E44 Renew Your Mind: How Biblical Truth, Faith, and a Growth Mindset Can Transform Your Life

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Jen Cudmore (00:00)
So here’s the thing that I think so many people don’t realize is that you have more control over your circumstances than you actually think you do. If you want to see more success in your life, if you want more opportunities or more goodness or more peace or more happiness, you have to examine the way that you think and you have to make some changes of what’s going on in your mind. I’ve seen so many people just throw up their hands and say, well, this is just what life is. This is the life that I’ve been dealt. And they toss away the future that God had planned for them. They don’t pursue the

dreams and passions that God gave them. They don’t fulfill their calling and they don’t reach their kingdom assignments all because of negative thinking and the lies that they’re choosing to believe. So please hear me. Don’t be that person. join me for today’s episode. We’re going to talk about leveling up your thought patterns and developing a growth mindset. So here we go.

Hey, welcome to today’s episode. This is the show where we go below the surface. We dive into who we are and we break free of who we’ve been. And so the past couple of weeks, that topic of mindset has been really kind of heavy on my mind. I signed up for a training class on how to become an online coach. feel like that God is calling me to

teach and train people how to pray and to move into freedom and different things. So we’ll see how God develops all of that. But my point is I’m trying something new. This is a world that I know nothing about. I have never been an entrepreneur. And so, well, I guess you could kind of say I was when I sold a couple novels, but I really didn’t do a lot of work around that. So here I am really challenging myself, stretching myself, and it has been a lot of work going on inside my brain. And so that’s what I thought I’d

would just show up and talk about today is I’m sure you can all relate. There’s just ⁓ so many different ways those lies, labels and limitations sneak into your thinking and you don’t notice how it’s controlling and manipulating some of the way that you live. And so for me, one of the things that has come up is ⁓ I’m recognizing that I have a lot of negative thinking around the concept of sales. I definitely don’t like pushy salesmen and I don’t want to be that when I finally get my

set up. And so I’ve been talking to my husband and my coach and, you know, and praying obviously around the ideas of the lies about sales always being hard or scary or whatever. Like there’s just been a lot of garbage that I’ve discovered in my brain. And so I thought, okay, maybe this would be a really good topic to tackle today for the episode. One of the things that my coach challenged me on this week, just a few days ago was as I’m developing the outline for my program. on becoming an effective intercessor.

I was telling her that I didn’t like some of the suggestions that I was getting from the training program. And she said, but that’s because you don’t know how to think with marketing language. And so it sounds funny to you. sounds foreign, but these are things that are tried and true and that they work. And I was talking to Tim about it last night and he was like, absolutely. The things you’re saying are definitely things I heard, you know, 20, 30 years ago. these, this is how it goes. So I’ve been really ⁓ pushing myself.

to stretch ⁓ how I think about what it means to be an entrepreneur.

I am seeing that as I really work on trying to retrain my brain to look at things differently, I’m definitely seeing the results of that show up in my life. And so I wanted to just go over a few things with you with regards to negative mindsets and thought patterns that sabotage us. So

But I want to start with a foundation of the Bible because honestly, it was God’s idea that we have control over our thoughts, that we get to choose our thoughts. That’s how he made us. a lot of us just sit back and let our minds just do whatever comes in and out. And that’s not the way God set it up. He wants us to be intentional and ⁓ pay attention to what we’re thinking about and choose the right thought patterns.

Let me throw out some Bible verses for you. I found these very helpful over the years. Romans 12, where it talks about being transformed by the renewing of your mind. That is telling us that we are going to have to be intentional. We’re going to have to take action to actually ⁓ change the way we think. I know a lot of Christians will do that around the concept of Christianity and the Bible and following Jesus, but God didn’t just mean that around.

religion, he meant that like around your entire life, because when we’re born, we’re born into a world that’s full of sin and we have an old sin nature, right? And so our, have to renew our mind basically like sanctify or purify our thought process. so Colossians three two says to set your mind on things above. Again, we get to choose and God is telling us

what kinds of things he wants us to be focusing on. And so when he says in Philippians 4, 8, I want you to think about these things, whatever’s true, whatever’s noble, whatever’s right, whatever’s pure, whatever’s lovely, admirable, anything that’s excellent or praiseworthy, that’s what I want you focusing on. And so many of us really struggle with that because it is so easy. Like it’s so natural for us to just immediately let our thoughts, go down in the pit and get super negative.

