Even though you have all of your business plans and goals nicely laid out in front of you, going off the road is still a factor you cannot remove from your equation. Without surrendering to God, the chances of that happening are way higher. Dr. Tracey Jones talks to Joseph Warren, the host of The Broken Catholic Podcast, about how letting go of the wheel and letting God work through you is an attitude every leader must have to gain a better vision in life. He explains how a one-hour meditation helps a lot in listening to God's voice and why eliminating our nagging ways can unlock better relationships. At our most vulnerable, God makes the most out of us.
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Joseph Warren – Leaders on Leadership
Our guest is Joseph Warren. Joseph is the host of the Broken Catholic, the number one podcast on iTunes for Protestants and Catholics. He's also best known as the Family Relationship Coach and the creator of Fix ANY Relationship in 30 Days, a proven process to heal broken relationships with your family, yourself, and God. You are going to love what Joseph has to say about what it takes to pay the price of leadership.
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I'm excited to introduce to you our guest, Joseph Warren. Joseph is the host of Broken Catholic, the number one podcast on iTunes for Protestants and Catholics. His show has been rated under the top 100 Christian podcasts in the world since 2019. His other show, Your First $100K, is a top 200 podcast for entrepreneurship. I know we have a lot of entrepreneurs reading. Joseph Warren started his first multimillion-dollar business at age nineteen and wasted away his twenties trying to find happiness through money, success, and pleasure.
He made millions, but then he lost it all and consider taking his own life. Having triumph through multiple failed businesses and broken relationships, Joseph Warren is best known as the Family Relationship Coach and the creator of Fix ANY Relationship in 30 Days, a proven process to heal broken relationships with your family, yourself, and God. He married his dream girl, Falon, in 2019 and is dad to one lovely daughter, Alora Love. Joseph, thank you for being on the show.
Dr. Tracey, it is a pleasure to be here. I like you already. We're going to have a great time. Let's talk all things leadership.
I want to talk about the beautiful name of your daughter, Alora Love. For our readers, I want to tell you how I like explaining how this wonderful individual came into my sphere. Mark Victor Hansen, he was dear friends with my father. I interviewed him, one of our most viewed shows. Mark's energy is incredible. He introduced me to Joseph Warren. That's what tremendous people do, they connect you with other tremendous people. Joseph got married. Tell me about your daughter, Alora Love.
Alora Love is the light in my eye. The name of Alora means the Lord is my light, and Alora does exactly that. She was a pandemic baby. Two weeks into the pandemic she was born. I experienced, with my wife, a different aspect of a pandemic. We had joy, peace, love all around us and family while the world had worry and all that other tension. Wherever we go, she's peaceful, joyful, and a big smile and lights up other people's faces. In church, at one time, the pastor mentioned something about the pandemic or whatever and I held up my daughter. We were in the front row. When I hold her up, her face opens and she lights up like she's flying. She loves it. Everyone behind me in the congregation could see this little baby being held up with this radiant joy coming out of her. I turned around and hundreds of people had smiles on their faces. She did that. That's what we're called to do, exactly what my baby girl did, to be Christ light in the world.
We're going to unpack that. My father wrote this speech called The Price of Leadership many years ago. He was passionate about leadership. He loved Christ, which is why he was able to be triumphant and resilient in his approach. He also said, “Tracey, there is a price you're going to have to pay to be a leader.” He went through four different things. I would love to unpack that with you because we do have the God in us. We had the help of the Creator to get us through this, but we're also humans in this mortal coil. We saw that like Christ did, the God side but we have the physical side, too. We're going to start with this, Joseph. You've done a lot of different things. You've had high highs and low lows. Can you unpack for us what loneliness means for you? Maybe share a season of loneliness in your time and how you would exhort leaders out there reading if they're in the wilderness.
Regarding loneliness, there are two types of loneliness. There's intentional loneliness, those times in our life where we want to be single. We want to enjoy our time getting to know ourselves, finding ourselves, finding our purpose. There are those unintentional lonely times. Those are those times in our life where we crave companionship. For whatever reason, we can't seem to bring those people in our life. Somehow, it's almost like we repel the thing we're looking for, that love from others and from God. Those are the two types of loneliness. I've had both in my life as I'm sure many of our readers have.
One thing I'd like to say about the four topics starting with loneliness is that you mentioned being Christians. Christian versus non-Christian, two separate places on the same spiritual journey. I'm not going to say one's better or worse than the other. I've been in both. I've lived in Christianity and I've lived as an atheist. I've lived as an agnostic as well. I could speak from both sides of that desk. I would say, whether I had God in my life or didn't, I still had human struggles. We're talking about four of them.
