If you're a pastor wanting to save and strengthen marriages in your congregation, we've got a great tool for you, Marriage Nine One One by Focus on the Family. Trains lay people to mentor couples who may be on the verge of divorce or who want to strengthen what they already have. The kit includes two leader guides, four workbooks, and all the training necessary to meet with and mentor men and women who need help. Visit Marriage Nine One One dot com. That's Marriage the Number.
NineOneOne dot com. Your vision is a tool, so if your vision is clear, and I would say from the standpoint as a believer, you're asking God, "What's your vision for me? Where am I headed? What does that endpoint look like?" And it should pull you forward.
So the rule is, focus on the vision, not the obstacle.
Well, that's Valerie Burton, and she's with us today on Focus on the Family with Jim Daly to share about developing resilience so you can overcome obstacles in your life. Thanks for joining us. I'm John Fuller. You know, right from the get-go, John, if the listener, the viewer, if you're in a bad spot, life just isn't moving in a good direction for you. We're here for you, folks.
On the family's been at it almost 50 years. We have great resources to help you kind of move through that log jam of life and be able to begin to get back on top of things and make sure you're you're feeling good spiritually, emotionally, hopefully physically, and All of it to drive you toward a deeper relationship with Christ, because we, as a Christian organization, we think that's where the fountain is at. The answers are found there, and then you apply them to your life. And today, we're going to talk about taking steps to prepare for those challenges ahead of time, building resilience, so you can, you know, not only get through it but conquer this life in a way that the Lord intended. Right.
And Valerie Burton is our guest. She's a best-selling author. Author, international speaker, a life strategist, and she's delightful. We're going to be talking about one of her books called "Rules of Resilience: Ten Ways Successful People Get Better, Wiser, and Stronger." Valerie, welcome to Focus on the Family. Thank you.
It is so good to be here. It's good to have you here. Thanks for making the trek and the journey.
So, with resilience, you know you can walk away with a lot of you know slightly different perspectives about what resilience.
So, what is the definition of resilience?
So, most of us, when we think of resilience, we think about bouncing back from setbacks. I think of it as being able to thrive and grow and be effective in the face of adversity and challenges and change. But the difference in how I define it in this book is that it is a personal system you create that enables you to withstand stressors and and challenges. And so, whether you realize you've created Or not, you have. Yeah, and so what I wanted to do was be able to tell people, okay, what what are the three pillars that make up this system, so you can look at it and say, ooh, I'm good there, but here's where I have room for improvement.
Yeah, you did a degree in psychology.
So often in the Christian community, we're yeah, we kind of bounce from what we'll say is psycho babble because we want to be rooted in the Word. But man, when you get into it, of course, Doctor Dobson was Ph.D. in child development. From the USC School of Medicine, and he saw this route where you could incorporate good science, honest truth-telling science, with biblical truth, and the two will not conflict. They usually run together because of the architect of the universe, God.
He put it together. He created our brain. He knows how we tick. He created how we tick, and so when you study psychology, especially as a Christian, these things tend to get reinforced. You're going, "Ah, wow!
There's a scripture." That talks about that in that context. To give that big disclaimer for you, how many ways can human beings? Fool themselves about resiliency, and what I mean by that is a person who's trying to just coat it with maybe a spiritual, you know, icing, and just to put the good foot forward. But deep down inside, it's not there, and they're faking it for whatever reason to show an outward resiliency that isn't there. Speak to that need for understanding what it means to have deep resiliency, not the flippant.
Comment when at church on Sunday. How you doing? I'm good. I'm good. I'm good.
And you're not. Yeah. How do you manage that? And how do you become more honest first with yourself and then with people who say, "Man, I heard you lost your your mom or your dad or your spouse, or I heard about the affair." Or what is a healthy way to respond with that?
So. I think it's really important that we understand that a hallmark of resilience is authenticity. Real resilience does require us to be honest about our fears, about what's not working, and a lot of times, if we don't know the answer to how to fix it, we can pretend it doesn't exist. One of the rules, one of my favorite rules of resilience here is, don't pretend. Don't defend.
