We all have things in our lives that we want to change. Things that we wish we could let go of or add to our lives. Most of the time, the things we want to change fall into 3 categories: health, money, and relationships.
What if it was possible to change your life in six months? What if six months from now, your life could be completely different?
It’s possible! I know because I’ve done it. And now I want to show you how!
Resources Mentioned:
The Mindset Reset: https://ashleyvarner.com/mindset
Renew180: https://ashleyvarner.com/180
Highlights From the Episode:
We all have things in our lives that we wanna change. Things that we wish we could let go of or add to our lives. And most of the time, the things that we wanna change fall into three categories. And I wanna ask you, what if it was possible to change your life in six months? What if, six months from now, you could look at your life and see that it was just completely different? It’s possible, I know it, I’ve seen clients do it. I have gone through this transformation myself. And I want to show you how. That’s what we’re gonna talk about today.
Welcome back to The Renewed Mind. If you are brand new, I wanna say welcome and thank you for being here. If you are someone who is a long-time supporter, then I wanna say thank you to you as well. Thank you for being part of this community. And for really just desiring to know the Lord more. Desiring to change your thinking and your mindset to grow in your relationship with the Lord. And really see your life change in the process. Because Romans tells us that whenever we are transformed by the renewing of our minds.
And so, that’s what we are talking about today. We’re talking about how you can change your life in six months. But it’s from a Christian perspective. Because everything that we do, our faith is tied to it, right? And so, any time that you’re making changes, you want to not just invite your faith in. Make sure that it’s a vital part of your transformation. So let’s talk a little bit about transformational goals.
Transformational Goals
Transformational goals usually relate to three different areas of people’s lives. That would be our health, our relationships, or our money. And I would venture to say that most people also want to add their spiritual walk to this. I would say that that has to do with all three, right?
Your Thinking
So I want to give you some ways to really see transformation happen in your own life, and it starts with your thinking. So that is what this channel is all about. And I really wanna take you through the practical steps, and really the mindset changes that you’re gonna need to make, those questions that you need to answer in order to see a transformation happen.
If you’ve listened to my teaching for very long, then you know that it is your thoughts that determine your emotions, your emotions determine your actions, and then your actions determine your outcome. So if you want to see a transformation. If you want your outcome to be completely different. It must start with your thoughts. It has to begin there. And so, I want to give you three tools to change your mindset. And let’s just jump in.
Three Tools to Change Your Mindset
What Do Your Really Want?
The first step is to decide what you really want. So often we don’t ask ourselves this question enough. We don’t ask ourselves what it is we really want, we might say that we wanna lose weight. But what is it that we really want? We need to be specific and need to look at everything. All of the different circumstances around us. Once you decide what you really want, whatever that transformation is, I want you to ask yourself, “Do my goals line up with this season of my life?”
Okay. If you have a set of newborn triplets, it’s probably not the best time to focus on losing a bunch of weight, right? If you have just gone back into the workforce, it’s probably not the best time to try out a new hobby, if you’re trying out a new job. I want you to think about what you really want. And then see if that lines up with the season that God has you in right now. If it does, then you can move on to the next question, which is, “Will other priorities be neglected “if I add this goal to my life?”
Now, I am not 100% believer in a just perfect balance. I think that there are always gonna be times when, in certain seasons of your life, when something has to take precedence over something else. For instance, whenever you have a newborn baby, you have to spend a lot of focus on that. Whenever you are building a new business, you have to have a lot of focus on that. Just any time there’s going to be some give and take, there’s gonna be an ebb and flow to your life and to seasons of your life.
God’s Priorities
But really you need to consider if other priorities, and truly, God’s priorities, are going to be neglected if you add this goal. God’s priority for you is your relationship with him. If you’re married, your relationship with your spouse. If you have kids, your relationship with your kids. And ultimately, those three things, those relationships are a priority to the Lord. He’s never going to want you or ask you to start a ministry that is going to negatively impact your children. Now, does that mean things will always be easy or your kids will never be in pain? No, that’s not the case. But he is never going to put more on your to-do list that would take away from those important priorities for you that he has for your life.
Do Current Tasks and Schedule Align With Goal?
So the next step, after you decide what you really want and you see if it is aligned with where you’re at right now. Then I want you to ask if your current tasks and schedule align with that goal. So I can guarantee you that if there is something that you wanna change in your life. You have to figure out how your current tasks and your current schedule can support that. Because if they don’t support it, that change is not gonna happen.
