#109 Make It Matter

Rachel Denning (00:01.07)
Hey, my friends, welcome to another episode of the Extraordinary Family Life podcast. I hope you're smiling today. If you're not smiling today, will you smile for me? Just do it right now. Just a big cheesy grin. And just pause for a minute. If you're feeling stressed or overwhelmed or frustrated or maybe just feeling some blah, just pause. Take a deep breath. Just smile.

Maybe if you're feeling a lot of tension, maybe you just need to stop and just do some praying and meditating and just kind of relax and let the tension out. I hope you guys will take time, and this is ironic because my message today is going to be like, let's go! But my pre -message is I hope you take time to celebrate the good that you're doing and acknowledging.

the good things you're doing and celebrating the progress you make. I hope you do that. I know a lot of you don't pause to make the time and effort to celebrate goodness and achievement and acknowledge the things you are doing well and your gifts and your strengths and your talents and your abilities and your accomplishments. So make sure you're doing that. If you're one of those people, it's always hard on yourself and pretty self -critical. Make it.

Make it a practice, maybe a regular practice of just acknowledging even at the end of the week, you just look back and say, what did I do well this week? Maybe you might even do it daily. What did I do well today? And let's just celebrate because you're awesome. And I mean that genuinely, sincerely, you're awesome. And way to go. Way to go being a great human being and striving to be your best self.

So have a little self -love, a little self -celebration, and things you're doing well. And then get back on it. Keep on plugging away and making incremental improvements every day. So my message today, my friends, is a fun one, and it's exciting. And it's really interesting. You've noticed this. You've probably experienced it yourself. I've noticed it working with people over the years all around the world.

Rachel Denning (02:24.622)
is sometimes they, I guess the context comes back to the way people respond to things. And it's really interesting. You'd think, and we would think, and generally think, oh yeah, when something's serious, everyone's gonna react with seriousness to it. But what kind of blew me away, and this started years ago, I started noticing this, is that people wouldn't take serious things seriously. I'm like, what? Like, how?

How could you not? For example, let's say your health is jeopardized and you go in and like you almost have a heart attack, right? So this is like a common thing where people just they eat really poorly, they don't exercise and they're literally borderline like cardiac arrest. And so they go in and the big wake up call is the heart surgeon, the cardiologist saying, look, if you do not change your life,

you're going to die, right? That kind of conversation. If you don't stop doing this, it's gonna destroy your health. Or if you don't stop doing this, it's gonna destroy, you're going down this life path, you're gonna destroy your life. It's those kind of conversations, right? And we would all think, you just naturally assume like, oh man, if you're that bad that your cardiologist is saying, look, if you don't change things immediately, you are on a path to destruction.

The natural thought is, oh man, yeah, everyone's gonna take that seriously. Gee, who wouldn't, right? But that's the crazy thing, my friends, and part of my message today is that sometimes people don't. And I know people like that, maybe you know people like that, that their physician says, look, if you don't stop, you are on a path of self -destruction. You're gonna die a lot sooner than you should. And...

then we see them to, you know, in our sadness and regret, they just stay on their same path. They keep eating the horrible food, they don't exercise, they don't take care of their bodies, they keep going. And that's kind of this catalyst for this idea of like, oh, wait a minute. Sometimes we don't, you know, we don't necessarily, there's no like mandate, there's no requirement that people take serious things seriously.

Rachel Denning (04:54.861)
And then as I've thought about it over the years, I realized, you know what? I think that's true of all of us. Sometimes we, we don't make it matter. And that's, that really is the bulk of my brief message today is we have to choose to make it matter. We have to make in our minds. And sometimes you have to, you have to choose it and then choose it again and keep choosing it.

But we have to, in our minds, in our hearts, in our lives, we have to make important things important. It won't always happen by default. It won't happen naturally, even though we think it should. Naturally, we would think everyone should take their health seriously, but they don't. Naturally, we think everyone would take their marriage seriously, like, hey, look, if you don't make some changes right now, you're going to lose your marriage.