The difference is, as a Christian, I had a place to go with my struggles. When I was a non-Christian, I had nowhere to go. I carried the weight of the world and my own destiny on my own shoulders. It's exhausting. That's why I ended up ready to take my life. That's why I relied on self rather than on God. The benefit of being Christian or to spending time with God is that you have a place to take the burdens of life. I wanted to say that loneliness itself, to those out there that are reading and find yourself in a season of loneliness, maybe it's intentional loneliness.
I coach a lot of men, successful individuals in the business world but they go home miserable and lonely. I have one client I'll speak of, she's a successful female business owner. Her husband is battling with alcohol addiction. She's trying to support him as best she can. At the same time, she's trying to put up that boundary where that toxicness doesn't enter the family life and her kids. He comes home every day from work, he goes out in the garage and he works on the garage to isolate himself from his own family. As fast as he can, he gets out of the house and into the garage to the point where he came to her and he said, “I'm going to build an apartment in the garage and I'm going to live there.”
To go to show, there's loneliness there he's creating for himself, yet he doesn't want it. The thing he wants, love, peace, acceptance, that we all want as humans are right inside his home waiting for him and he doesn't know how to access it. He is driving himself further away. There's one reader reading that is exactly what that man is. Maybe it's not alcohol, maybe it’s something else. Maybe it's porn addiction, whatever it is. The key to loneliness is to surrender it. Don't fight it. Fighting it doesn't work. All my clients say, “I got to work on that. I got to work on this. I'm working on that.” How's it going? You've been working on it for how many years? “I don’t know, seven.” That's not working.
What is the solution? The solution is you surrender it to God, the only one who is strong enough to take that burden from you. Until you surrender it with your free will, God will never trump your free will. For our non-Christian readers, when it comes to loneliness, whatever your flavor of loneliness that you're experiencing in your life and don't act like you’re not. You're human. Whatever you're hiding that loneliness in, maybe you're a workaholic, maybe you're killing it in your business. Maybe you're a great leader at work, but a poor leader at home. There's loneliness there. You're bandaging something. For all of you, whether you believe in God or not, I could say surrender is the key. It's your way out. It's your solution.
It’s like when you see celebrities that take their lives and you're like, “Why? They had it all.” If there's one thing we all can agree on no matter our worldview or political view or religious view, you can have it all and still have that hole in your life. When did you realize when you got to that point that you didn't need to go alone? You got to the end where there was no hope and you wanted to not live anymore. What spoke to you? Where did it all come together? Where did that spark happen where you were open to, “There's another way to deal with this rather than checking out.”
Being raised as a Christian, suicide was never an option. Not for real, yet I had all the thoughts of ending the pain. I did well at a young age. At nineteen years old, I made millions. I retired at the young age of 24 and partied for five years in Scottsdale, Arizona, and wasted away my fortune. While my fortune left, I also watched my friends leave. My girlfriend left. I had nothing left and I had no one left. That was my bottom.
I remember I called my oldest sister in Tampa, Florida and I was in Scottsdale. I was weeping on the phone and I hadn't cried since I was a little boy. She was like, “Joseph, this isn't like you. You're the positive guy. You're the personal growth guy, the self-help guy, the leadership guy. What's going on? This is bad.” I was like, “I lost everything.” I got to the top and it was a lie. It was empty. It was lonely. It was all those things. At this time in my life, I had thrown God out the window. I worshiped the God of money, success, and pleasure, and that God lies to you.
I wept and my sister said, “Why don't you move to Tampa and start over? Come stay with us, the kids, my husband and rebuild your life.” That was humiliating. I was at the top of my game. I had 50 employees. I was leading their lives, their incomes and their families. It was like, “I'm going to go live in my sister's second bedroom. What?” This is how life shows up sometimes when we don't focus on what matters most.
The Book of Proverbs goes a lot into friends that are there all around you for the wrong reasons, but we don't want to listen to that when we're younger.
“They love me for me.”
“They get me and I can be with them.” You had the seed already planted in you that God was an option and God was there to help. You had so much success and you thought you could do it on your own.
Surrendering To God: The benefit of being Christian is that you have a place to take the burdens of life.
I was the self-made man.
God would be for people that needed God to help them make themselves.
That's how I saw it at a young age. I grew up in a forced religion. My mom and dad are awesome, but they did what they could with what they could. My dad was a Marine. As a US Marine, he combined Catholicism with Marine Corps training. That's called redundancy. That was brutal. We were like little soldiers. It was more worshiping a tyrannical God who demands perfection and performance, rather than a God who asked for a relationship. I didn't have that. I threw that whole version of religion out the window at a young age and I said, “I'm going to go out into the world and get what's mine.” I did and realized it wasn't enough.
