Making The Most of Your Difficulties | Episode # 158 | Encore Episode # 19

Empowered Living With Jeff Byrd.

Welcome to Empowered Living. Listen as Jeff tackles critical issues in a way that brings "Insight for business, leadership, and life!

https://www.talknetworkradio.com/hosts/EmpoweredLiving

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:29):
Hello, this is Gabriella on the scene today with Top
Network Radio. We have a real dread for you just
around the corner, and that is Empowered Living with Jeff Bird.
Jeff is the owner of Jeffrey per Coaching and he
will be coming to you weekly to teach you more
about empowered living. Now let's join Jeff already in the studio.

Speaker 2 (00:56):
Hello and welcome. This is Jeff Bird with Jeffrey Bird Coaching,
and this is Empowered Living. So glad that you tuned in. Today.
We're going to attempt to take on what is a
big topic and try to make some sense of things.
This is going to be titled making the most of

(01:17):
your Difficulties. Now, every single one of us have difficulties,
some bigger than others. Someone once told me that life
is usually not like being attacked by a dragon. It's
more like being pecked to death by a flock of ducks.
And most people relate to that. It's very unusual that
we have a big traumatic event on a given day.

(01:40):
But now I know that some who are listening to
this and some friends of mine are having very large
traumatic events going on. And so what we're going to
talk about today applies to those difficult things, the major
health issues, the major losses. It's going to apply to
those as well as the flock of ducks, the little
things that just aggravate us an annoy us. They don't

(02:02):
do us any real harm on a daily basis. Is
just when they all kind of ging up on us,
they can get to us, and they can cause us
to react in ways that aren't the best. I want
to start as a point of departure with a couple
of verses in the Book of James. This is in
James Chapter one, verses two through four, that says, consider
it all joy, my brethren, when you encounter various trials,

(02:25):
knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance, and
let endurance have its perfect result, so that you may
be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing. Wow, that's a
pretty big promise. How many people would like to be
perfect and complete and lacking in nothing. This is the

(02:48):
only quality, to my knowledge that is said to those things,
the quality of endurance. Those who have endurance, who know
how to endure, they end up being perfect and complete lacking,
and there's nothing that can knock them off their course.
There's nothing that can get them down and keep them down.
They know how to get up. They know how to
keep going. They know how to keep focused on the

(03:09):
vision and keep taking the steps towards it, no matter
what the difficulties and the obstacles that come into their
life may be. Now, this word endurance, it's also translated patience.
Sometimes it comes from a Greek word called hoopo monee. Now,
I remember someone saying years ago that the way they
remembered that is that in basketball, the ones who make
the most hoops get the most monet. So hoopomnee. And

(03:32):
what it means is steadfastness, constancy, and endurance and patience.
And in the Bible and the New Testament, it is
characteristic of a man who has not swerved from his
deliberate purpose and his loyalty to faith and piety, even
by the greatest trials and suffering. Now, so this is
applying to a spiritual faith, and I also want to

(03:53):
apply this today. I want to broaden that out and
use it for faith in other things. Faith in your purpose,
faith in your endeavor, faith in your calling, faith in
maybe the value that you're adding to others through a
new business you've started, or through the business that you
currently do, because there's tough times that come in all
of those areas. So I want to make this faith

(04:15):
broader than just the spiritual faith and apply it to
anything that you're really trusting for that you believe in,
that you're moving towards. That adds value to you, and
that enables you to add value to others. Now, some
of you may recall there's been a movie written about her.
The movie was called He Named Me Malala, And this
is the story of a young woman named Malala Yusafzai
who's Pakistani born, and she grew up in the Salt

(04:39):
Valley area of Pakistan. And on October ninth, twenty twelve,
as she was on the school bus coming home from school,
her bus was stopped by a group of armed Taliban
gunmen and one of them boarded the bus and called
out her name. Well, everyone froze, no one said a word,
but one of her classmates glanced at her, and the