And then they just plug right along doing the same old things. We'd say that with your lives, hey, you're on a path of self -destruction here. If you don't make some changes in your life, you're going to destroy your life. And they're like, yeah, yeah, we should. And then, boop, back on their way. And so my invitation to all of us today is literally this message. Make it matter.

And what I'm saying is, in your mind, grab a hold of that lever and crank it up. Make it matter. Choose the thing that you know you need to work on. Make it matter. And it literally is a choice. This is what's so cool and so fascinating. And this might be new for some of you that were just this concept of, oh, wait a minute. I get to choose how important this is in my life.

And I can deliberately and intentionally grab a hold of that dial and just crank it up and say, you know what, this matters so much. And you can move it into a priority position. What's interesting is like sometimes we will talk about it. Like right now, if we were sitting here having conversations and say, Hey, what are the most important things in your life? You'd be like, yeah, you know, it's my, my spouse, my family, my children, my relationship with God, my health, you know, my own.

Rachel Denning (07:22.573)
Taking care of my life and we would prioritize these things but then it's always it's always extremely valuable to say do my actions and habits align with what I'm saying here is there congruency and There often is not because we might say it superficially of like yeah, those are the most important things but we haven't grabbed a hold of that lever like I'm talking about that dial and really cranked up the importance of

We haven't made that deliberate choice to make it matter.

I want to share a thought that I wrote down yesterday. Yesterday morning I was just, I was doing some thinking and some writing and this idea of an echo was in my mind and it just, I had this thought of like, wait a minute, oh, this is beautiful. Like how we start our day echoes throughout the day, right? It's not always a d***.

direct effect, but how we begin our day has an echo, right? Or a ripple. There's just this gentle ripple, this gentle echo throughout the day. And I shared it with some of my coaching students. They were like, yes, that's so true. If I'm slow getting up and kind of groggy and, you know, dragging my feet, I find that I do that throughout the day. But if I pop up and take action and get going, I find that I do that throughout the day. So here's the rest of the thought I had.

What we do in the morning, how we start our day, echoes throughout the day. What we do in our days echoes throughout our life. Right? There's just this gentle echo. If we do it day in and day out, it just starts to echo throughout our life. And then here's the real hit home reality. What we do in life echoes in eternity.

Rachel Denning (09:24.973)
And so in one sense, the way we start our day, it starts to add up and it'll echo throughout eternity.

And I want to invite you today to make things matter, to get really clear about the things that matter most and make them matter. Like level up, raise necessity, raise urgency, raise the importance, make your priorities your priorities. And it really is just genuinely a choice. It's that simple. You have to decide this matters.

way more than I've been having it matter to me. And for some of you, it might be your health. Maybe you just haven't made that serious enough. You haven't made it matter enough and you need to do that today. Maybe it's your education. So, Kaia and I go to this exercise gym for martial arts, which I love it. It's just super fun. And one of our instructors shared a thought this morning that I really loved. She...

admitted that she's had this problem of like starting books but never finishing them. And it's kind of just been this pattern. She's like, oh, I want to read and she'll read a little bit and then never start, which is a very common thing. Most people don't finish the books they buy. And so she but she also noticed about herself that she hated running and she needed to run. She needed to go out and run with her dog. And so she said during this, you know, the quarantine period of the COVID here, she's realized that kind of

I'm not finishing what I read and I'm not out running like I should. So I was like, I'm done, I'm doing it. So she started running and she was like, I'm struggling with it, it was hard, it was brutal. And then she had this aha moment, which I think this is brilliant. She just had this aha moment of like, wait a minute, not finishing all these books is like this extra load that I'm carrying around. And so she put all the unfinished books that she bought but hasn't finished in a backpack.

