EPISODE DESCRIPTION
In this episode of Coffee With Phil we’re looking at a refreshed life, where Phil unpacks a refreshed life, pulling back the curtain and sharing where he is going, how he is tracking, and invites you to join him on that journey.
If you can see that the pace of life is unsustainable, and you don’t feel alive during moments of joy maybe it’s time for you to start taking note of the warning signs and join Phil as he slows down and learns to live a refreshed life.
If you’re the kind of person that only worries about feeling good today, you definitely won’t want to be challenged by Phil in this podcast. But, if you’re game, grab yourself some time and enjoy coffee with Phil.
MENTIONS
- Podcast: The Carey Nieuwhof Leadership Podcast. CNLP 555
- Podcast: The Emotionally Healthy Leader Podcast’ – Pete Scazzero.
BONUS CONTENT
- Show Transcription: CWP.18.
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Introduction.
Well, hi, and welcome to the podcast. Welcome to coffee with Phil and of course, my name’s Phil Strong, and it’s my privilege to be with you today.
Today in episode 18, we’re looking at a refreshed life, because I believe a refreshed life brings new hope, and I want to unpack that for you wanna pull back the curtain and just talk a little bit about, I suppose, where I’m going, where I’m tracking, and invite you to join me on that journey.
You know this was made really clear to me recently when I was listening to another podcast, I was listening to someone speak to me about living a slowed down life. Really to access that refreshment, I believe one of the things we need to do is to live a slowed down life, but what was ironic was that I noticed the playback speed on my podcast player was set at 1 1/2 times normal speed, so I was listening to this podcast at an extra pace in order to get through more content, but the subject was living a slowed down life and I just couldn’t believe the irony at what I’d set myself up for.
So, are you living a refreshed life? Are you trying to slow down, or are you trying to speed up? Are you trying to get more done, or are you really trying to live a refreshed life?
Let’s get into that and I wanna unpack that with a few thoughts today.
The Pace of life is Unsustainable.
Here’s what I wanna say to you, that I believe the pace of our life is unsustainable.
Life’s getting faster and faster. Life’s getting more full, and more full, and I think those of us that, and I put myself in this category, those of us that have not tuned in to assess where the busyness is, are really living life in the rat race that is going to cause something to go pop. Life is unsustainable, and here’s how I noticed that, and I challenge you to consider a reflection of your own.
But I looked at my life, and I said to myself, do I feel alive? Do I feel fully present in what’s happening in the moments in my life with the people that I care about in my life? And I have to be honest and I have to say, look, I struck out on both counts, I really did.
I looked at my life and I said, you know, I’m busy, I’m productive, I’m fruitful, I’m living with people that love me and I love them. But I wasn’t quite sure that I felt alive. There was something missing, and I suppose, you know, I would have a moment of joy, or potential for joy, and it wasn’t really there, it was a bit empty, you know I had some massive breakthrough and exciting things happen, but I couldn’t quite connect with, what I have come to term, the fullness of joy. It just didn’t feel alive. You know, I would be perhaps at a family gathering and I’d be wondering why everyone else was having a good time, and I wasn’t really present? And I challenge you to think about this.
You know, for me, I had to dial it back, peel back the layers and I had to ask myself, what signs am I getting, or what signs am I missing, that my body, or my soul, or my mind might be telling me? So, you know, what are the feelings that are going on inside me?
And I had to learn that feelings are given to us as a gift from God, but they’re a sign post, you know. Feeling angry, feeling anxious, fearful, feeling alone and abandoned. These are feelings that are real, and I’ve got to grasp hold of them, but I’ve got to recognise that they don’t necessarily control my world, but they’re sign posts that indicate what’s going on in my inner world and so, what signs am I getting? But then I have to be really honest and say, you know, there are signs that we are missing.