(04:59):
gunman saw the girl's glance and identified Malala and shot
her in the left side of the head and left
her for dead. Well, now, amazingly, that bullet somehow veered
it didn't go straight through her brain and killing her.
It veered and it kind of went down once it
entered her head. And now it did damage to her

(05:19):
hearing in the left side of her head and caused
the need for some facial reconstruction. It did put her
life in jeopardy for a while, but thankfully there were
some medical and outstanding medical attention that was given her
immediately and she was blown to other hospitals and they
were able to save her. Now, we would think that
maybe that would have stopped her. And what she was
doing is she was speaking out and she was writing

(05:42):
against what the Taliman was doing and how it was
oppressing people in this area of the world. She was
communicating with the BBC, she was writing and she was
actually naming people who are committing atrocities and human rights
violations against other people. And so that's what got her targeted.
You would think maybe, and being targeted like that, that
she would stop. No one would have really blamed her.

(06:03):
It was putting her at great risk, it was putting
her family at great risk, and you think maybe she
would have stopped. That's not what she did. She believed
that her purpose was greater than her suffering, even if
it cost her life, and she was going to continue
to speak out for human rights, especially for the age
education of women. So she continued on and the next

(06:23):
year after that shooting occurred, she actually was the cover
of Time Magazine's one hundred Most Influential People in the
World issue. She was the cover of that and then
the next year she went on to become the youngest
Nobel Peace Prize laureate ever and Pakistani born one, and

(06:43):
she won the Nobel Peace Prize. But she didn't stop there.
A lot of people won the Nobel Peace Prize and
they never do anything very significant after except go cut ribbons.
But not Malala. She kept on with her work and
on her eighteenth birthday. All this was prior to eighteen.
On her eighteenth birthday, she celebrated by opening a school
for Syria refugee girls and she enrolled two hundred girls
into this school on her eighteenth birthday. And she's gone

(07:06):
on to speak for the United Nations and travel all
over the world advocating for human rights and for the
rights of girls to be educated. So what her story
depicts a principle that's very important. And Chucks Lindahl said
years ago that life is ten percent what happens to
us and ninety percent how we respond to it. And

(07:30):
that's the first thing I want to mention today when
it comes to how we deal with difficulties. The difficulties
themselves are never our biggest problem. Our reaction to the
difficulties is always our biggest problem, because the way we
react either minimizes the problem or creates new problems for us.

(07:51):
One of my favorite memories of my dad and things
that I most respect about it. For those of you
who don't know me, he's been gone since nineteen ninety,
but one of the things that I love the most
about him was how he learned to take responsibility to
his actions. Now, I was a terrible kid in a
lot of ways, and we didn't get along well when
I was growing up, but I saw him take responsibility

(08:13):
for his reactions. He had a little book by J.
Allen Peterson. It's available online as a as a free PDF,
but the name of it was called your Reactions Are Showing.
Your reactions are Showing, And that's always our biggest problem,
is our reaction to them. And he got a hold
of that book and he took it to heart, and
I was able to watch him transform before me, going

(08:36):
from somebody who was reactive and who would stuff things
until he got angry and have explosive episodes to food control,
who who, through God's enablement he would readily attest, was
able to get his reactions under control and not react
in just a human knee jerk reaction kind of way,
but react in a way that was beneficial, that added
value to the others around him, that improved the situation.

(09:01):
That's the first thing I want to give you is
that difficulties do not define us. Our reactions do. And
the second thing I want to give to you today
is that during difficulties, our goals should be to strive
to be bigger on the inside than on the outside.
We may not be able to change the circumstances, but
we can change who we are on the inside. We

(09:24):
can develop and grow to have better responses on the outside.
There is no situation that you or I will ever
face where we cannot grow on the inside. There is
no human agency, no circumstance that can occur in this
life that can keep us from becoming bigger on the
inside and growing on the inside. And we need to

(09:46):
we need to remember that during difficulties. Some of you
may recognize the name Alexander Sultsanitsen. If you do, you
may know that he was Russian. Back during the days
of the Soviet Union, he was Russian born, and he
was a writer spokesperson, and he spoke out and wrote
very strongly against communism. Well back in those days, that

