each stage in my life? Here are the two things. I'm good at it and I enjoy doing it. Now, there's some things that you're good at and you don't enjoy, don't worry about that, okay? And there's some things, by the way, that you enjoy and you're not good at. I mean, many of you don't know that before I was a pastor, I was a worship leader. I played guitar and drums all my life, had garage bands all the time growing up, junior high, high school, and college, and I actually started off leading worship because I have a passion and I love I loved to sing. The only problem was nobody liked to listen to it. So I loved to do it, but I wasn't good at it. And I didn't have the skills for that. So the key thing is to say, what am I good at and what do I love to do? And I want you to look for patterns in your life. Because if you were good at it at an early age, you're gonna be good at it later on in life. A kid who's good as a soccer player at 10 is gonna be a good and even better soccer player at 20. That when you learn what it really means to be gentle, the world's yours. I mean, it's your apple. It's, you're in charge. It's not driving you, you're driving it. Now, in our hard-driving, ego-driven world, market-driven culture, you don't hear a whole lot about gentleness. And the reason why is we don't understand what it really means to be gentle. We think gentleness means weakness, and God says absolutely not. The gentle are the strongest people on the planet, and the earth the world will be theirs. It's the weak people who are arrogant. It's the weak people who are prideful. It's the weak people who are pushy and rude and mean and gossip. Those are weak people. He said the truly strong people in life are the gentle and the world will be theirs. Now I take Monday off. Monday is my Sabbath. I don't like taking Monday off 'cause I don't like feeling that bad on my day off. But I find that I need to to recharge. And on Mondays, I am dead to the world. I do not take calls. I do not read email. I do not take text messages. I sleep in. I get up. I play around the house. I go to lunch with my wife. We relax in the afternoon. And Monday evenings, we do family night with our families, who I now have grandkids that are involved. And we've kept that religiously. We've kept that faithfully over the years, and it has kept me from burning out under enormous pressure. How would you like to pastor a church where you move the church building 79 times in the first 13 years?

I did.

Because land was so expensive, we used 79 different facilities in the first 13 years. Some weeks I'd be in 5 different buildings. Laguna Hills High School for Sunday morning, El Toro High School Sunday evening, a bank building for Wednesday, another one on Thursday, a Saturday night service at another school, and on and on. We said, we're the church, if you can figure out where we are this week, you get to come. We said, we only want our church for really intelligent people, so we keep changing the location. But that was a lot of frustration. And I can tell you, I have learned to handle enormous amounts of stress and enormous amounts of tension, but I could not do it if I didn't rest my body, if I didn't take my day off, if I didn't— and don't call it your day off, call it your Sabbath. Call it your day off, you'll fill it with your honey-do list. All the stuff I couldn't get done, you try to use it to catch up on other stuff. No, it is a day of rest, relaxation, relationships, restoration emotionally. So you need to rest your body. So forget what can't be changed and focus on the future. Until you learn to do this, you're going to be unhappy much of your life because you hold on to the habits and you hold on to the hurts and the hang-ups and you hold on to the grief and the guilt and the grudges, and that causes so much unhappiness in your life. You gotta let it go. Are you focusing all your energies? You have a limited amount of energy. You don't have unlimited energy. You know that, that's why you get tired, that's why you get fatigued, why you get worn out. You don't have unlimited energy. Since you don't have unlimited energy, I highly suggest you don't waste any of it on something that you can't change in the past. Why in the world would you give one more second of emotional energy to something that is never going to change? It's done. It's over. It's finished. Your past is past. You got to let it go. Don't waste it. Your consciousness is the way you talk to yourself. Oh, good. Your consciousness is the story you tell yourself. Remember when I was talking earlier about autopilot?

Yes.

I can tell you your autopilot. Finish this sentence 10 times. It's just like me to be. And I'll tell you your autopilot. It's just like me to be lazy. It's just like me to be late. It's just like me. That is your autopilot. Now, the story we tell ourselves is the fourth factor that influences us. The Bible says, as a man thinks in his heart— So he is. So he is. And so you have to change your autopilot. Now let me tell you how to do this. All of us have things we want to change in our lives. The way you think affects the way you feel, and the way you feel affects the way you behave. If you want to change the way you act, you start back here with your thoughts. If I'm acting depressed, it's because I feel depressed. And if it's— I feel depressed, it's because I'm choosing to think depressed thoughts. You can't change a feeling. but you can change a thought. You tell a little kid, stop, be happy. I'm trying, Daddy. You can't force a feeling, okay? You can't force a feeling, but you can change the thought that is creating the feeling. Now here's a real important thing about temptation, and I've shared this with a lot of people, it's helped a lot of people. When we have a, when you have a habit, or I have a habit that I don't like, and I'm being tempted to go to this habit over and over and over, The key to changing a habit is not to resist it, but to replace it. Not to resist, but refocus. If a guy's having a problem with pornography and he's watching TV, he doesn't just say, "No, I don't want this, I don't want this." He just flips the channel. The moment you change the channel, the temptation loses its power on you. Do not Listen, here's a pastor telling this. Do not resist temptation.

