How to Fix your Holidays

Friends Church Calgary Weekly Message

Speaker: Vince Klassen

“The hardest thing you’ll ever do is admit that you’re [part of the problem]”

I was reading an article recently that had my paraphrased quote as the byline. “That’s a bit harsh” I thought! And yet as I sat with this, I started to look at the difficult parts of my holiday season where, if I’m really honest, I was part of the problem. I played a role in what went down. Sometimes it was obviously me being the problem. Sometimes my role was responding poorly when someone else was the the problem, my response just making everything worse. Sometimes I got angry back, or withdrew, or got quiet, or got nasty. But I did make things worse.

The problem was, I didn’t know what was causing my bad behavior. I didn’t know the trigger.

Do you?

We often walk into situations without a conscious awareness of things that are going to make us snap, or suck all our energy out, or any number of responses. We try to control our responses but what if we looked underneath and started to see what caused them. Deal with the root cause?

What would it look like going into the Holidays with an awareness of what might set us off? Be able to manage the triggers instead of having to apologize for our bad responses? Be it blowing up and having to apologize, or pretending we can’t make an event, or drinking more than we should to get through? What if we could do better?

That’s our goal this week.

And surprisingly, I think the author Luke from the Bible had this in mind when he wrote his story of Jesus’s birth and early life.

See you at the Spiritual Gym. Invite a friend who might need some help in this area. Or send it to them after you hear the talk if it resonates with you.

One of my favorite Enneagram resources [and link to it: https://www.instagram.com/alignedsoulco]

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