(10:08):
was a crime punishable by eight years imprisonment in a
forced labor camp. They called that the Russian Gulag, and
he was arrested and he was put into prison for
eight years in the Gulag. Now later he was released
and he wrote a book called The Gulag Archipelago, and
he as a result, won the Nobel Peace Prize in

(10:29):
nineteen seventy for his literary works. And he says he
would say in this book, looking back on his prison experience,
bless you, prison, Bless you for being in my life.
For there lying upon writing a prison straw, I came
to realize that the object of life is not prosperity,

(10:50):
as we are made to believe, but the maturity of
the human soul. Now here's a man who got it.
He understood. He came to understand as a result of
this imprisonment in a terrible place. It was like Nazi
concentration camps. Many many people died. They had open burials
and just mass and bodies thrown into these open pits,

(11:11):
and it was terrible. He learned as a result of that,
a very very important lesson that it was what he
became on the inside that was far more important than
what he experienced on the outside. Of this prosperity that
we're made to believe is the most important thing in life,
It's far more important who we are and who we
are becoming. And I want to say that every situation

(11:36):
that you or I find ourselves in is designed for
our growth. There's not one situation that you're ever going
to be in that I'm ever going to be in
where we cannot grow. And there's no better place to
start to grow and to prosper than exactly where we are.

(11:56):
Your current circumstance is the very best place for this
growth journey to begin, which will lead to greater growth
on the inside, greater development on the outside, becoming more valuable.
And as we do that, then prosperity comes in. But
it's a byproduct, it's not the main goal. When the
main goal is in the right place, developing all that

(12:16):
we can be developing ourselves, as scripture says, seeking first
God's kingdom, and Jesus said that kingdom of God is
within us. When we seek first that kingdom within us,
and seek to grow and develop and become all we
can be. Then the second part of the promise in
the verse was all these things will be added to you.
When we're seeking the right things first. Then it opens

(12:38):
the door for the other things to come. But then
when the things do come, they don't destroy us. We're
able to use them rightly and for best purposes. Otherwise,
as one person said, God's greatest dilemma is trying to
bless us, is figuring out how to bless us greatly
without destroying us completely. Because often the blessings come prior
to our inner development. We don't use then right ways,

(13:00):
we threw them away, we lose them, They destroy us.
They cause all kinds of problems and relational issues in
our lives. So the inner development is primary. Next difficulties
develop us into more valuable people who can add more
value to others. There's a woman you may have heard
of by the name of Corey ten Boom. She was

(13:21):
a Dutch woman living in Holland, during the Nazi occupation
and her family was taken captive because they were hiding Jews.
They were suspected of hiding Jews. They actually were hiding
the Jews. They built a very tiny room in a
bedroom and it was hidden. It was behind the headboard
of the bed, and nobody knew that there was an

(13:42):
extra little room back there. It was called the Hiding Place,
and that's the name of the book in the movie.
And they hid these Jews there, and so they never
found The Nazis never found the Jews. All they found
was extra ration cards, and that's what led them to
be arrested. She and her father and her sister and
some others. And just a few months after being arrested
by the Nazis, her father died in a concentration camp.

(14:04):
Sometime later, her sister Betsy died in her arms in
the concentration camp. And you would think that Corey could
have become very bitter about that. That's not what happened.
She grew on the inside as a result of this
experience in ways that are almost unbelievable. Following her release,
she did. She was released due to a clerical air.

(14:26):
She was scheduled to be sent to the gas chamber.
The following week, somebody made a clerical air and she
was actually released. Following her release, she didn't just go
sit around feel sorry for herself to write books about
how terrible her experience was. She went out and she
started a recovery house project for war victims. She wrote
over forty books. She spoke, She traveled and spoke and

(14:49):
shared her stories and God's provision in his miraculous sustainment
of them, even her sister's testimony. As her sister was
dying in her arms, her final words were, there is
no so deep that God is not deeper still. And
she went and she shared these testimonies and miraculous things
that happened, how they were preserved, how the little vitamin