And so it can take some work for us to shift our thinking and renew our mind. But I just want to point out as a foundation, the Bible is pretty clear. God wants us to take action and be intentional about monitoring what’s going on in our brain and how our mind is working. We have control over our thoughts. God gave that to us, but are we actually doing it and doing it well? Are we doing it with wisdom? So.

How does it look like in daily life to go through that process of capturing your thoughts? that’s a Bible verse, I forgot to look up. There’s a Bible verse, I think it says in Ephesians that talks about capturing your thoughts and making them obedient to Christ. That’s really important. God cares about what we think about and so we need to try to think in ways that are pleasing to him. So how do we do that in daily life? What does that look like?

So number one, read your Bible, right? You gotta know the truth. You gotta know what’s in there. You gotta memorize some things. You’ve gotta really meditate on the truths that are in there so they get deep inside of you and that it becomes second nature to think that way and act that way. So it’s not just reading your Bible though. Like get in.

get in arenas where you’re hearing the word such as maybe you’re listening to a sermon on YouTube or maybe like you go to church on Sundays or whatever day of the week that works for you. You might do Bible study like buy an actual Bible study so you’re not just reading the Bible straight but you’re doing like a topic on maybe a character in the Bible or an attribute of the Lord or a specific book in the Bible. There’s so many different ways you can do Bible studies.

You can join a small group where you have discussions around what does the Bible say and different topics? So the point is just to be intentional about ingesting the Word, getting God’s truth inside of you in your heart and mind so that it becomes ⁓ immediate recall when you’re in the middle of a situation.

So the second thing ⁓ I’ve talked about before is practicing awareness. And this was huge for me. Man, I had no idea how much my negative thinking was controlling my life and sabotaging me. And so as God began to teach me to pay attention to what I’m thinking about, I was like, ⁓ that’s really like not great. Why did I believe that? Why did I fall for that lie? Or why did I put that limitation on myself? How silly.

And so the mind really is a battlefield and we have to be paying attention. We don’t get to just let anything run amok inside our brains. When something comes in, we need to check it. We need to capture it. We need to say, wait a minute, does this honor God? Does this fit what the Bible tells me about what God wants me to be thinking about? Or is this something would not be pleasing to the Lord? Then I need to reject it and intentionally move my mind off to something else.

And this is gonna be a lifelong ⁓ training ground, honestly, I believe. ⁓ Definitely, I think it gets easier with time, the more you’ve trained yourself to think properly, the easier it gets. in the beginning, it can feel super overwhelming. I know it did for me, but you just start small. You just gotta start somewhere, ask the Lord how to help you focus and develop that awareness, and then just build it up from there. So practice awareness around…

your thought patterns and think about what you’re thinking about. So then another super important step is to get in different circles. You have to be around people that look at life differently than you do. And I did not do this when I was younger. I definitely gravitated towards people that made me feel comfortable towards people that I didn’t realize this, but they never challenged me. We all thought the same, you know, we had similar

mindsets about how the world works. We did similar activities. And so ⁓ as I’ve talked about before, you know, I lived a small save life because I never branched out. I never tried anything new. I never pushed myself. And part of that is not getting around the right people that look at life that way. And so when you ⁓ are wanting to shift from negative mindsets to more healthy ways of thinking, you’ve got to get around the right people.

who you hang around with actually affects your behaviors. It affects the way that you think. So who are you spending the most time with? Are you spending time with people who are very negative or are you spending time with people who have that outlook on life where everything is good, there’s always opportunity? I’ll get more into that in a minute. But for me, I remember like when I hung out with my college roommate,

⁓ There was a, I wish I could remember, there was a phrase that she used to say all the time that it was just cute and funny. And I found myself starting to say that all the time, just simply because I was in her presence a lot. Or I’ve also found myself when I’m in environments with people who do a lot of cussing and cursing, I am tempted to talk like that, just simply because I’ve been hanging around them and they influenced me.

So you need to be really careful who you’re hanging out with. And I know sometimes at work, you can’t always control your environment. I remember one time for like a year or two, I had to sit by a super negative person who complained all the time. It was very difficult for me. And so I had to come up with ways to sort of block that so I wasn’t hearing it and choose to focus on.

you know, different truths and things that were good. So there’s gonna be times where it might be a little more difficult than others because you will be around people that are not necessarily the best influence on you. But you don’t, I guarantee you won’t stay in that place. You’ll be able to ⁓ develop different friendships, different relationships, especially when it comes to mentors, this is extremely important. You’ve gotta get around people.

who think higher, who think bigger than you do, because it will help pull you up to that level. So for example, when I became a manager,

getting around people who are already doing it well. So I deliberately went out and tried to spend time with a couple of my friends who were in, who were managers in the medical field and were doing it really well.