You know maybe your spouse, maybe your children, maybe your parents. Maybe they’re seeing things that you’re not seeing. You know, if people say to you, are you OK? And you’re ‘Yeah, yeah, I’m fine’ before actually really thinking about it, perhaps you’re missing the signpost. Perhaps they’re sensing or feeling, or experiencing, or noticing something that is really revealing the pace of your life, and the fruit of the pace of your life.
I have to say this, I’m recording this on what we are currently calling a post COVID season. We have had three years of just absolute chaos, uncertainty, changing landscapes, division, and control, and panic, and mandates, and new ways of living, and we’ve just gotta be real that we’re all in recovery from that, and we’re all in a different space of recovery. We’re all in different stage and progression of our recovery, and we shouldn’t expect that life’s gonna go back to normal.
There is no normal, friends, I have to tell you this, normal life has been redefined. No longer are we going back to the same old same old. So there’s a new landscape. We’ve come out of the cave, as it were, the world has been scorched by, let’s just say the pandemic, and we’ve gotta learn to live in this new world, but that means we’ve got to appreciate that everybody else is trying to live in this new world.
So the first thing you need to do the first thing I’m trying to do, and that’s what this is about, is to take care of ourselves and so what signs are we seeing or what signs are we missing, that your body, your soul, or your mind are sending us, and then how do we connect with those?
Well, the thought that I’ve got on that really is that Sabbath is a lifestyle, and it’s a God-given gift. So, story in Genesis tells us that God created the heavens and the earth, and everything in it, and it was wonderful, and it was good, and he did that over 6 days and on the 7th day it says God rested, considered all that he did, and was pleased.
But you know, we don’t live like that, I don’t reckon, you know we jampack our schedule full of things, we move from priority to priority, to demand to demand, and we really don’t have a key focus, we don’t have clarity, but we ignore the Sabbath principle.
Sabbath principle is something that I’m really trying to learn more about. I’ve gotta admit that I’m getting a D as a grade at the moment, you know, if I was to be really honest, my score sheet, or my report card has a D, and I’m trying to improve it.
Sabbath as a lifestyle is a God given gift.
But you know Sabbath isn’t a day or a time, but it’s a discipline of our heart, and it’s a way we choose to set ourself before God and say, ‘well, God, if it’s good enough for you? It’s good enough for me, and if your motive is love toward me and I want my motive to be love toward you, then really I need to embrace your design for life and your lifestyle.’
Sabbath is a lifestyle, it’s a God-given gift, and I don’t want to teach you on the Sabbath here, I might do that a different time, but there’s also plenty of people that are better at it than I am.
You know, if I’m if I’m confessing to you that I get a grade of a D in Sabbath, then perhaps I’m not the best teacher on what to do. I’m definitely the good teacher on what not to do.
Sabbath is very much like the tithe, my good friend Steven de Silva, he says “The tithe is something that you either choose to give, or it ultimately gets taken from you.” You choose to give it to the Lord says ‘I will protect you. I will protect your finances and you will flourish’, but the converse to that is, if we don’t honour God’s principles for living, then the thief comes in, we leave an open door through sin through missing the mark, and the thief has an open door to come and to kill, steal and destroy.
So, if you don’t give the tithe, it will be taken from you in a different way. The Sabbath is the same friends. If we don’t honour God’s principle, his discipline for living, if we don’t honour that and we don’t set aside time to stop, and to cease from our activities, to turn our attention towards God as our creator and contemplate him, and enjoy him, and recognise him in our life, to delight in all the gifts God has given us, and our family, and our work, and our play, and our hopes, and our aspirations for the future, to worship God in that space and to enjoy life as a Sabbath discipline.
If we don’t choose to do that, then our body is gonna start sending us signals, our mind and our emotions, our soul is gonna start sending warning signs, and one of those warning signs, friends, and it’s very real in my world and multiple different levels is burnout.
Burn out Warning.
I want to tell you that burnout requires a flashing sign over our lifestyle. I think we should have it flashing over our mirror in the bathroom as we as we brush our teeth, or brush our hair, and as they flash, flash, flash. Watch out. Warning. Warning. Warning, warning. Burnout approaching.