I love your point about whether you have God in your life or not, we're strong. We’re tenacious. Whether you believe he made us or not, we got these wonderful brains and our bodies are incredibly resilient. You can get pretty far on your own, but the world has a nasty way of biting you. If you're not being wise as serpents, you can get in with the wrong group. I love it when you said self-made man because my dad was also a self-made man until he found God and realized, “Who am I going to live my life for?” Whenever he’d meet one of these birds in the personal development industry that would say, “I'm a self-made man.” He'd Look at them and say, “Good, that relieves god of that responsibility.” He would laugh.
It's like, “If you think yourself can do the best, okay.” There's a humility in that. That's definitely a beautiful take on loneliness. I'm thankful that you were open to then reach out to somebody and realize you don't have to keep doing it alone. That's a story for the readers. At any moment that you go, “This hurts,” surrender is always an option. I was in the military. I married a Marine Catholic. That's one of the things, you got to surrender. That's a beautiful thing. A lot of times, submission, followership, discipleship or surrender is like, “No.” It’s the devil loves to get you all puffed up with yourself because that's when he can take a real bite out of you.
There were two types of surrender that I've identified in my life and I apply to all my coaching with my clients. As men especially, women as well, powerful women, surrender is a dirty word. If you look it up in the dictionary, it's dying, it's a weakness, it's a white flag, “I lost. You lost. You're a loser.” None of us want to be a loser in the world. We want success, a self-made individual. That is the first type of surrender. I call that physical surrender. It's where you're physically surrendering to a stronger power and submitting. That's not what God calls us to do.
The second type of surrender is spiritual surrender. It's in the spiritual realm. It's not in the physical realm. Spiritual surrender is the dying to self, the dying to ego. It's your egoic self. It's hanging it on a cross next to Jesus, putting it to death and being risen three days later as what CS Lewis calls a miniature Jesus. As long as your ego is taking over and running your life and running your own little universe, then there's no room for a God. In fact, there's no room for your wife, there's no room for your kids because your ego is too big. You've got to die to self if you want to have a meaningful life. It's a spiritual surrender, not a physical surrender. You’d still be there. Your whole body will still be there. When you let go of this and die spiritually, the freedom, peace, joy, everything you're chasing out in the world in the physical realm that you can't find, it's right there on the other side of spiritual surrender.
When you see people go through this metamorphosis, you see their countenance change. I saw a movie years ago, The Case for Christ, where Lee Strobel spoke and trying to disprove God. Finally, in the end, you could see his whole face and I'm like, “That guy is a good actor because it looks like he met Jesus in a relational way.” That's what you see. It's great for the leaders. I love the point about surrender. For our readers out there, I'm sure, Joseph, you would echo this. That surrender is a daily process. It's not one and done. It's the old Zig Ziglar, they say, “Motivation doesn't last, neither does bathing. That's why we recommend it daily.” That's surrender.
You got to get up every day because this is still part of our fallen nature. Every day, we get to put that bad boy in his place and surrender that. The guy in the garage, many people are like that. The other people around them see that they're slowly killing themselves. You coach people through this, the loneliness. It's never about the other person. It's something they're carrying around within them. How do you help them unpack that? Share a success story about something that's come out of that.
I have many success stories. I have a 97% success rate with any client that I coach with, getting exactly the result that they showed up wanting, which is a beautiful thing. I don't do the work. I give them the access. God does all the work and the healing. It's a beautiful, amazing thing. That being said, let's wrap up and give a happy ending to that story of the guy in the garage. If you're reading and you’re a version of that guy in the garage, there's a happy ending for you too. This happy ending is in the process because I am coaching his wife and not him. I don't have access to him, yet I'm seeing the suffering in him. I'm hearing through her. That's chipping away their marriage and obviously impacting her and the success of her business. She's a seven-figure earner. I cannot access him because his free will hasn't chosen to coach with me, but his wife has.
I believe, in the biblical sense of marriage, that two separate individuals become one flesh, which means if I'm coaching with her, I am indirectly coaching him because she and he are one in the spiritual realm. She's like, “What do I do?” I said, “The first thing you're going to do is you're going to stop nagging your husband about his alcohol addiction. He's already kicking the crap out of himself. I guarantee it. He is beating himself down and that's the powerlessness that he's feeling is the guilt and the shame. You want to set him free from that as his wife, as his spouse.” She says, “How do I do it?” I said, “Back off. Let him be.”
Here's the secret for all the wives out there who have stubborn husbands in one area or more, the same for husbands with seven wives. The secret is to stop nagging your spouse to fix or change the thing that they're having an issue with or feel broken in. It's not going to work. You're only pushing them further away into isolation, into their own garage experience. Stop. It's not working. That was the first thing. You got to get out of that denial. It's not going to pan out for you. It's going to get worse and you'll end in a divorce.