What that means is, don't pretend things are okay that are not. And we can conquer what we're willing to confront. But if we won't even say, "Hey, our marriage is struggling right now," or "I really don't like this career that I'm in. I don't know how to get out of it," but like, could I do something different? Or I'm stressed and overwhelmed, yeah.
And maybe as a mom, I feel like I shouldn't be, and I feel all the pressure of what everybody says I should be able to do, and I should just be happy about things all the time. If you're able to say something's not right, then you could admit what you need to work on. One of the things I've often noticed in that kind of application, we often say, you know, I I want to talk or walk with people that have a limp. Another way of saying that is people that are only On the mountaintop, don't go very deep, and people from a valley where they've had the hard knocks of life and have turned to God for help are usually the people that have great wisdom, that know what they're talking about, that know about life and those kinds of things. Speak to that aspect of differentiation between a life of ease and then a life of difficulty, and what are the benefits of both?
Well, first of all, we can't measure resilience unless there's been a challenge, right?
So someone says, "Oh, I'm resilient." The first thing you think is, "And what have you been through?" Right? I didn't get my lunch money one day. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So we grow through our challenges when we're resilient. We don't just go through them, and We have to recognize that there is that opportunity. One of the rules is find the opportunity in the challenge. There is an opportunity to grow your resilience when you're going through things. Your father, who it sounds like you guys have had a great relationship, which is so awesome.
Yeah, I always love to hear that. And but he went through some difficulty with a congenital heart issue. Yeah, but you were able to, I'm sure, talk with. Him and and he kind of. Maybe directly or just indirectly developed a system to deal with his difficulty.
Speak to that. Yeah. So my dad, in his mid fifties, going for routine physical, the doctor is like, "Your heartbeat is a little abnormal," which he had heard before. My dad retired from the air force after twenty four years. He played sports in high school.
They did an angiogram, and the doctor, when the Came out. He said, "I've got good news and bad news." He said, "Good news is your arteries are in perfect condition, like no blockages, nothing." That's good.
So the bad news is one of them's going to the wrong place. Oh, he said, "This is a a birth defect that normally would kill you at six months old, but definitely by the age of ten, we've never seen anyone get to this age with this condition." It was obviously a shocker. He did have the open heart surgery, but when we were curious about why, like, I wonder why didn't he have other issues? They said, "Well, you know, he could have had a heart attack in his twenties or his thirties. They would have just said it was a fluke.
Yeah, they would never have known that there was his birth defect." They said, "But you know, you've you've never smoked, you've." Always been pretty healthy physically, and we think these were basically preventive choices that you made that actually compensated and helped keep you alive all this time.
So the the idea there, as I said, we have our adaptive skills, the internal resources, the protective resources, the external, but then there's the preventive choices. What could you do today? And this is my favorite coaching question around this: If you were looking back five or ten years from now, in any area of your life—your relationships, your finances, your health—what would you wish you had done? And so that's what happened with my dad. It was like because he had made some other good choices, not knowing there was a problem, he was kind of cushioning himself from a problem that he didn't even know.
Could have taken his life. Yeah. So in these ten rules of resilience, number one, let's hit number one. We're not going to cover them all, but hopefully people get a taste of it.
So what's number one? It's expect the unexpected.
Okay, that's good. Expect the unexpected, and you got to be ready to handle. That's your dad, right? Yes. Expect the unexpected.
Be ready to handle it, and. That means you know we can have our best laid plans. We all know that we typically don't go to from A to Z in a straight line. There's a setback. Things don't go as planned, and if you prepare for that, if you expect that, that when it doesn't go as planned, it doesn't take as long for you to recover and find your Plan B.
It's oh yeah, I didn't know what was going to be a setback, but I could pretty much guess that there was. Going to be one, and that's the unexpected. The most obvious question with that one is: for that person that struggles when the setback comes, it's so deep. Yeah. And even as a spouse, you might, as the spouse, go, "Wow, that's a molehill, not a mountain." How does that person find deeper resiliency when that is the typical reaction from you?