And I just would hang out with them. And sometimes I would ask them questions, but mostly it was just about being in their presence so that I could learn to think like they think and speak like they speak. ⁓ I’m super, super grateful to these women who gave me their time and attention just for free, right? Because they didn’t mind investing in me. think of my friend, Christy, who first pushed me into management. They gave my friend, Olivia, who had

learned some difficult lessons and walked through some of the same things I walked through and she was able to really help me and I wouldn’t say commiserate but like challenge me on things that she learned. ⁓ had another friend named Andrea who just had so much knowledge and wisdom. I loved talking with these women because

Every time I got around them, it was like I would learn a new way of thinking or a new way of looking at how to be a good manager. anyways, enough about that. You’ve got to get around people who are better at things than you are so that you can learn to look at life the way they look at life. And this can also be virtual. I did do a lot of trainings on focus and productivity for a while because I was like, my gosh, I need to get better at time management because I moved in

⁓ from part-time to full-time and I was trying to manage a department of 15 people so it was super overwhelming and so I needed to be more effective with my time and so I did a lot of free virtual trainings ⁓ on focus and productivity which really really helped me manage my time a lot better so ⁓ for me what it looked like was starting small and just investing in everything I could get my hands on that was free or maybe some cheap books

that didn’t cost a lot of money, but eventually you’re gonna have to invest time, money, and energy. If you want to renew your mind and develop a healthier way of thinking, ⁓ there will be a cost. And so are you willing to pay it? Do you want your life to be better or not? Do you want to get better in this area or not? You’re gonna have to put time and money and effort and energy into it. So just be prepared to do that. But also take advantage of some free things

And then the last thing that I would suggest, I kind of already said this, is ⁓ we have to be intentional about feeding our mind. So how are you doing that? Are ⁓ you buying books? Are you watching trainings or taking classes? Nowadays in the age of information where everything’s online, there’s just so many different ways where you can get.

the information that you might be wanting. And so you got to figure out what works for you. I know people that don’t really like to read, but they will listen to an audio book. And so that’s extremely ⁓ valuable way of doing it. That never quite worked for me. I prefer to hold the paper in my hands and use my pen and take notes. And I know you can do that on electronic versions too, like with your Kindle or whatever. figure out what works for you, but you have to actually be intentional. Like I’ve shared before when God

told me I was an intercessor, I didn’t know what that meant. I had to go figure it out. So I went and bought a bunch of books on prayer. When I first got married and we got pregnant right away, I think we had been married like six weeks. And ⁓ I was like, my gosh, I want to be a really good wife, a really good mom. I don’t feel like I’m equipped to do that. So I need to go out and find the tools. And I did that by buying a lot of books because that worked for me.

and I taught myself ⁓ with a lot of ⁓ education through books of what are the kinds of things that I can do to be a better wife and mom. And then, you know, when I wanted to learn more about the spirit realm and hearing God speak, I started taking classes and attending events at these different churches that focused on those kinds of things so that I could get around those people and get in those trainings and learn about it and educate myself. So there’s lots of different ways you can educate yourself. But here’s the thing.

you’re already investing in something. You are already feeding your mind right now with the way that you live. But it’s, the question is, is it valuable? Is it actually making your life better or is it holding you back and wasting your time and energy and, and, ⁓ money and effort, that’s something to really think about because whatever gets your attention, whatever it is that you’re focusing on is influencing you.

It’s affecting you and shaping you. ⁓ The Bible tells us, know, guard our mind, guard our heart. I think of that scripture, ⁓ Proverbs 23, seven, where it talks about as you think or as you reckon in your heart, so are you. That’s what you become. Basically the concept of garbage in, garbage out. If you were going to be in environments that are negative or ungodly

that’s what you are going to become. So pay attention to what’s getting your focus. ⁓ And part of that is like your entertainment. Where are you spending your free time? Are you watching a bunch of soap operas? Because that’s gonna affect your marriage. Or like I had shared before, I was reading too many novels and the Lord challenged me on that. That if I didn’t…

cut back and put balance in my life, it was going to skew my perspective of what a relationship would look like and I would ruin my marriage. So I’ve been very careful about the types of novels that I read and how often I read them because I don’t want that to skew my relation or cause problems in my relationship with my husband because ⁓ fantasy and fiction becomes a reality when I’m too focused on it. Political propaganda. my gosh, I know people who spend so much time focused on

certain type or certain niche in politics and it skews their thinking on everything else in their life to where to the point where they cannot have a ⁓ normal balanced conversation with someone who believes something opposite. It really stirs up their emotions and you know causes difficulties in their conversations. ⁓ What else? There’s a few ideas like what you watch on TV, what you listen to, these things are so