What do you do with that? You go to his dad, his Heavenly Father. When your husband stops listening to you, you go to his Father. Bring your nagging to heaven. You beat down the gates of heaven and you say, “Heavenly Father, help my husband. He stopped listening to me. He's sick. He's unwell. He's hurting. He's broken. Father, you love him. Heal him. Use force if necessary. I, as his wife, give you permission to hit him upside the head with a 2x4 if that's what it takes. I love him that much. Hurt him. I'd rather he be hurt than dead.” This takes courage. She did it. She surrendered it to God.
She stopped nagging her husband and she accepted where he was. He'd come into the home and she's like, “Hi, honey.” That was it. That was shocking for him because she had nothing to say to him, he came in drunk. That was a shift. His attention is like, “What's going on?” I said, “Surrender your husband's addiction to God. No more your little control freak, trying to control his addiction. Stop, let it go. You're playing God in your own marriage. It's not working. Give it to God and then trust God will heal it because you believe he will. He's loving God.” She did it.
Our next coaching session, I'm like, “How's it going?” She goes, “Joseph, you'll never guess what happened.” I'm like, “What?” She said, “My husband came in one night to the bedroom and he said, ‘Honey, I'm done.’” She's like, “Done with what?” “I'm done drinking.” She's like, “Honestly, I couldn't believe him because he said that before.” He also said, “By the way, me moving out into the garage, I now understand how irrational that is. That won't be happening.” She looked at him and I gave her coaching, words to say and she said, “I and the kids are here for you. We're not going anywhere. No matter what you do, you won't push us away.”
That's God's with us.
She's like, “You can hurt yourself. You can try to hurt us unintentionally. I'm not leaving. They're not leaving. We are 100% right here in the house for you forever. Let us know when you're ready.”
I'm glad you said that. Our readers know I was married once a long time ago in a galaxy far away. I was single for a long time. How I got my head wrapped around this is I read John Piper's book. I went into the covenant of marriage. I went in and said, “I want to love one person on earth the way Christ loves me or the church.” I didn't need anybody to complete me. I really did that. My dad used to say that and I'm like, “Doesn't it upset you what some of the kids do?” He goes, “Yes, but then I remember how many times I must have brought God to tears with everything I did.” It's a whole different way of looking at it. When we got married, I was marrying one of God's sons and he was marrying a daughter of Christ. Thank you for sharing that because that's the only way it happens. That tenderness, nagging never works. Proverbs talks about a nagging wife.
That was my reference.
I don’t think people think about a nagging husband. There are 31 Proverbs. Every day, we read a proverb. Every time my husband reads one of those verses, he repeats it ten times and I'm like, “I’m trying to keep the lid on this nagging thing. You could have married a nagger.”
My client did something powerful. Not only did she stop nagging her husband about his addiction, brokenness and how it occurred to her was weakness because she's the type A, powerful executive woman. She stood in the gap for her husband. That's what leadership looks like. He didn't have the strength to do it himself. That's leadership when you're willing to do that for somebody else. She did a homework assignment I gave her because I give out tough homework assignments. I'm not easy as a coach. That's why it works and that's why we get results.
Surrendering To God: As long as your ego is taking over your life and running your own little universe, there's no room for a God.
She had to do a forgiveness conversation with her husband. She didn't have to, she chose to. It looked like, “I am truly sorry for how I've been showing up with you through what you're going through. I've been making you wrong about it. I've been nagging you about it. I want to say I am truly sorry for any hurt I have caused you or if I've made this any more difficult for you. Would you be willing to forgive me?” She stopped talking and handed her power over to him to either receive that forgiveness and give it back or to reject it. That's what forgiveness looks like, hand your power over to another.
Most leaders do not do this. They say, “I'm sorry I did that.” It's a dismissive sorry. They forget the final part, “Would you be willing to forgive me? Here's my power. Here's my vulnerability. Reject me if you want. I hurt you. I'm willing to put myself at risk now. I love you that much.” When she did that, that opened up something in that man that brought back his dignity, gave him a little sense of power back as a man so that he could get back up. That's everything.
That's a different approach on loneliness. It's a real thing. My dad talked about weariness. We still have this flesh and we're still dealing with issues. Some people have some physical issues. How do you combat weariness? How do you stay replenished and refreshed so you can run the race and finish strong?
It goes back to what you said and I contributed to that carrying the weight of your own personal destiny on your shoulders is exhausting. Being self-reliant is exhausting. Trying to lead your own life and then come home to a family, your spouse, your kids, who rely on you as the leader of the home, it's exhausting. You got to have a place to go with it. You have to have a place to recharge, to replenish. Here's the secret, it's not your strength that's going to do it.
What do I do? I used to rely on myself and I used to drown it out. My coping mechanism was I would drink occasionally. I never had an addiction in that. In my single life, I acted out with women. I fell into a sexual addiction bad. I had never been addicted to anything and that was a sign of weakness to me, being raised by a Marine. God allowed me to experience addiction for the first time so that I can experience what powerlessness feels like so that I could relate to the people he was going to bring to me and not be holier than them looking down on them. Fix it. Change it. Get out of it. Stop being a weak person. I got to see that chemical powerlessness. There was a chemical thing. I couldn't stop it even when I tried.