(15:09):
vile of vitamin drops that she had just lasted and
lasted and lasted as they shared it with all the
women in the barracks. She had amazing stories, and she went.
She went back to Germany to speak and to share
her story. And at the end of her presentation, a
couple of former prison guards came up, and she didn't
know who they were, didn't recognize them, and they said,

(15:30):
we've come to ask you to forgive us, and she said, well,
what did you do? She said, well, they said, well,
we were prison guards where you were in prison and
your sister were in prison. And she remembered who they were,
and they had been particularly cruel to her sister. And
she said that when they asked for her forgiveness, that
everything in her turn to ice. But she knew she
had to release them and forgive them and wish them

(15:51):
the best. And she said she knew she had to
do that. And as she put out her hand to
take the guard's hand and shake it, she felt this
warmth and just this and this love of forgiveness wash
over her and take over her as she forgave them.
So she as a result of those experiences could very
easily have made her bitter, but she realized that it

(16:11):
wasn't the experience that was her main issue. It was
her response to the experience. And she's left us a
beautiful demonstration of responding in the right place. And that's
the same issue that's before us today. It's not the
things that are happening to us, it's how we're responding
to them. The last thing I want to give you

(16:31):
on this is that difficulties often guide us into our
greatest life work. Recently heard someone say that your greatest
purpose is hidden somewhere in the midst of your deepest pain,
and that's so true. I have a colleague, a member
of the John Maxwell team like I am, and she

(16:52):
actually runs an anti human trafficking agency in India. But
the reason that she came to do that is because
she was sexually abused as a teenager and she understands
what it's like to be on the receiving end of that,
and so she has a heart for these girls who
are trapped in this human trafficking and sex trade, and

(17:13):
so she decided to do something about it. As a
result of her experience and what that did in her
and the vision that gave them, she is now able
to come to the aid and the rescue of many
many other young women. No one can ever take away
our ability to choose to develop ourself, no matter the
conditions you're in or however bad they are. There is

(17:35):
no other human being on this earth who has the
power to take away your ability to choose to develop yourself.
It's always a choice, and we have that choice. We
could be in solitary confinement in a prison somewhere and
still inwardly choose to develop ourselves, to see how we
can learn how we could develop. One prisoner developed an

(17:58):
exercise course called Paul that was his last name. That's
where Pilates comes from. And now that's used all over
the world to help people get in better shape and
strengthen their core and develop muscle system. But he did
that while he was in prison. He decided he was
going to do something good for himself and with that
time in prison. So we have to ask, in any difficulty,
who or what is controlling me? Is it am I

(18:21):
being divinely inspired and led to develop myself from the inside?
Or am I letting the people in the circumstances around me,
or even myself just my natural reaction? Am I letting
those things control me? We have to have a vision
before us of who we are destined to be. If
we don't have that vision, we'll just react and probably negatively,

(18:43):
to the difficulties that happen around us. But if we
have that vision of who we are meant to be
as children of God, I will give to you. And
as such, modeling and demonstrating his character and his concern
for developing to be the most we can be for
other people. If we have that vision, then when we
come into those difficulties, we will we will take control.

(19:06):
We can gain self control, control of ourselves and our
natural reactions, and develop ourselves on the inside to be
ever reaching, to become, to reach our potential and become
all that we can be. I'm going to be back
in just a minute. We're gonna take a short break
and we're gonna look at some takeaways and some personal
applications for today. Jeff will be.

Speaker 1 (19:26):
Back shortly to wrap up today's message. This is Gabriela
Steal on the scene today with Top Network Radio. If
you're just tuning in, you're listening to Empowered Living with
Jeff Bird. If you've missed any part of today's message,
you can hear it again online as well as the
entire archive of Empowered Living at www dot Topnetwork Radio

(19:52):
dot com or search keyword hashtag empowered Living. We would
like to acknowledge our music partners, Sounds Ideas for Corporate
to the Max and Kevin McLeod for Airport Lounge. Any
scriptures read during this broadcast are from the New American
Standard version of the Holy Bible. If you would like

(20:14):
to learn more about Jeffreybird Coaching, visit www dot Jeffbirdcaching
dot com. That is j E F f b y
r D Coaching dot com. Do a Facebook search for
at coaching rocks, or drop Jeff a line at Jeff

(20:34):
at Jeffbirdcoaching dot com. Again j E F F b
y r D Coaching dot com. Let Jeff's coaching rocks
be the building blocks of your empowered success. Now let's
go back to Jeff for the rest of today's message.

