MM152 - What is Sapping your Strength | MM Book Study Pt. 10

Weeds and saplings take away the energy from healthy plants in nature. Do you have weeds in your life that are choking you? Are there saplings stealing away your strength?

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[INTRO]

♫ Trenches by Pop Evil ♫

*Alex*

Welcome to Morning Mindset. A daily dose of practical wit and wisdom with a professional educator & trainer, Amazon best selling author, United States Marine, Television, and Radio host, Paul G. Markel. Each episode will focus on positive and productive ways to strengthen your mindset and help you improve your relationships, career goals, and overall well-being. Please welcome your host; Paul G. Markel.

*Professor Paul*

Okay, here we go again. Welcome back to Morning Mindset and I am your host Paul Markel, and we are going to continue with the Morning Mindset book study. Yes indeed, and this one, today's chapter, if you hear the pages ruffling that's because I actually have a paper copy a dead tree version of the Morning Mindset book in my hand, and I hope that you have either the paperback version or the Kindle version and that you are following along.

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If you don't have those, pop on over to Amazon and pick them up and you can follow along and take notes in the margin and all that good stuff. Okay, when I was young my mother planted a garden every spring, and we also when I was growing up we had fruit trees and we had grapevines. I remember we had a peach tree and we had apple trees and we had grapevines. We have the purple grapes and we had the white grapes, you know, the concord grapes and then whatever the other ones are. But when I was a little child in the springtime, my mom would plant the garden and then, you know after a week or two.

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We'd go out there and we'd see little tiny green sprouts and my mom, when I was a small child, I don't know maybe 5-6-7 years old, something like that. She showed me, she took me out in the garden and she showed me the difference between the healthy plants, what was going to be corn or was going to be carrots or green beans or whatever, the difference between those and the weeds.

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The weeds that weren't going to be valuable, the weeds that were just there taking up the energy, the soil, the water intake, and the nutrients that the healthy plants needed. So what she showed me was, we had to get in there in the garden and we had to figure out what was good, you know, what was going to be carrots or green beans or whatever and we had to leave those there.

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But we had to pull out the weeds had to get rid of those weeds, because the weeds- and she explained to me if we leave the weeds in there, then the good plants, the healthy plants, the productive ones that we want to grow won't get enough nutrition from the soil and the weeds will steal away the water. They'll steal away the nutrients and we won't have good healthy vegetables or fruit or what have you.

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Now the saplings are, it's a little bit different. If you ever go into an apple orchard, if you've ever gone to an apple orchard and old one that's fallen into disarray. The apple trees, rather than looking like a healthy tree, what you would picture as a tree, almost look more like bushes. Because they have all these little sapling vines growing out of them. Pear trees do the same thing, apple trees and so forth, and a good Gardener will go into the Orchard and they will prune away the saplings.

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The little tiny, you know twigs that are sticking out of the branch, because why? Well in order to transfer all of the energy, or in order for the plants energy to go to fruit production, you've got to get rid of all those other distractions. See the saplings that are coming out of the trees, they take away the energy from the tree, and they steal its strength. They stop it from being able to produce healthy fruit. If you just let it go, if you don't trim the vines, if you don't trim your grape vines, if you don't prune your trees, what will happen is all the energy will go to unproductive saplings instead of to making good fruit apples and pears and all that stuff.

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So I learned, you know, when I was young that yeah, even though it looks like these are healthy branches coming out of these fruit trees, we have to look and decide which branches are actually going to produce fruit and which ones aren't and the ones that aren't, we need to cut them off and get rid of them.

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Because they're just stealing the energy away from the healthy tree. You say “That's great Paul, but I don't have a garden and I don't have an orchard. So why do I care?” Well, I'm telling you why you should care, because in your life, chances are really high that you have one or both of those situations you either have weeds in your life.

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Weeds that are stealing away the nutrients, they're stealing away your energy, they're preventing you from growing and leading a strong healthy productive life. Now these weeds may be bad habits, you may have developed several bad habits over a course of a lifetime, and you realize that you're like, “You know, I could be doing better at work. My family life could be much better, but it's not because I have these things in my life. I have these bad habits that are essentially weeds and these weeds are choking out my ability to be healthy and productive.”

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Now, maybe the weeds aren't habits. Maybe the weeds are people there could be people in your life that are acting as weeds. There's choking away your productive strength, every time you want to do something productive or good or positive in your life, you have these acquaintances. Maybe you call them friends, but they're actually weeds and they're stealing away your ability, they're choking you out, they’re keeping you down, they’re keeping you from realizing your full potential, because weeds are not productive plants.

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Weeds are unproductive plants. The only thing weeds are good for is maybe, you know the cattle to chew on them and then they turn into manure, that's it. Weeds don't provide a service, weeds are not productive and the weeds don't want the plants to grow. The weeds steal away the energy from the healthy plants. Maybe you have people in your life.

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Maybe you need to have an honest self-assessment and you can realize “You know, some of these people that I call friends, instead of helping me to grow and prosper are doing the exact opposite. They're holding me back.” Now saplings are very similar, saplings appear to be productive because they grow on a healthy plant.

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They grow in a healthy tree, but the saplings steal away the energy and the strength from the healthy tree and saplings to you could be distractions. Maybe they're not necessarily bad habits, maybe they're not necessarily negative people or bad people or you know, weeds. But the sapling you have so many things, maybe you're torn in so many different directions, you have so many projects going that you can't focus your time and energy on one specific task.

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You're never able to complete one task exceedingly, well because you have all of your energy going in different directions. If you find yourself in a position where you feel like, honestly self-assessment, that you should be doing better that you should be moving forward that you should be improving, but you're not.

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Maybe you're feeling a little bit frustrated, you're like, you know, “I know that I should be promoted by now at work. I know that I should be making more money. I know that I should be out of debt. I know this but I'm not.” Maybe you need to take a just a little bit of time to think about what's going on in your life, and maybe you have a bunch of saplings a bunch of things that are stealing away your productive energy.

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It could be time to trim the tree, it could be time for a little bit of pruning in your life. You need to get rid of these non-productive saplings these non-productive distractions, and once you get rid of those, you can focus all of your time and your energy on positive Pursuits on things that will make you stronger and more healthy and improve your relationships and your career goals and so forth.

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So today's episode of what is sapping your strength. You need to take some time to examine your life and figure out if you have weeds that are choking you out or if you have saplings that are stealing your energy pull those weeds. I know it's you got it, you know you got to get your hands dirty pulling weeds is not easy.

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You gotta get down on the ground, you got to get your knees dirty, you got to get your hands dirty, you've got to actually do it and saplings the same thing. You got to go out there, you have to figure out which things are productive, which branches of your life are productive, and which ones are just stealing away your energy and get rid of the ones that are stealing away your energy.

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I hope that you guys are enjoying the book study. We're not even halfway through yet, and we'll be back tomorrow with another one. I am your host Paul Markel and I'll talk to you again, real soon.

[OUTRO]

♫ Trenches by Pop Evil ♫

*Alex*

Thank you for spending time with us today. To get show notes, submit a topic request, for more from your host Paul G. Markel, visit MorningMindsetPodcast.com. That’s MorningMindsetPodcast.com. Please leave a review of this podcast on your favorite podcast player, we appreciate your time & effort, and we look forward to reading your honest feedback.