Burnout is caused, in my humble opinion, and I’m no expert. But burnout is caused by people doing the wrong things to please the wrong people. If you’re a square peg in a round hole, you just don’t fit.
So, I find burnout is people operating outside their gift, operating outside their capacity, operating outside the area of the assignment that God’s given them, and they’re doing the wrong thing. So people doing the wrong things.
But also I find burnout comes from the personally imposed pressure of trying to please the wrong people. For those people that are natural people pleasers, they operate at a level beyond their capacity to do things because they’re afraid people won’t like them or accept them. Those are people pleasers.
But those of us that are performance junkies, high achievers, want to go because we like the success and the thrill of success. Maybe we’re trying to satisfy ourselves and in that I would say you’re living for the wrong purpose.
To correct that, I would say the phrase that I learned years ago is that ‘I live to serve an audience of One’, and that’s with a capital O. It’s the Lord God almighty, it’s the sovereign king over all creation, it’s the one that I choose to dedicate my life to for eternity, and He’s the only one I’m trying to please, and quite frankly, I think too many of us are spending too much energy doing the wrong things that he quite frankly doesn’t care about. He’s like, hey, good on you, you did great, but that wasn’t what I wanted you to do. You know Jesus himself says ‘get away from me. I don’t know you.’ And he was saying that because the people that were around him, were really spending all the energy doing the wrong things and he didn’t really care about it.
So, let’s just say firstly, burnout is a warning. There’s a warning that burnout is coming if we don’t access the principles God has given us for a fresh life, and I’m not here to speak as one who’s perfected it, I’m here to speak as one who’s failed at it, and really trying to search for the rhythms of grace that God has given to us through Jesus, that would help me to embrace the life as Jesus has prepared for me in order that I can flourish, be refreshed, and have a new hope for a new future.
So I’m on a journey and I think the podcast over this next season, if you’re looking at the chronological numbers of the podcast, I think the next season is gonna be really about me sharing some of that journey with you, inviting you to participate in that journey as a friend or a listener, but, maybe to learn from my mistakes, I’d suggest that was possibly the best advice I could give you is learn from what I’ve done wrong.
My current journey.
Because I’m searching for a refreshed lifestyle, I do believe that the promise of Scripture for the life and partnership with God through Jesus Christ, is that we should have a life that’s full of abundance.
You know, Jesus came to have life in all its fullness, and the fullness of life, to me, is living in the satisfaction that I’m connected to God in a personal, intimate way, and I’m walking in partnership with him, you know, as Adam walked with God in the cool of the day, in the Garden of Eden, that’s a great picture of how we should do life with God. We work, we play, and we have fellowship with God. So I’m searching for that. I’m searching for the patterns that I need to disrupt in my life.
What are the things that I’m doing that are destructive, self-destructive? My tendency to say yes to too many things, to have aspirations for too many things. I’ve got a podcast I’m gonna record in a couple of weeks that will point to one of my major weaknesses that’s really hindering me, so watch out for that coming.
But I do have hope, you know, a refreshed life that brings new hope. I have hope that there is a better pattern.
In 2022, I went on Sabbatical and it was something that was like a necessity, it was something that I needed, a sabbatical is an extended prayer of time, that’s approved and permitted by, in my case, my eldership board and it’s a way to put aside yourself from the daily grind of life to reconnect with God, reconnect with who you are, and really you find a fresh insight into the season ahead. It’s a lengthy period of time, in my case it was, officially, I was eight weeks away from the office, but it extended into our summer, so there was certain, I suppose liberties I had around reduced time because of the New Zealand summer holiday.
But the Sabbatical for me was only the beginning. There’s no way that I could reset my life in eight weeks, but it was the catalyst. It was kind of like the jolt that I needed. I have had previous seasons like this before in my life.