You know what I mean?
So when you're the person that is feeling overwhelmed by the challenge, but maybe you. Have a spouse that minimizes it, yeah, or not? That's an aspect of it, but that your your low resiliency, if I could say it that way, that you're you're always making a mountain out of a molehill. It's not a big deal. We can get through this.
So, if you expect the unexpected. Then when these things happen, if in advance you've said the unexpected is going to happen, I can't predict what it was.
Some things you can't predict. I'll give you an example. We bought a house a little over eight years ago. It wasn't just a house; it was a property. We had been living in a normal house with you know.
I can tell you really like this place. It's wonderful. It is absolutely. It's a project. It's a project.
It's a project. So because it's a project, okay, and my husband Jeff and I. I'd say we're both visionaries. If that means we're very optimistic, right? Exactly.
So when we bought it, Jeff was still flying commercially. Like I mean, it's like okay, you're gone two weeks a month. We got acreage, we got all this stuff, and the house was you know 40 years old.
So we were renovating. There was always something going wrong, and so after a while, after about a year and a half, it's like maybe we should move. And this would happen like once a year. Until I was writing this book, and I realized I keep my husband. He's he's like yeah okay.
He's very laid back. I am like I'm tired of these things. And then I said, but if I expect the unexpected. If I expect that, yes, there is going to be some fences that need mending, or you know, maybe we're going to have to replace something in the house, and that's every year. There is going to be something, and it's going to be something big.
So let's have the expect the unexpected fund, right? It's no surprise, right? It happens all the time. Yeah, septic tank. Septic.
We've replaced the septic tank. We've replaced multiple H V A C units. We've had all kinds of things happen. And now, when it happens, rather than I might at first go, but then I go, "Oh, this is part of the unexpected." Yeah, and this place has been such a blessing, and it's realized some dreams both of us had, and we've been able to host family reunions, and it's lovely, it's wonderful, it's a blessing. But it's not a cakewalk.
There are things that happen we don't expect, and it's completely lowered my stress level. And I'm not talking about moving. Yeah, that's good. Yeah, that's good. Well, Valerie Burton is our guest today on Focus on the Family with Jim Daly, and we're so enjoying the conversation.
Her book is called Rules of Resilience: Ten Ways Successful People Get Better, Wiser, and Stronger. And you can learn more about Valerie and this terrific book at our website, and the link is in. The show notes, Valerie. Let's move to vision. This one can get, pardon the pun, a little blurry.
I didn't think of that until I just said it. But, but vision for people, like, what should my vision be? We talk about mission statement, vision statement.
So, in the context of resiliency, what does it mean to have vision for something? Your vision is a tool.
So, if your vision is clear, and I would say, from the standpoint as a Believer, you're asking God, "What's your vision for me? Where am I headed? What does that end point look like?" And it should pull you forward.
So the rule is, focus on the vision, not the obstacle.
Gives you that perspective. It might be too personal, and just tell me we can move on. But what what are elements of that? That were important to you. What again?
I'm I'm sorry. I just need the practical tools. A vision statement for my marriage. You could tell how Gene might get frustrated here. Like, what are you talking about, Gene?
What What do those elements look like? What you know? I want to be happy. I want to be joyful. I want to love you.
I want to be committed to you. Yeah. Can I read part of my vision statement from the book? Of course. Part of my vision manifesto.
So it's unique to you. But what you want to be Doing is writing in the present tense. What vision looks like for you? What ideally you want to be doing in your everyday life? And when you read in the present tense, it does something to your brain because you're saying this isn't what I'm going to do.
It's what I am. It's what I am. And so I've even like actually recorded myself reading my vision manifesto, and I listen while I'm on the elliptical or taking a walk. Good for you.
Sometimes what it does. Is I might be dealing with the challenge in that moment. When I read this, it reminds me of who I want to be.
So I'll read mine for my relationships. I am kind. I am gentle. I am loved, and I am loving. I'm supported.