So powerful. ⁓ I definitely noticed a difference when I switched from listening to secular music almost every day to listening to Christian music to then even further listening to mostly worship music. It has absolutely affected my outlook on life. I have more inner peace. I have more gratitude. So again, this isn’t about setting religious rules or saying I can never participate in something that isn’t super godly and pure.

That’s not what it’s about. It’s about being careful what you’re investing in, where you’re putting your attention because it does affect your life and it affects how you show up. ⁓ too often we stay stuck. This was me for so, so long. ⁓ I remember when finances were tight when, I don’t know, Tim and I, were like 10.

12 years into marriage and we were having conversations over how can we bring more money into the household. And immediately we were stuck or we were fixated on the idea that neither of us has the time or the capacity to do that. And so God really pushed back on that and showed us that, if we would shift our lifestyle a little bit, one of us could actually go get a second job. And so that’s what happened. ⁓ We made some adjustments to our routine.

and my husband was able to get a part-time second job and that was a huge blessing for us. ⁓ So where are we putting limitations and saying we can’t do this? Where are we putting excuses on ourselves or on our situation and saying this can’t work and that can’t work? I used to have a friend, I think it was like back in college.

where she laid around her house all day and then complained that her back hurt. And I was like, well, your back hurts because you’re laying down all day long. You’re sitting down all day long. So then she would say, well, I can’t go get a job because my back hurts. ⁓ I was like, well, there are lots of jobs you can do that aren’t gonna affect your back, or there are different ways where you could do like vocational rehab ⁓ and find a position that would work for you.

There’s lots of people who work with aches and pains and and they’re able to do it but because she had that mindset of I can’t do it. She never did she never ended up getting an actual job and she Really lived a very impoverished lifestyle for the time frame that I knew her and it was frustrating for me because I saw potential in her and she could have absolutely went out and Found a job or got educated to do a certain job

But she had no drive. She had put that cap or limit on herself. And a lot of people do that in different ways. ⁓ I remember when ⁓ I was in high school and I really wanted to go to college and the reality hit me was that, you know, my parents didn’t have the money for college. How was I going to get there? So I had to figure out, I could have said, well, I come from a poor family. None of us have money. I guess I’m just not going to college.

that’s not the mindset that I chose. I chose, no, I’m gonna figure this out. I’m gonna pray. I’m gonna ask God for provision. I’m gonna ask God to show me what are the things that I can do that would help get me to college. it’s amazing to me how many people will just sit back and say, I’m stuck. You know, the cop out of.

I prayed and God didn’t do anything, therefore he doesn’t want me to this or ⁓ just the idea that it’s all up to God to fix it and provide for me. And that’s so not biblical. We are told to ask, but we have a responsibility to take action. So I love the concept of pray like it depends on God, but work like it depends on you. Like you have to do some things.

to better your situation. You’re gonna have to take action. God doesn’t do all the work for you. He doesn’t just drop things in our lap. We have to show that we will steward well the things that we already have. And then he begins to develop and give us more. ⁓ anyhow, I see a lot of people who are not willing to help themselves. And so it kind of ties God’s hands. I remember, in fact, recently, this happened to me this summer. God said, you need to stop saying, I can’t afford it.

because that ties my hands. And so I was like, wait, he’s like, you keep praying for extra provision. You keep praying for me to show up in these different areas, but then you keep speaking out the words, I can’t afford it, which blocks the blessing. And I was like, wait a minute, am I really doing that? Like I hadn’t put that together. So yeah, there are certain things because of the way God set up the world and the certain laws that he set in place, like the law of gravity, he’s not gonna ⁓ go around his own laws.

