Is Your Brain Stuck on an Old Script? Here’s How to Embrace Change

“Me!!!” I typed into the webinar’s chat.

I raced to respond to Kelly’s question before anyone else:

“Who feels they’re struggling with how to create content that drives shares?” she had asked.

Turns out I was the only one who responded.

“OK, Sara. Come on now,” Kelly admonished. “You just took a whole course on how to create content that drives shares.”

I had. With her as my teacher, mind you.

I did know better.

But I had followed the old script in my brain — as if on autopilot — instead of applying my new knowledge and tools.

Here’s the thing

In that webinar session, Kelly kept pointing to lessons I had learned in her course.

To tools I had.

To strategies I owned — if I could make myself at home with them.

But my brain was stuck in old thought patterns.

Why?

“Sara, you’re like a kid at Christmas, excitedly opening a package, admiring the contents — and then abandoning it as you rush to open the next tantalizing gift,” I sensed God speak to me.

“You’re still looking for more instead of using what you have.”

But change is hard, right?

The strategies and skills I learned with Kelly weren’t easy. Every few days we’d apply new methods to content we’d written.

I saw improvement, absolutely. But I also saw how long it took to apply her principles.

While I knew it would get easier the more I followed her guidelines (practice makes perfect, yes?), I knew it would be slow-going at the start.

Too often it seems easier to go back to doing things the way I’ve been doing them — rather than make the effort to change my routine.

Especially when embracing the gift seems to require a lot of me.

But God seems to be pushing this point with me: Make it you by using it.

Yes, let it become you

Embrace the gift. Explore it. Exhaust its limits.

“That’s how you get the new script into your head. That’s how you make it your skillset rather than head knowledge,” He told me.

“That’s when it’s not just ‘yours’ but it’s ‘you.’“

Check out what Paul wrote to the Galatians:

“Since this is the kind of life we have chosen, the life of the Spirit, let us make sure that we do not just hold it as an idea in our heads or a sentiment in our hearts, but work out its implications in every detail of our lives.” 

(Galatians 5:25, MSG)

Don’t just hold it as an idea or sentiment; work out its implications in your life.

Go all in

Yes, Paul meant the life of the Spirit, and I’ve been learning how to walk in the Spirit since I was in junior high school.

But I think this has implications for those gifts and goals (and courses on making blogging count), too.

Work out their implications in your life. (Yes, I’m talking to myself.)

Later in Galatians, Paul wrote this:

“Make a careful exploration of who you are and the work you have been given, and then sink yourself into that. … Each of you must take responsibility for doing the creative best you can with your own life.”

(Galatians 6:4-5, MSG)

I’m sensing a theme.

Let’s sink ourselves into the gifts God has given us. Let’s do our creative best with all the tools we have.

Including, for me, the ones I learned from Kelly.

Don’t be like this

Last weekend, my husband replaced a heating element in our ceramic-top stove. The large burner on the back left side, the one we used most often, had gone bad.

He tested the new burner and seemed satisfied. But when he cooked his famous fajitas for dinner this week, he didn’t trust the burner to do its job.

(In his defense, it wasn’t heating as quickly as it should have.)

He’d remove the pan; the burner would burn red; he’d put the pan back — only to whisk it away to see if it had stayed red hot. He was convinced it wasn’t.

“Just leave it on the burner,” I coaxed Steve. “You’re not giving it a chance to work.”

His peppers and onions never sizzled…

You’re not giving it a chance…

It was so easy for me to see the truth about the frying pan on the burner. Much more challenging for me to apply it to myself.

Are you like me? Do you, too, whisk the pan off the burner before it has a chance to do its work? Do you open a gift only to ignore it?

I’ve got shirts in my closet still bearing the price tags — items I purchased years ago. I never gave them the chance to be worn, let alone worn out.

Enough.

It’s time to rip off the tags and wear out our gifts — whether they’re made of fabric, spiritual truths, or courses loaded with proven (and paid for) tips and tools and way too many to-do’s.

Who’s going to embrace the gift? Explore it? Exhaust its limits?

And in so doing get a new script into her head?

Me!!!

(And I’d love for you to respond, too.)

Let’s go all in.