Where do I take it to? I was set free from my addiction. My clients are set free from theirs when they get quiet with God in the morning. I'm the tough coach. I do a 40-day holy hour challenge. That means 60 minutes, not 59, not 58, not 52. Sixty minutes in silence. Stop talking, listen. What you have to say to God is not as important as what God has to say to you. Many of us were never taught how to pray correctly. We were taught to show up to God and say, “Thank you. Give me something.”
God sees our hearts. God sees our motives. Rather, would you be willing to show up and spend time with God with nothing in return? No ask. That's what a relationship is. I define a relationship as time spent with another. Do not say you love your wife if you don't spend time with her. Do not say you love your kids if you spend more time with your work. You're lying. You're pretending and you're going to have bitter kids. Time spent with another, that's how I did it. I spend an hour a day in silence with God. I gave him two weeks. I was in an arrogant place. I said, “God, I will show up an hour a day for the next two weeks. If you want to talk, let me know. Otherwise, I'll sit here bored off my ass,” pretty much is what I said.
In those two weeks, God slowly put people in my life that opened me up, challenged me, mentored me and taught me spiritual disciplines of how to stop talking to God and start listening to God. When I learned that spiritual discipline that any human being can learn and I now teach in my coaching, God started showing up in an experiential way. Healing all the wound and brokenness in my heart, from childhood trauma, broken relationships over a lifetime, that had caused me to act out in an addiction. He healed it all and I didn't have to. That will put every therapist on planet earth out of business.
Therapy is good, but it's not complete. It says, “You can heal you.” No, you can't. That's why their business model is perpetual. It keeps you coming back year after year. Clients work with me one time and then they don't need me anymore. That's a beautiful place because they learn how to give it to God, how to surrender. That's how I do it. That's the short answer is one hour a day in silence and I surrender whatever struggle I have, whatever thing I don't feel strong enough in. Wherever I have self-doubt, wherever I have any human struggle because I do, I drop them on God's lap and I sit with him and say, “God, I surrender this to you Father. What do you want me to do?”
How do you hear it? I know you talked about the confirmation, the God nods. I've seen that the minute I'm quiet. It's like trying to catch a butterfly. Let it land on you. Let grace flow on you. When I do that, then that starts coming in, people showing up, doors opening that I've been trying to kick down. Sit back. We all have this lean in and go grab it. Lean back and let God do the heavy lifting. How does he speak to you? Your modus operandi for you and your coaching and your experiences and this is beautiful, surrender. Do you hear him? Are you meditating? Are you reading the word? Are you truly being in silence?
The short answer is when I first started, I was trying to quiet my mind and that was a brutal experience. I had an active, creative mind as an entrepreneur and business leader. Fighting all the concerns of the world and what I have to do next and the meeting I have later, that was exhausting for two weeks. I pushed through it and then learn to quiet more. I was able to sit there. As thoughts came in, I didn't invite them to come sit down and have a cup of tea with me, if you get my drift. I didn't entertain the thoughts. That’s what's cool about your mind. If you don't focus on the thought and allow it in, meaning your imagination to go off on that thought, it passes through your mind like a conveyor belt. It waves and says, “Invite me to come to talk with you.” You nod at it. Give it that awkward look like it's an ex-girlfriend or whatever passing through and you're like, “Good to see you. I don't want to talk to you.”
It goes through on this conveyor belt and the next thought comes in. You keep doing this until it's a thought from God. It's something about your identity. It's something about who he is to you or a revelation about yourself. You record in a journal everything that you hear, sense, feel, or experience. It could be a color. It could be a sound. It could be a thought process. It could be a childhood memory. You don't try to analyze it. Not during that protected, sacred 60 minutes.
After the 60 minutes, you go back over and put on your analytical, critical, and judgmental hat and then you look through it, “What did God say to me?” That's where you think it through and interpret. During it, you're only receiving and recording. That's the secret to it all. It takes practice. It's a new muscle. Those who meditate out there, you're halfway there. The problem is you're stopping at nature and not the creator of nature. Go one step past because the creator of nature created you. If you're searching for your purpose, your meaning, what's going to fulfill you, he and only he has the answers. Go get it. Sit with him in silence. Ask him, “Father, what is my identity? What is my purpose? What are my assignments?” Wait, listen and write anything you hear. You will start to hear more and more as you start to sit with him more and more.
