Huffman Coaching and Consultation LLC

To find true peace, and lead well, we must be ruthless with the non-essentials. This week, look at your day and identify tasks you can:

Stop: Drop obligations kept only out of guilt.

Automate: Use tools for repetitive chores.

Delegate: Let someone else handle tasks that don't require your unique touch.

By stopping what doesn’t matter, you create space for your "why." In leadership, life gets busy. Intentionality is essential to avoid burnout. What is one thing you can let go of today?

Happy Easter Sunday!

In her book, Take Back Your Time, Christy Wright highlights four reasons why some people may feel out of balance. Do any of these resonate with you?!

"... the angel of God isn't accusing (1 Kings 19). Instead, the angel is incredibly practical, essentially saying, 'Grab a bagel.' Elijah is like, 'A bagel?' and then looks around and sees fresh bread baking over hot coals along with a jar of water. So he eats and drinks. And then he goes back to sleep. Why? Because sometimes the most spiritual thing you can do is take a nap. I'm not kidding. Rest is absolutely essential. As one of the ten commandments God gave us in the Old testament, rest is a non-negotiable to live a God honoring life."

-Heal Your Hurting Mind by Craig Groeschel and Dr Wayne Chappelle

Take a moment today to make your own list, and let us know when you've done so!

"These are the relationships, activities, and commitments that make you light up and come alive. When you spend time on these things--the right things--you feel balanced. They are the things you need in your life to be the person you want to be. Once you have your list, it's going to help you know what values you want to live out in your day-to-day life.... you can't do them all, all the time. You have to prioritize." -Christy Wright

Between many genuinely *good* work and life commitments, have you ever felt out of balance?

"Finding balance can be tricky because it isn't just a schedule problem; it's also a heart problem... whether we're doing too many things or the wrong things or maybe both, we need to get to the root of what's really going on in our heart" -Christy Wright

Here are five categories that account for many unnecessary, time stealing, commitments that we can easily make if we are not intentional about our identity in Christ and our life's most precious gifts.

Step 2 to taking back your time is "Stop Doing What Doesn't Matter."

In step 1, the focus was to discover what matters most to you. Once you discover the most important things, it will become easier to leave behind those things that are simply distracting you.

From a practical standpoint, author Cal Newport emphasizes deciding what truly matters before building your schedule. He urges readers to prioritize high-impact work over tasks that merely fill time, so energy is invested where it counts most.

Once you have clarity on what matters most to you, the next steps—stopping what doesn’t matter, creating your schedule, protecting it, and being present—will come much more naturally.

Step 1: Decide What Truly Matters

Last month, we introduced the idea of decluttering our lives to focus on what truly matters. Today, we’re diving into Step 1: Decide what matters to you.

I encourage you to pause and reflect:

What truly matters to you?

What matters to God in your life?

What values guide your decisions, relationships, and daily habits?

As we step into a new year, my team and I want to take a moment to share how deeply grateful we are. As we look ahead, we are excited to continue serving our community with meaningful content, tools, and services that support growth, healing, and intentional living.

Over the next several months, we'll focus on decluttering our lives. In her book Take Back Your Time, Christy Wright outlines these five steps to help us focus on what really matters to us.

We’ll soon dive into each of these steps in more detail to support all of us in living more intentionally.

As Stephen Covey famously said, “The key is not to prioritize what’s on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities.”

Statistically, most people have abandoned their New Year's resolutions by now. The thing about resolutions is that they're more about outcomes than processes, and even less about identity.

"Outcomes are about what you get. Processes are about what you do. Identity is about what you believe. When it comes to building habits that last—when it comes to building a system of 1 percent improvements—the problem is not that one level is “better” or “worse” than another. All levels of change are useful in their own way. The problem is the direction of change.

Many people begin the process of changing their habits by focusing on what they want to achieve. This leads us to outcome-based habits. The alternative is to build identity-based habits. With this approach, we start by focusing on who we wish to become."
-James Clear, Atomic Habits