How this year, or your life, unfolds for you depends a great deal on how you approach it. What do you want?
Your how can change everything.
But what do you do when you don’t know how? When you only know what doesn’t work?
For example:
- Enthusiastically approaching it with resolutions or goals that are weak, only to fizzle out quickly. A familiar story causing shame and depression.
- Approaching it with indifference, or a defeated attitude trying to avoid the shame and disappointment you’ve felt in yourself when you’ve failed before.
There’s another way and I’ll show you how to find it.
Your will is part of your how. Share on X
QUESTIONS
Start by asking yourself some questions.
As you read these questions, pause and reflect on how you really feel, not how you think you should feel.
Love yourself enough to be honest. No one needs to know the answers but you.
Knowing how you really feel will empower you to know how to respond.
- What do you want to happen this year?
- What do you want to not happen?
- Where will you be at the end of the year if you do nothing?
- What really matters to you?
- Who are you becoming?
- If obstacles are in your way, how will you respond?
- Will you give up?
- Or will you refuse to give up and ask God to help you?
- Will you ruminate?
- Or will you feed hope and faith?
The old saying is true “where there’s a will, there’s a way”.
Your will is part of your how.
THE POWER OF THE WILL
There are many things we want in our lives but wanting them isn’t enough. Wanting is weak. It’s easily distracted and sidetracked.
Wanting isn’t using the will.
Tapping into the power of your will is to take ownership of what you want and transform it into must.
Wanting says I wish. Willing says I must.
When you decide something must (or must not) happen you engage the power of your will.
For example, I tell the story in my book Emerging With Wings when I was triggered back to my 6-year-old self as an adult1 and how I responded to the incident with
this must stop, this must never happen again.
It has never happened again.
Engaging your will is how to discover what you’ve decided must take place.
Engaging your will is how to discover what you’ve decided must take place. Share on X
THE POWER OF MUST
The heart attitude of I must creates tenacity when you don’t know how. The power of must uses the power of disposition.
Disposition has two definitions. The first has to do with a person’s temperament, nature, attitude, and mentality.
The second one is – the way in which something is placed or arranged, especially in relation to other things*.
How I put it is to put something into a specific position.
When you don’t know what to do, or how to do it, the power of must empowers you to position yourself mentally and experientially to find out how.
I did this with raising my children.
Due to childhood trauma and other reasons2 I was afraid to be a mother. God blessed me with two in spite of myself.
I transformed my fear into I must raise them to know they are loved, and empower them as individuals in ways I never had been.
I didn’t know how to do either of those. The must in me drove me to find out.
How I positioned myself was through chasing down tools. Here are a few:
- Prayer
- Words found in the Bible
- Books
- Counsel
- Classes
- Observing others who were raising their children well and seeking to model them.
These tools served me well. Although my parenting wasn’t perfect (no parent is) I succeeded in my must.
How your year unfolds is how you decide it must.
I’m not saying you can make your year perfect or challenges won’t arise. I’m saying how you respond makes all the difference.
WHAT NEXT
Tools for you:
- Other articles I’ve written relating to this one.
- Want to know what empowered me to overcome that trigger? Read here.
- 1,2Get my book Emerging With Wings for the full story.
- Get my new book Because You Matter for how the power of must turned into a strategy in chapter 7.
Thank you, Danielle!
You’re welcome, Kara. Thanks for reading and commenting!