Learn About Yourself

Learn About Yourself

Two questions that you should take time to ask yourself.

Once a month I meet with a pastoral coach. This is something I started doing back in 2020 when I unexpectedly found myself in a new role and wanted to get an outside perspective on the challenges before me. This has been a vital relationship in my life over the past three years. He has become a spiritual mentor, someone who cares for my spiritual and mental health. He challenges me and gives me a place to dump my frustrations and feelings of inadequacy. I greatly appreciate the perspective I gain from our monthly phone calls. While on that subject, I want add a note to say, if you do not have someone who speaks into your life on a regular basis… someone you can be raw with… you are missing out.

Last week we started our conversation off with two questions that has been stuck in my mind ever since. If you know me you know how much I love good questions. I often say that my goal with pretty much everything I do is for people to walk away from it engaged in a deeper conversation. I believe that life change happens when we join others on the same journey and work through the complexities of faith and life.

So, what are the questions?

“In the last few weeks, what is one thing you have learned about yourself? What have you learned about people as a whole?

We rarely slow down to look deeply into our own soul. Maybe we are too busy… maybe we fear what we will find when we look. What I love about these question is it forces us to look inside. What makes us tick? What makes us do the things that we do? What motivates us? Makes us feel defeated? What is changing within us? When it comes to other people, what are we seeing in their actions, motivations, and fears?

I often wonder if we don’t undervalue learning as a culture. Sure we listen to sermons, attend classes, and maybe read books and articles… but, at least in my experience, we often do so in the safest way possible. We confirm our bias. We pay attention to the things that make us feel good about ourselves, our actions, and the choices we have made. While there is nothing wrong with that on the surface… we rarely grow.

What happens when we slow down long enough to open our eyes and ask ourselves the hard questions? These questions help us gain perspective, about ourselves and the world we live in. We understand our motives and are able to better asses the motives of others. We gain an understanding of what it means to live in this world, contribute to society, and (at least for followers of Jesus) how we can best impact the world around us for Christ. What if our assumptions about ourselves and the world around us are incomplete… or even completely wrong?

For me, these questions have caused me to slow down and evaluate a lot of things. I have written already about my need to slow down and rest… and that is still very much a lesson I am learning about myself. When it comes to what I am learning about people… I will be honest and say that I didn’t know how to answer that question. I need to spend more time paying attention.

What are you learning about yourself? What are you learning about people as a whole?