People's lives are better when they cross paths with me. I allow others to be responsible for their choices, and me only for mine. My approach to relationships is healthy. Peaceful and reciprocal, my marriage is joyful, unified, and romantic. And the question is, what is the balance for Christians between pursuing their vision and accepting God's will for their life?
So I think be content in all things is not the same as be happy about it. Right. Right. So I think of Jesus's words specifically in this world: you will have tribulation. Cheer up.
Cheer up! Cheer up! What do you mean, cheer up in tribulations?
So there is a an acceptance of the things you don't control.
So this goes back to another rule, might be my favorite rule: control the controllable, accept the rest. Yeah. Control the controllable, so we know this is a psychological concept of internal locus of control. The people who are most resilient and most successful have an internal locus of control. When they're dealing with challenges, they ask, "What do I have control over?
I do have control over my attitude. I do have control over my prayer life. I have control over certain things that I can do or choose not to do." And they let go of the things they. Don't control whether this is you know you dealing with a a boss or an organization where things are shifting. This could be the things going on in the world.
You don't have control over what other people do. That doesn't mean accept the rest. Doesn't mean that I approve of the rest. It means I look at it and I realize I am not in control of everything. You know, and it's so true.
And one of those other common things that we say is, "Woof, that person really has low self awareness." You don't want to be that person. People are saying that about. I'll give you an example, and you know, again, I mean this for constructive purpose. But I remember in my late twenties, Gene and I were already married, and I had a good friend who was lamenting that he had he didn't have a girlfriend and how badly he wanted to be married. But I've given it over to the Lord, and I knew he hadn't.
You could just hear it in everything he was saying. It was you know, and he was aiming quite high. For the type of girlfriend he would like, first of all, beautiful, you know, and then all the other attributes. And I, you know, I was trying to be a good friend, and I just said to this person, I said his name, and I said, "It doesn't sound like to me you've given it over." And it really, I could tell it was an arrow, but it was that lack of self awareness I was sensing. Like, bro, come on, you're saying you've given it up and given it to the Lord, but you haven't.
And that's just an. Application of how, you know, real world circumstances work. You could probably share examples of that, but speak to that awareness issue inside your heart and inside your relationship with Christ, and then with those right around you. The need to be aware of what you say and what you do need to line up. Yeah.
So. Having what I call it thought awareness, being aware of what you're saying to yourself about your circumstances, but also being aware of where you may have an opportunity to to grow. I call these growth gaps.
So, take your friend for example, wanting to get married. I in in the book I would describe that as a performance goal. That's something very measurable. Have the girlfriend or not have the girlfriend, right? But every goal that we have.
That's a performance goal that's measurable. We need a growth goal to go with it because there's a reason we haven't reached the goal already.
So, how will you need to grow in order to get to where you want to go? You may need to grow in your faith. You may need to grow in your trust of God. You may need to grow in your communication. You don't communicate well, and you're throwing people off.
So, understanding what's the growth goal that goes with this performance goal. And Valerie, let me ask this question. This might be the most important question I've asked during our entire time. I first have an image, and then the question. The image is being on a river bank, wanting to be on the other side, but there's no bridge.
There's no way to get there, and that person. You're asking the right questions. You're saying the right things. That is the building of the bridge to that other side. Yes.
But they're standing there perilously, incapable of asking themselves those questions. How do you go from that paralyzed moment of I've got something? The problem might be me. Yes. This was my question.
Is I was at that bridge, right at thirty-six, divorced with no kids. And knowing that was still my dream, it was very scary to hope for it. Wow, there's a lot of women and men in that spot.
So you can have something you want, and you won't admit it because you're so afraid you're going to be disappointed. Yeah. Am I kidding myself? Should I keep hoping for this? But you know the definition of faith in Hebrews 11:1.
Faith is the substance of things. Hoped for, and the evidence of things not seen. Yeah, the very definition of faith is that you have to be hoping, and sometimes hoping is the scariest thing you can do, because you're so afraid you won't get it. And when you choose to hope, my my thought was. Not only that, I would walk through that fire that was so hard, and it would not consume me.