I wanted to drill into that. As entrepreneurs, it's tough to even sit there for fifteen minutes and have my morning devotionals without, “What about this?” I can remember watching my dad pray. He would say the name Jesus over and over again and I'm like, “What is that about?” He would say, “Whenever a thought would come in, I would say Jesus.” Him saying it out loud would orient him, “Stop. Keep away.” We can't control our thoughts. We have the mind of Christ. We have to discipline it. That's a huge factor and breakthrough. I’m going to do the one hour, too. I need to do that. I have to. The noise is exhausting to me. It's a good exhausting. The Holy Spirit is telling me, “You're not spending enough time talking to me. You're spending too much time talking to everybody else and not enough to me.” I got to get realigned. Thank you for that word of affirmation.
You're welcome. I acknowledge you for taking on that challenge. That will shift your life.
I can't wait. Abandonment also gets a bum rap like surrender. My father was talking about true focus on what we ought and need to think about and not what we like and want to think about. The Devil loves to distract us and get us to mission drift. How do you stay on point, Joseph?
Being we're on this theme, let's stay with this theme of bringing God in. The way I do it is I abandoned myself back to God's will versus my will. My will is all my hopes and dreams, and some of them are good. They're helpful. They don't harm people. They're beneficial to my life. These are human. They're not God's best though. There's a distinction. I want God's best because it's the only thing that will fulfill me, you, all of us. I abandoned myself to God's will, “God, this opportunity came up for me to co-author this book with this individual. I'm excited. It's awesome. I want to do it.” My old self would say, “Can you bless it? Because I'm doing it anyway. I'm here to get your blessing, not your approval if I'm being real about it.”
My new self, my surrendered self is now, “Father, as good as that looks, I'm not moving until you say go. If I lose it, it wasn't intended. It's not part of your plan for my life. It was part of my plan for my life.” My plan hasn't worked out. Let's be real. It hasn't. I see where my plan has gone. It led me to the top and then I crashed and almost wanted to kill myself. That's a terrible road. I don't want to go there again, ever. “God, I trust your plan even though I can't see it and I doubt it all the time. I still trust you enough because you're a good father. You're not going to let me down. I know that.” It's a daily surrender. It's a daily abandonment.
I promise you this, once you start learning to surrender every little thing to God, it gets easier. It's like going to the gym after you haven't gone in ten years, it's going to suck for a month. Let's be real. There's no way around it. Suck it up. Put on your big girl pants and go get it, but then it gets easier because you get acclimated. You get trained. The same thing goes with quieting your mind, it gets easier. The same thing goes with surrendering your will to God, it gets easier with practice. Everything gets easier with practice. Is that helpful?
I love that not moving until you say go. I love the blessing versus approval. It's easier to ask for forgiveness than permission. It's like, “That's selfish. That means you're hell-bent on going your way.” That's not cool. I love how you teased that out.
Surrendering To God: Once you start learning to surrender every little thing to God, life gets easier.
If you want to know if something in your life, an opportunity, an open door, is from God and not from your mind, the way to test it is put it at risk. How do you put it at risk? Be willing to lose it and give it up. How do you do that? If you want certainty in the matter, that's from God, not, “I think it's from God because it's good. He would stop me if it wasn't.” No, you have free will. He'll let you walk off a cliff if that's your choice. The way you test it is, for example, co-authoring a book with a top and huge brand. I would say, and I call these surrender prayers and I teach them, “Father, I surrender to you this book, deal or partnership. If it is your will, then let this specific thing happen or occur by this date. If it's not your will for me, it's not part of your plan, it's a nice thing but it's not your best for me, then I give you permission to slam that door shut hard and vicious. Make it clear and apparent. I can't move forward if I want to. In the name of Jesus.” That's a surrender prayer.
I'm putting it at risk and I'm saying, “Father, thank you. If this is a gift from you, this opportunity, I'm giving it back to you. If you want me to have it, you do it. If you don't want me to have it because it wasn't from you, which is something I grabbed and I'm pretending it's from you because I want it, then slam that thing closed because I want your will first.” That's everything. That's seeking God's kingdom and his righteousness first. When we do that, he gives all those other things to us.
I don't worry about money. I don't stress about hardly anything. Anything that looks like stress in my life or resembles stress is waiting on God to put me in coach for the big game. That's the only thing that would cause me anything is the waiting. God is building a foundation around me because I thought he was building a nice five-story home for my life. When in fact, he's building a skyscraper. A skyscraper takes much longer to prepare the foundation for. Once I got that, I step back and stop fighting him and let him put in the concrete. Let him put in the foundation. That will tie into our next thing, vision.
Let's talk about vision. Sometimes vision gets us, “You got to be like Moses or the prophets.” My dad always said, “Vision is nothing more than seeing what needs to be done and getting to work.” What is vision for you? How do you gain clarity on vision?