So we have a responsibility. There are things that we have to do and there are ways we can accidentally block the Lord from blessing us because we’re speaking and thinking in negative ways. So really need to pay attention. ⁓ So let me throw out a couple common negative mindsets just to get you thinking and I’ll focus more on these later when I have a little more time, but just to get you considering like, is this me? Maybe is this something that I need to pay attention to and start working towards? ⁓

getting out of my life. So victimhood, and let me just start by saying, I lived all of these. So I definitely can relate to all of these. So victimhood, my problems are everybody else’s fault. And then you don’t take responsibility. You don’t try to better your situation. Things like I can’t get a second job. I can’t work more hours. ⁓ Instead of trying to push and think outside the box, you just

you settle and ⁓ say there’s nothing I can do. It’s out of my hands. There’s the scarcity mentality, which is there’s never enough. There’s never enough time. There’s never enough money. ⁓ You tend to hoard things. You tend to focus on yourself and keeping things for yourself. ⁓ You struggle with generosity and giving because you’re like, what if I run out? I don’t have enough to give to everybody else because I got to take care of myself. ⁓ awful. I live this way for so many years.

I remember when God actually said to me, you’re stingy. I was like, wait, what? I am? Like, what do mean? And so he really pushed me to practice generosity and giving. And that was so hard for me. I was really kind of embarrassed at ⁓ how much I really was stingy because I had that ⁓ scarcity mentality that I don’t have enough for myself, therefore I can’t give to others. And that is so wrong.

That goes against the law of sowing and reaping. God told me, you don’t have more because you’re not investing more. If you want to see your finances grow, you need to invest your money and be giving. So if you want to reap more benefits, you’ve got to sow more into others and that looks different for different people. But that was a huge lesson for me. The Bible is pretty clear that when God gives us things, we are meant to invest them and multiply them.

another negative mindset is the poverty mindset. And this is one that I’ve been really working on lately. It’s the idea, like wrong understanding of wealth and unhealthy dependence on money being the answer to all my problems. So the assumption that I’m always gonna be poor or like the inability to see possibilities, like you don’t even try to get ahead because this is just my lot in life. I just, I’m never gonna have.

the funds to do anything different. So it limits ⁓ possibility and it limits opportunity. When opportunities do come, you don’t recognize them for what they are. And then the other concept of like, you’re always settling. ⁓ I can only shop at Goodwill. I can only shop at Walmart because I only have a couple of bucks. so that, guess what? If you say I can only shop at Walmart, you will only shop at Walmart for the rest of your life.

⁓ We got to be super careful what we’re thinking so here’s another one Shame and condemnation. I’m not good enough. So why bother to try I’ll never succeed anyway. I don’t deserve blessing. I don’t deserve opportunity I’m not worthy God can bless other people but he’s not gonna bless me because I did a B and C and I made too many mistakes or you know, kind of however that looks for you,

that definitely holds us back and gets in the way because again, we can’t see opportunities, we can’t see possibilities and we stay stuck in that place of never trying and never being willing to take a risk. So those are four of the main negative mindsets I have definitely struggled with over my life. So I wanted to throw those out to get you thinking. ⁓ so instead of those mindsets, what do we do? We need to develop what’s called a growth mindset. And I haven’t done any research around this and I’m definitely

wanting to dig into it more, but it’s the idea that we can learn to think different, that we are always trying to better ourselves, that we’re always trying to grow, that we’re always ⁓ investing in pushing ourselves and expanding our knowledge base and expanding our view of how the world works and things like that. along with that is the idea of the abundance mindset where there’s always more instead of scarcity that says there’s never enough.

we look at it as if there’s always more. Or the ⁓ miracle mentality, which I had never heard that until this week, I learned something new. A miracle mentality is about expecting crazy and wild things to happen, expecting God to show up in these amazing, mind-blowing ways. And so I was like, ooh, I definitely want to ⁓ develop that for sure. So as a child of God, our possibilities, our opportunities are endless.

God owns the cattle on a thousand hills, right? That’s what the Bible says. I should have looked at that verse. He has a lot of resources. He’s got plenty of money. He’s got plenty of opportunities and he can open doors for us that nobody, no human can do. So we have to learn to dream big with God and we have to learn to pray bold prayers in understanding what is God’s heart.

That’s what we want to develop. We want to develop that mindset of growing. We want to renew our mind by focusing on the good things in life. And we have to be intentional. We have to put action behind it. as we go about the week, let’s explore the depths of these final thoughts. Number one, where is God challenging you around some negative mindsets?

And then how can you develop better awareness over your thought patterns and what might be sabotaging you and your success and your happiness? And where can you be more intentional about learning new things expanding your education and your knowledge in a certain area? Or where might you need to get in some different friend groups or different?

circles that can push you and help elevate you in your mindset so that you can be more successful and more happier, whatever it is that your goal is, whatever it is that God is calling you towards in this season. So think about those things as you go about your week. Bless you, friend, and I will see you next time.