I want you to ask, “What are your current routines? “Are these current routines supporting your goals?” Because if your current routine is going to the coffee shop every morning and grabbing a large coffee, but you’re wanting to save money. That current routine is not supportive of the goal that you wanna have. I want you to ask yourself, “Are your current commitments gonna be a hindrance “to these goals?”
Now, this is something that few people think about whenever they’re wanting to make a change in their life. And that is, if you put something on your plate, it’s going to push something else off unless you just really have your priorities outta whack. The healthy way to do this is to put a commitment in, but take a commitment out at the same time. We’ve heard this idea whenever someone is decluttering their closet and they have it all perfect, and then they buy new clothes, and they always say the one in and one out rule.
Consider Your Commitments
So consider that with your commitments. There may be a time when you have to let go of some commitments. Maybe you’re teaching five classes a week at your church or five different projects and you need to let go of two of them. Or in order to add something in, you need to take something else out. There’s nothing wrong with seasons changing. And I want you to really be in prayer about your current routines and your current commitments. Because if you wanna see change, and remember, that’s what we talked about in the first step was deciding what you really want. If that’s something you really want, you’re going to have to let go of some other things.
Another thing that you can ask yourself is to just consider why you are doing the things that are on your schedule currently. Are you doing these things because you feel obligated? Maybe there’s no one else to take over. Or maybe you fear the opinions of others if you step down and what they’ll think of you. Maybe you are doing those things because there’s a true joy that comes into your life. Or maybe it is the fulfillment that you feel, but ultimately, it needs to be God’s call on your life if it’s gonna stay on your schedule.
I love to share, and I have shared this before about how, on your to-do list, if there are things on there that God didn’t put on there, you won’t get them done. But just like Jesus could say that He accomplished everything that God asked Him to do. Even though there were people who were sick. Even though there were still people who needed to hear about Him. It’s because he accomplished everything that God wanted Him to do.
And so, if you start looking at your commitments and your obligations in the same way and say, “Okay, Lord, what are the things “that you have for me to do at this season in my life? “What is it? “Because I wanna do only the things “that you have in store for me right now.”
If you do that, if you decide what you really want, and then you determine if your current tasks and obligations, and schedule align with that goal, then you need to change your daily routine. This is ultimately the biggest change that people forget about whenever they wanna see the transformation.
There is a quote by John C. Maxwell that I love, and he says, “You’ll never change your life “until you change something you do daily. “The secret of your success is found in your daily routine.”
Your Daily Routine
So let’s talk a little bit about what a daily routine needs to have, and how you can really just figure out what can stay and what needs to go. In your daily routine, it needs to reflect what your priorities are. I always tell my clients that if I looked at their schedule, I could tell them what their priorities are. And the same is true for you.
In Renew 180, I have a whole entire month teaching on productivity, time management, schedules, and to-do lists. But just to give a small snippet here, I want you to look at your schedule. Maybe just look at what your last week looked like and say, “Based on this schedule, what are my priorities?” And if that’s what you want, then you’re on your way. But if you really wanna see transformation in your life, you have to be willing to change the things on your daily schedule.
So how do we do that? Well, I want you to take a look at your tasks, and then ask yourself three things and put them in three different categories. If you look at a task, and it might be a good solution to just take a step back and write out a list of everything that you need to do. Write down everything. All the tasks, all the things that need done, all of the obligations. All of the events that happen, or the things that you need to do. The pickups and drop-offs, the dry cleaning, the laundry, everything, right? I want you to sit down and write it all out. And then I want you to ask yourself what column of these three things that each of those tasks go in?
First Column: It-Doesn’t-Need-To-Be-Done
The first is the it-doesn’t-need-to-be-done column. So the just-say-no column, right? I want you to maybe highlight or just cross off all the things that maybe you think that they need to be done, but they don’t necessarily need to be done. Maybe it’s something like posting on Instagram every day. If you have a business that runs online, it can be really hard to have that fear of missing out, of not posting every day, or not having a reels every day, or whatever it is.
I want you to decide if that’s something that you can just say no to. Maybe you can just post three times a week instead of every day. I want you to think about those things that you can just say no to. Maybe you make your son’s bed every morning and you can just say no to that and let him make his own bed. Whatever those things are, right?
Second Column: What Can be Delegated
Then I want you to look through what’s left, and I want you to decide if it’s something that you can delegate. Now, I know that sometimes whenever people say, “Yeah, just delegate, delegate,” right away, people come up with the idea of, “Well, I don’t have the money to do that.” And while it is definitely helpful to be able to pay someone to do things for you, there are other ways that you can delegate things. So I wanna give some examples in both categories.