Mine may be a little different version than a lot of others, even Christians. I like what you do. You saw a need in prison ministry and you took that action. I'm sure there was a part of you that was somewhat scared of the unknown, especially as a female, walking into a prison with men. You did it because there was a need and you wanted to go serve. Leadership is serving others. When it comes to leadership, I have a three-word definition of leadership, you go first. That's leadership in a nutshell, biblically speaking. Worldly speaking, too.
I've done it in my first businesses where I made millions. That's how I built a team of 50 quickly. I went first. I went out and showed them how to do it. I did night work with them when they didn't hit their goals. I went out and help them hit their goals even though I hit mine. I took arrows. I took hits. If you're a great business leader and you're a great leader at work but you're a poor leader at home, go first. Be the spiritual leader. Have the forgiveness conversation with that spouse of yours. That's leadership. You take the hits. That's key to everything. That's what I want to say. You went first and prison ministry. You showed leadership there. That was awesome, Dr. Tracey.
I went first with my podcast, doing a podcast for Protestants and Catholics and setting a vision of unifying Christians, unifying Protestants, and Catholics. Let's stop fighting each other. We worship the same god. We do it differently. The enemy has us distracted by fighting each other as brothers and sisters in Christ, but not fighting him as he's taking land. He's taking territory from the church, from the kingdom. He's hurting our kids.
They're being sex trafficked. They're being aborted, killed and slaughtered all over the place. Somehow, it's not our problem because our kids are safe in a little suburbia. I've seen sex trafficking places right here in South Tampa and these massage parlors in affluent South Tampa that got shut down. There were eleven-year-old girls working there that had been kidnapped. This is closer than we think. I digress. The way I see vision is simply this, it goes back to God's will and not mine. I don't have a vision for myself anymore. That's a contradiction to the world.
Isn't that freeing?
It is. I say it this way. Things that move us towards peace are from God. Things that move us towards pressure are from us or from the enemy. If you're feeling anxiety, anxiousness, franticness, pressure, you're probably working on something that you came up with. You forgot to see if it aligns with God. God's plan is a peaceful thing. That doesn't mean it doesn't require work, by any means.
Conflicts, mistakes, shortcomings, and betrayals.
There's a total difference when God takes my previous business that got acquired and he took it with a forceful hand because I said, “Remove any obstacles in my life that are blocking me from your calling.” He did. He took my business and then move me into what I'm doing now. I have a certainty in what I'm doing because I know God did it. Do you know how much peace comes with certainty? Confidence isn't enough. We all want certainty. If you want certainty in your life, find out God's vision for your life. Stop chasing yours. You'll have certainty. Confidence only lasts so long.
That is beautiful, the certainty. The other thing I tell people because I work with a lot of people, “What are you going to do with your life?” The other thing is if all you do every day is walk in stride with God and fall deeper in love with him, it doesn't get any better than that. Everything else gets manifested according to how he wants to bless it based on who you're intersecting with. Certainty is an absolutely beautiful thing. If it's peace, it's from God. Pressure, it's from us.
You can look at any error of your life and clean it up quickly asking that question.
I love it because we are congruent. You hit on it many times. You cannot be a divided house within your own house. You can't have certain areas in your life that you're not going to hand over and think that it's not going to infect everything else and bring you down. People are like, “That was my personal life.” I'm like, “Fool.”
I call those bipolar Christians. They're living with a duality. It’s like, “God on Sunday and then me the rest of the week.” That's not how it works. Our God is a selfish God. He wants 100%, not 99%.
How would that work in marriage? You're going to be married Tuesday and Thursday and the rest of the week you're going to be single. That's not how it works.
That’s how many of us live, though.
We wrapped up loneliness, weariness, abandonment, and vision. Joseph, thank you. I've got pages and pages of notes. I love how you put this dialogue together. Thank you for giving us a lot of practical tools too. I can hear you say it but if I can't go apply it within 24 hours, it evaporates. That's how I learn. Anything else that we have not touched on, leadership wise, that you would like to share with our readers?
I define leadership as you go first. As business people, as successful entrepreneurs ourselves, whether you're like some of the guests on my show and you did $250 million in your business or you did $250,000 in your business. The same thing holds true. We're all human. We're all broken. We're all wounded. The things of this world will never satisfy. They'll never fill us up with what we're chasing. There's nothing more important on this planet than relationships. I believe, on your deathbed, on my deathbed, there is only one thing we're going to be thinking of. You could read it in every deathbed story ever written, and that is your relationships. It's not the money in your bank account. It's not the houses, the yachts, the helicopters, the jets, it's none of that. Sorry, Grant Cardone. It's none of that. Sorry, Gary Vee. It's none of that.
Surrendering To God: Things that move us towards peace are from God. Things that move us towards pressure are from the enemy.