Do not resist temptation.

And let me tell you why. Says the pastor. Yeah, let me tell you why. What you resist persists. But, 'cause the whole time you're focused on it. What you need to do is just change your focus, and this is taking your conscious and saying, I'm gonna renew my mind, I'm gonna think on these things. Whatsoever things are pure and lovely and, of good report. I'm going to think about good things.

And that's how—

be transformed by the renewing, by the renewing of your mind. It's not saying— when I was a little kid, Oprah, my mom would bake chocolate chip cookies at night, and I'd walk and stand up at the kitchen table, and my mom would say, now Ricky, don't, don't you eat those chocolate chip cookies because dinner's coming. And I said, I'm not, Mom, I'm just looking. Whatever gets your attention gets you. Yes. So if you want to break a habit, you just refocus, and that's the renewing of your mind. Put your mind on the right thing. No matter what you do, somebody's not going to like you. No matter— you cannot please everybody. You can't please everybody all the time, or even part of the time. Uh, so here's the thing I would say to you: you don't need other people's approval to be happy. Now that's an important thing. We think if I can just get everybody to love me, I'll be happy. No, first you're never gonna do it. And if, like, some of you have been trying to get your parents' approval, and they're like dead, or they're elderly, and if you haven't got it by now, you're not gonna get it. But here's the thing, you don't need it. You don't need anybody else's approval to be happy.

Thank you guys so much for watching. I made this video because Eric Coleman asked me to. So if there's a famous entrepreneur that you want me to profile next, leave it down in the comments below and I'll see what I can do. I'd also love to know what did you learn from Rick today that had the biggest impact on you? What lesson did you really absorb that you're going to immediately apply to your life or business somehow? Please leave it down in the comments and I'm gonna join in the discussion. Finally, I want to give a quick shout out to Judy. Judy, thank you so much for picking up a copy of my book. Your One Word. I really appreciate your support and that picture that you posted on Instagram as well. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you so much. So thank you guys again for watching. I believe in you. I hope you continue to believe in yourself and whatever your one word is. Much love, I'll see you soon.

Knowing how to recognize what's important and what's not important. I can't tell you how important this skill is and how few people have it. To look at a situation and go, that's important, that's not. That matters, that doesn't matter. That's valuable, that's not valuable. This is crucial, that's not crucial. Leaders know what's important and they focus on that and they forget everything else. Successful people know what matters and don't worry about what doesn't matter. Paul says, this one thing I do, not these 40 things I dabble in. He is focused, he's laser focused. And you have to learn this skill in life to be successful at work and at home and in life, the skill of knowing what matters most. I've always been taunted about my skin tone and the brown spots on my face, which has made me very insecure. As an adult, I discovered makeup. I never let my family or friends or anyone I'm dating see me without makeup, so to be here without it right now is a huge step. The fact is everybody's got flaws. Nobody's perfect, but the definition of flaw is 100% subjective. Because what we might think is a flaw in our culture is a beauty mark in somebody else's.

Right.

And so really—

Yes, there's an African country where the fatter you are, the more husbands you can have.

I'm going there. All right, on purpose, Evan either. All right. You know, I bought a pair of jeans the other day and I got it home and it was distressed jeans. There was a little tag on it and it said, These genes are intentionally flawed to make them unique.

Wow.

You need to write that one down. We are all intentionally flawed to make us unique. Now, Portia's problem is actually a deeper problem, and the issue here is it is the myth that being beautiful will make me happy. I live in Southern California. There are a lot of pretty people there who are miserable. So it is not an automatic beauty equals happiness. Happiness is a choice. So you gotta realize that sometimes your own self-rejection is turning people away. That— Everybody went, mm.

Yes, it's her perception of what—

Absolutely. She's flat out gorgeous. But the point is, is that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. I say this to Portia though, you don't want friends who only love you for your looks. Okay? And you don't want a husband who only loves you for your looks. Speak the truth. Because I'll tell you this, our looks aren't gonna stay. Now mine do, but I don't know about yours.