In 2008 we had a major crash you could say due to the global financial crisis and a whole lot of things happening in our family and that caused me to have a self-imposed Sabbatical of one year. I took me and my family out of the country for a whole year, and we lived away from friends and family, we lived off the grid, not as in the electrical grid, but we lived very much disconnected from our friends and family, and it allowed me to reset patterns in my life.
So what I’m really sharing with you is my journey to find a new pattern in a refreshed life, and I suppose, why I wanted to share this with you, you’re thinking, ‘well, what the heck does that mean for me?’, is I want you, now, on the basis of my honesty, to turn yourself and your attention to your life, and your patterns, and say well, how’s your journey going?
What I’ve had to recognise as the biblical truth that what you sow, thus you reap, and I was sowing chaos. I was push, push, push. Busy, busy, busy. Perhaps neglecting the pains, the wounds, and the hurts of the journey that were accumulating in the cupboard, and sooner or later the cupboard just gets so full they fall out, you trip over them, and you realise you got a mess to tidy up. Well, no that’s been my story for the past few years.
But what about your journey? Let me let me finish by pointing you back to the mirror so that you might consider what I’ve shared with you today, in the short time we’ve got together, but that you might also take the opportunity to reflect on your journey.
Your Journey.
And so, I want to start with the positive. I want you to ask yourself what benefits would I hope to see in a refreshed life? What benefits would I hope to see in a refreshed life? So, consider your life and think. What would I really like to be better? Would I like more quality time with my children? Would I like a better friendship with my wife or my husband? Would I like to have time out to be able to enjoy a hobby or the company of friends. What benefits?
So, you know what I’m doing really is applying simple motivational techniques, to say if you have a benefit that’s big enough you will consider making change. Most people don’t make change in their life because they don’t have a benefit in mind.
So, I’m giving you the starting point by saying, what benefits might you hope to see in a refreshed life? And then I want you to do this, and this is really where the rubber hits the road for you, I want you to consider where in my life is the overwhelm? Where in my life is the overwhelm? and I’m using that word intentionally. What are the areas in your life that feel out of control or unfulfilling?
This is the take away I wanna leave you with, and I wanna repeat it, I wanna stress it, so that you can either write it down, you can check the notes that we’ve got attached to the podcast channel. You can get the guides that will help you, but ultimately I want you to ask yourself this question, where in my life is my overwhelm? What are the areas of my life that feel out of control or unfulfilling?
Because friends, I want to give you some hope. The Lord God Almighty loves you with a passion, with a fire, with a fury, unlimited commitment to you, and he wants your life to be fulfilling, he wants your life to be enjoyable, he wants you to be filled with the joy of him and the life of the people around you. But if you’re not experiencing that, then quite frankly, you’re missing the mark. But that’s not God’s design for you.
So, I want you to think about what benefits might I find, and then what are the areas that feel out of control or unfulfilling. Now once you have those areas you might want to think about how you can take control back. There are other podcasts on this channel that will help you with that. There are many, many people that will be able to give you some disciplines.
I’ve personally found a lot of benefit from listening to ‘The Emotionally Healthy Leadership Podcast’ by Pete Scazzero. You can find that on all good podcast channels just search for ‘emotionally healthy leadership’ and particularly his book, ‘emotionally healthy spirituality’ has been a real goldmine for me as a godsend.
Slowing down life to appreciate life is the biggest thing I’m working on right now. You know, sitting out on the porch, on the deck, with no device, and just enjoying the sounds, and the feel of the sun, or the breeze on my face. I mean that sounds really lame when I say it out loud, but it’s actually been so refreshing just to check out for 15 or 30 minutes and not try and do anything, but just try and connect with the world around me.
And so, I want to leave you with that as an invitation. I want to thank you for being on the journey with me. I don’t promise to have all the answers, but I hope by pointing out my struggles and my flaws in this area of my life, that you might be able to perhaps get some insight into how to have a refreshed life in your world that would bring you a New Hope for a better future.
So, thanks for joining me, my name’s Phil Strong, I’ve enjoyed having coffee with you today and I look forward to being with you again sometime soon. Take care.