But I decided I will be better, and not bitter. And that became a coaching question: How could I be better? That's where my hope went.
So, from a practical standpoint, I started looking for people that were better on the other side of a divorce, and I was like, "Is that possible?" Well, if it's possible, that's what I want because I sure don't want to be worse, and I definitely don't want to be bitter, and I definitely don't want to close my heart to love and to what God's put in my heart.
So that became my learning, and so I think opening yourself to hearing others' stories of resilience and. What can I learn from that? Yeah, is a big piece of the puzzle. You know, when you look at Scripture, there's so many stories of the apathetic human being, believer or non-believer. I mean, the biblical stories are full of people that just rest in their bad place.
They don't become motivated to go to a better place with the Lord. Why are we wired like that, or why why are we defaulting to that? It is irrational to stay in a bad place. It can feel easier. Is that it?
Yeah, it's just more comfortable. Hope requires discomfort. Hmm. Requires you to get out of your comfort zone. And so it can be easier to stop hoping to say, "I thought God said I could have marriage.
I thought He could heal in this area. I thought we could get out of debt and maybe eventually be in a better place financially." But I don't see it happening yet. And why do I keep putting forth the effort? When you stop hoping, you start settling. Yeah.
And so I think that's what happens in the settling. You're not happy about settling, yeah, but it's more comfortable. You know, it's interesting. You look at prison or during war. You look at prisoners of war.
One of the things psychologically. Enemy combatants do is to try to take hope away, to put you into despair. I mean, it's a real recognition spiritually of what the enemy is trying to do—to steal, kill, and destroy. He's trying to remove any sense of hope because hope is a characteristic of God. Yes, and you remove that from the human spirit, we become just not healthy.
And hope is also a requirement of resilience. It's that little, that that little light that says it could get better, or I could find a way to weather this. Right? I could find my contentment. I'm not content right now.
Maybe you know.
Sometimes we're in circumstances that are not going to change. But we have to find a way to be able to show up in that and learn how to be okay. Lord, what can I learn here? Yeah, in this moment. Yeah, and and the hope that we can somehow be okay—that's still hope.
Yeah, yeah, that's good, Valerie. This has been terrific. I could just keep going. It's like sitting in the living room and having a life discussion here. I could see why you're so good at coaching and corporations pull you in to help people think differently about how to get around this obstacle.
Or so, thank you so. Much for your great book, Rules of Resilience: Ten Ways Successful People Get Better, Wiser, and Stronger. It includes many more insights that we didn't cover today. We have copies for you here at Focus on the Family. When you make a gift of any amount, we'll send you a copy as our way of saying thank you for supporting the ministry and helping other families.
We are a nonprofit ministry, so your donations go straight into ministry to help people like Anne. She is a stay-at-home mom of three teenagers. She wrote in and told us this: "I listen almost daily to your broadcasts. The variety of your shows provides guidance and encouragement to me as a mom and wife, but also as a Christian. God is really working through this ministry.
So, partner with us and be part of what God is doing. He sees it. He sees you give that gift, and then it accrues to your account in heaven. Let's go save people. That's a great thing to do.
And if today." This program impacted you because you're struggling with some heavy challenges. We have caring Christian counselors here for you. It's absolutely free to get that initial consultation, and they'll give you some next steps to grow and find healing. Yeah, you can set up a counseling consultation or donate and get your copy of the book when you call 800 the letter A and the word family, or look for details in the show notes. And thanks for listening to Focus on the Family with Jim Daly.
I'm John Fuller, inviting you back next time as we once again help you and your family thrive in Christ. If you're a pastor wanting to save and strengthen marriages in your congregation, we've got a great tool for you: Marriage 911 by Focus on the Family. Trains laypeople to mentor couples who may be on the verge of divorce or who want to strengthen what they already have. The kit includes two leader guides, four workbooks, and all the training necessary to meet with and mentor men and women who need help. Visit Marriage.
911.com. That's marriage. The number's 911.com.