You're going to look back and say, “How much time did I spend with my kids? Did I spend enough? Did I spend enough with my spouse? Did I spend enough with God? Am I ready to meet him? Did I heal those hurts in me?” How you answer that question on your deathbed will either determine regret or a big smile from ear to ear as you enter heaven. The great equalizer to every human regardless of what you do is the deathbed and looking back on relationships. As you’re reading, look at your calendar because if it's not in your calendar, it doesn't exist. That's what we do as business people.
Show me in your calendar a time with your wife. Show me in your calendar a blocked out protected time with your kids. Show me in your calendar your one hour a day with your creator, your maker. If you can't, you will end up on your deathbed looking back with regret and no more time. You can make a decision right here and right now to incorporate into your calendar the relationships that matter most to you. When you get to the end of your life, which could be twenty years from now or could be twenty days from now, you will have zero regrets.
This is why I coach people. Do you want to die with zero regrets? I'm your guy. I will make sure every relationship in your life including God and yourself, your whole family, all cleaned up. You could die tomorrow with zero regrets. How do you think you're going to show up in your business when you got all that cleaned up? Like a powerhouse. How much money do you think you're going to attract? A ton more than you are right now in this broken state with messy relationships. People sometimes are, “Joseph, I'm not sure I see the investment, ROI, and relationship coaching.” I'm like, “Really? Call me on your deathbed. You will then.” That's what I want to say about that. Look at your wife and your kids, look at your dad and your mom, look at your siblings, they are the goal. Clean it up, forgive. Ask for forgiveness. Get clear there then go chase some dollar signs if you like.
Give grace, get grace. Joseph, where can people stay connected with you? What's the best way to get in touch with you?
I'm going to do one better. I'm going to offer anyone of your readers a coaching time with me for complimentary. I’m going to give them one coaching session. I charge a decent amount. We'll call it a warm-up call and this will be an opportunity for you to jump on with me and bring me anything. Whatever you're going through, don't be shy. Stop being a wuss. Show up in your life. I promise I'll create a safe coaching container with you and we'll keep it confidential. We'll tackle some of those areas in your life on that matter.
I'll give you 30 minutes of my time for free. If we have a great conversation, I’ll make it a little longer. At the end of that call though, I'm going to confront you and I’m going to say, “Did you like what you got?” If you like what you got, let's move forward. Let's turn this into an official coaching relationship. I'm giving you a free sample like Costco. Try it before you buy it. You could go get that at JosephWarren.net/call. Schedule that in my calendar and that will get booked up quickly. If you want it, go get it.
Joseph, thank you for that. Can you give me the two podcast names again too so our readers can bounce over there and subscribe to your channels as well?
If you're a business individual, you may enjoy my podcast, Your First $100K. I interview successful entrepreneurs, “How did you make your first $100,000?” That's what I believe 90% of entrepreneurs get stuck, stop, or quit. It's the mental game of entrepreneurship. How do you get through year 1, 2, and 3? If that's your jam, go get that at Stitcher, iTunes, all of it. You can find it there or go to JosephWarren.net and see it there. Broken Catholic, if you want the faith-based, the spiritual talk. You want to get real about relationships. I bring on top Christian, Protestant, influencers, and Catholic influencers and we talk about what is God doing in their lives. What is he done? Where are they resisting? What's next for them? You're going to get inspired. The biggest thing you're walking away with is a new sense of hope for your situation and possibly a way out.
You talked repeatedly throughout this and I thank you for the time about pruning. I love the word broken because there are no breakthroughs. There is no boldness without brokenness. It's part of who we are. Somebody got us, with love, put us down so they can bring us back up and all our glory.
If you're following this show, would you share this show of Dr. Tracey Jones. Isn't she an amazing, articulate interviewer? That's a rare gift.
I'm excited at the connections God is bringing. Thank you for beating me to the punch. You are phenomenal. For our readers out there, please subscribe to this show, to Broken Catholic, and Your First $100K. I didn't know about the $100K one. I want to get over there and subscribe to that. Joseph, I want to thank you for your transparency. I want to thank you that the wisdom that you shared with us that truth is timeless. There's a cloud of witnesses clapping their hands up there. This is stuff we're going to be reliving throughout all of eternity. I'm blessed to be on this journey with you. I call it stacking crowns in heaven. I see that's what you're doing. You and I have both wasted our fair share of resources and time. You know this as much as me. I tell people I was a Prodigal. For all you people out there that want to finally get on the shtick, it's never too late because God routines time in a mighty way.
I spent the first half of my life glorifying Joseph. For the rest of my life, I'm going to glorify God and bring his people closer.
I am delighted to be on that journey with you. To our readers out there, thank you again, Joseph, for all your wisdom. You bless me. I know our readers are going to be off the hook with the things that you've encouraged them. You're a great healer and that's what we need. Thank you for letting people heal so they can get restored. That's the name of the game. To our readers out there, thank you for being part of our Tremendous Tribe. We couldn't do it without you. Have a tremendous rest of the day. Bye.
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