First off, I would say the things that you can delegate. If you have a business, you might be able to hire an assistant. If you create videos like this, you can hire someone to edit them. I have someone really great who edits my videos, and I always appreciate the work that she does. And so, I can delegate that to someone who is much better than me at it, but also, it takes something off of my plate, so that I have time to spend on other things.
I just wanted to give an example. I recently went on a vacation, and whenever I got back, there was so much laundry that needed to be done. And I could just imagine, we had to go to work the next day ’cause we got back in the middle of the week, and I knew if I went to work, all I would be thinking about was the eight loads of laundry, it felt like, that were waiting for me at home. So I took everything to a drop-off service. This is not something I do all the time, but I decided that for the sake of my sanity, I was gonna take it. They hung everything up, and I just went and picked it up after work, and we just put it away and that was it. For me, it was better to just delegate that once-a-year type thing.
Now, like I said, I do a load of laundry every day, but we had just gotten back from vacation and I needed to have that delegated. Now, you might be considering things like having a home delivery service for your, something like Hello Fresh, for your dinners. And they pack it all in for you, they give you the recipe, and you cook it at home. That could be a way to delegate. You can use the pickup service at your grocery store or at your Walmart, where they shop for all the groceries for you and you just pick ’em up. Those are things that you can delegate that don’t, like that pickup, that doesn’t cost you anything. Another thing that you can look at is delegating things to your family members. So that would be the making the bed scenario. If you are constantly making your child’s bed and they’re over the age of four, I would say, then consider teaching them how.
Now, it might not look the same way as it does whenever you do it, but consider just teaching them and delegating that to them. Things like emptying the dishwasher or feeding the dog, are things that other people in your home can do.
Third Column: Take Responsibility
The last area, this is gonna be all the tasks that are left after you’ve said no, and after you’ve delegated, the last, whatever’s left, is something that you need to take responsibility for and really enjoy. So there is so much teaching in the Word of God. And earlier this year, I did a Bible study on 1 Corinthians. And as I was reading 1 Corinthians 13, it really stuck in my heart that you can do all of these great things, right?
You can have faith that moves mountains, but if it doesn’t have love, then it’s worth nothing. You can give everything that you have to the poor, but if you don’t do it in love, it results in nothing.
So on all the rest of the tasks that you have, I want you to pray and ask the Lord to give you a fresh dose of His love to do everything else that’s left. Because if you have to pick up and drop off foster kids and you don’t do it with love, then it’s for nothing. But if you ask the Lord to give you that love, He will give it to you, and then it means something, right?
There are always going to be tasks and obligations that need to be done, and we can ask for that extra dose of God’s love to accomplish all these things. Now, I say all that and kind of give that mini-teaching on to-do lists because I want you to realize that you can say no to things. I mean, now, there are gonna be some things you don’t wanna say no to, things that only you can do, that only you want to do.
So for instance, I know someone who, it is very important to them to pick up their kids every day from school. Now, other people, don’t have a problem with putting their kids on the bus or having someone else pick up their kids. There’s nothing wrong with any of those scenarios. It’s all up to you and how you look at your responsibilities.
Just look at what’s left and see the things that line up with this new goal that you have, with this transformational goal that you have. And decide, “Okay, Lord, what do I need to add “to this list in order to see transformation in my life?” So then I just want you to ask yourself, what are the things that you need to add to your activities, to your task list that you can ask the Lord to infuse his love into? That way your tasks line up with the transformational goal that you have set for yourself.
This is so important whenever we are wanting to make a change, that we ask the Lord for his help, right? That’s why this is a Christian perspective because He gives us the joy, peace, and love that we need to see transformation in our lives. That’s the missing key, where so many people forget to just ask the Lord for his help. He did not expect us to do this life, to make this transformation without Him renewing our minds and really giving us the strength to do the things that He’s called us to do.
Concluding Thoughts
Remember, Philippians 4:13, “I can do all things “through Christ who gives me the strength to do them.” So as you are making these changes in your life, remember to decide what you really want. Remember to figure out if your current tasks line up with that goal, and then to change your life, you need to change your daily routine.
All right, that’s all that I have for you guys this week. I hope that you enjoyed it. If you have questions, feel free to leave them in the comments, and I would be happy to respond to those and help. And make sure that you stick around for next week’s video. If you subscribe and hit the notification bell, you will be automatically informed whenever the next episode comes out. And it is going to be all about if God will give you more than you can handle. We all hear people say that God won’t give us more than we can handle. And I’m gonna answer that question for you guys next week.
All right, I will see you guys soon. Have a great week.