Speaker 2 (20:55):
And welcome back. This is Jeff Bird with Jeffreybird Coaching
and you're listening to empower how we're living. Topic today
is in how to make the most of our difficulties
And as a wrap up, I'd like to leave with
you four takeaways for application and ways to think and
to be during the midst of any difficulty that you
may be experiencing. Number one is we must learn to

(21:19):
see the difficulties not as setbacks. That has opportunities for
greater growth, purpose and ability to help others. None of
us gain valuable insights in a bubble excluded from difficulty.
We grow the most as we learn to develop in
the midst of difficulty. Now, think about this, when you

(21:42):
come to some difficulty, who is it that you go
to maybe to talk to or to get some counsel
or what resources do you listen to. It's not people
who have never been through any trouble. It's people who
have been through them and come out on the other side.
And when we're going through the difficulties, that's exactly the purpose,
so that we can become, like we started the show show,
perfect and complete, lacking nothing, and as we grow and

(22:04):
develop in those areas, we become so much more valuable
as a resource for others. Number two is always ask
in any difficulty, how can I grow through this? What
areas inside me need to be developed so that I
can reach my greatest potential. And as we look inside

(22:25):
and look at those areas that can be developed, then
we could look back outside and look for resources and
others who can help, and others who are farther down
the path that we can get some assistance and some
help from Number three. During difficulty, remember others who have
gone through great difficulty and ended up with greater influence

(22:47):
than otherwise could have been possible. Today, we've talked about Malala,
We've talked about Alexander Sultzen Needs and Corey Tenboom. The
world is filled with other stories, some that are famous,
some that may never be known outside of small circle.
Nelson Mandela, he was one Abraham Lincoln. I was just
reading the other day. He ran for office and lost

(23:08):
eight times, lost two failed two businesses before he ever
was elected as president and became the man that we
know him to be. What if he had given up?
What if he had let those difficulties overcome him rather
than develop him and learn to endure and to persevere,
to keep that vision before him and to stay at it.
Where would we be? What would our world be like

(23:28):
had he not done so? Remembering others who have overcome
and who have impacted and changed the world greatly as
a result. And then number four during difficulty, partner with
others who are committed to pressing on to become their
best regardless of their trials. We need other people like that.
We don't need to be around people who give up easily,

(23:51):
who just lose the vision, who just settle for comfort,
and who lose sight of who and what they can
be and the value of that. We need to have
those other folks in us who can help pick us up.
Ecclesiastes four nine through twelve says two are better than
one because they have a good return for their labor.

(24:12):
Or if either of them falls, the one will lift
up his companion. But woe to the one who falls
when there is not another to lift him up. In
other words, if we're working together, if we've got some
other people of like minds and hearts on our team,
and we come into a difficulty, we're not going to
be so bad off because we were not going to
be there by ourselves. We'll have other people who can
help lift us up, help remind us of the truth,

(24:33):
help encourage our development, help keep us on track even
through those difficulties, and will be much better off for
the team that we have around us. I want to
thank you so much for tuning in today and joining
me here and thinking about these things. I hope that
these are an encouragement too you. I know that every
single one of us has some sort of difficulty going on.
Probably during this week you've had a few different things

(24:55):
we want, so I hope that you'll think about this
and ad spend some time pondering these questions that we
can ask in ways that we can develop ourselves on
the inside during these difficulties that can make us the
best people that we can possibly be, the very best
version of ourselves that we can be, reach our greatest potential,
learn the most, and be the most valuable to the

(25:16):
people around us. Thank you so much. This is jeff
Bird with Jeffrey Bird Coaching, and you've been listening to
Empowered Living