Rachel Denning (11:29.645)
and she's been running with that backpack. As this reminder of like, wait a minute, these things that I'm not making important are like extra weight. It's an extra burden because I'm not making them a priority. They don't matter enough. These are my words now. They don't matter enough and I'm not giving them the importance they deserve and so it's just this extra burden, this extra weight that I'm now carrying through my life. Boom, let that hit home.

It's so true. And as I walked away this morning after she mentioned that I was like, Oh man, that is gold because like our ignorance is this burden that we're carrying around. And our unfinished business that's important is this huge burden that we're carrying around. And the things we aren't making important enough if we don't make it matter. Then it becomes this huge burden. It's a problem. And you're just dealing with it all the time.

And that's whether your bedroom closet is a disaster zone or your garage and it's just this undone mess that's just chaotic and unprioritized and you just haven't taken care of it. Maybe it's a vehicle that's not running well and you just don't get it fixed. There are things around the house that need to be fixed. Maybe it's your relationships with yourself, with money, with food, with your spouse, with your kids. Like you leave it undone, you haven't made it matter, right?

And so then it just becomes this burden that you just drag along through life. And so some of you have this big, I don't know how to even describe it, this big chain with all these clumps in it and they're acting like anchors and drag lines and you're just trying to move through life and you're just dragging them along. It's just burden you have because you haven't made them matter or haven't made them matter enough.

So my simple invitation today to all of us is take the things that really do matter, that really truly are important, grab a hold of that dial or that lever, crank it up, make it matter, raise necessity, raise urgency, and yes, that will necessarily remove other things from your life.

Rachel Denning (13:53.805)
when you're shifting your priorities, other things are necessarily going to be pushed down. That's okay. Let them be pushed down. It's interesting how people become passionate about things that don't matter and really passive about things that do matter. And we give time and attention and devotion and effort and energy and resources to things that really aren't that important.

to the neglect of things that really are important. And so I want to invite you to consider that in yourself and make those shifts. Look at the things that really matter and then man, make them matter. I know I'm repeating myself here, but I'm trying to drill this point home of...

creating a sense.

Rachel Denning (14:51.469)
I don't know, I need more words here. I need to expand my vocabulary. Because I keep coming back to the same words. But creating a sense of importance and urgency inside of you. Where you no longer neglect or go through the motions or just it's just kind of there, right? It's transactional like we talked about in the last podcast.

It's just transactional. You're like, okay, I'll just, yeah, I'll do it. I'll go through with it. And so you're getting, you know, when you only give leftovers to your health and fitness or to your family or whatever it is, when you only get leftovers, then of course you get leftover results.

which is lame. It's really lame. So decide today. What is it my friends? What is it that you know in your heart and mind you have to make matter more?

do that today and then it's really easy to say, you look at it and say, if this mattered way more to me, what would I do differently? That's a pretty simple question because you're going to know right away, like, oh, okay. And do it, do it right now. Like literally ask yourself, if that mattered more to me, what would I do? If my marriage mattered more to me, what would I do? If my health mattered more to me, what would I do? If my finances mattered more to me, what would I do? If my children mattered more to me, what would I do?

If my career, my business, if pursuing my purpose, my mission, my passion, my life's work, if that mattered more to me, what would I do? If service and caring and loving and making an impact mattered more to me, what would I do differently? And I think you'll, I think you know already, or give it, give it a minute to think and write down some ideas, then put that up in front of you and decide, decide, resolve, right?

Rachel Denning (16:56.749)
Settle it in your mind and your heart. This really matters to me. And then act like it. Show it. Prove it. Do that. Prove it to yourself and to others that it really truly does matter. And I promise my friends, as you start doing that, you're gonna start getting different results. You're gonna start getting different outcomes.

because you're going to start acting like it really does matter. And when it really does matter, man, you get things done. And it's awesome. And it comes out. It's obvious. It's clearly evident what really matters. So my friends, grab a hold of that dial, crank it up, and make it matter. Reach upward.