Good to be with you again, you brave-hearted woman. Thank you for joining me. I'm your host, Dawn Damon, and known also as the BraveHearted Mentor because we're doing brave stuff as we're growing, we're blowing and we're becoming brave.

Today I wanna talk to you. I wanna encourage your heart because I just have a feeling there might be some out there that just say, ‘I wanna quit.’ So what do you do when you feel like you wanna give up? Quitting, giving up, calling uncle, throwing in the towel, all of those things. You feel like I'm done.

First of all, let's talk about the difference between I'm done and I’m finished. Well, you see sometimes endings, are necessary, aren't they? Sometimes a season is just over and wisdom demands that we discern that season and that we figure out, ‘What am I supposed to stay? Am I supposed to go?’ However, it turns out we are called to finish well. No bad endings or no crazy jump off the edge. We don't do things haphazardly as brave-hearted women.

As women of God. We wanna finish. Well, if you feel released from something, then commit to a proper integris conclusion. But think about it, if I wanna quit a job, if I wanna quit a relationship, maybe I wanna quit an eating program, a commitment I've made, I wanna quit school. I want to quit church. Discern your season. Get some wisdom, get some counsel. Talk to some advisors that you trust. Get an informed and predetermined decision. That's what will help you finish. Well. Stay away from rash, instant impetuous actions. But if it's something more serious, I wanna quit a bad habit. I wanna quit sin. I wanna quit this addiction that I'm caught in. I wanna definitely quit this illegal behavior. Or maybe you wanna quit life altogether, get immediate help. That's not what I wanna talk about today. Because if you're there, I guess no one knows how desperate you feel and how deep in your head you are or how you feel. You're probably trying to go it alone. You're probably trying to handle your issues all by yourself, never good. In fact, the desperation that you feel actually does come from trying to deal with your issues and your problems without any support. So that's the disclaimer to this, that maybe your season is done and you need to finish well. Or maybe you're in a really desperate place and you need to get some help.

But today, I'm talking about those who want to give up on their goals and dreams, those who want to give up on living large, and who're just willing to accept average. You're gonna give up on personal growth and development, your pursuit of greatness in God. Maybe you've been chasing something and you're just tired and you say, I'm done. Or you're repairing something, you're restoring, you're mending, you're coming back from a dry spell, A season of financial reversal, or a desert place. You're coming back from exile. A disappointment or discouragement, a cutback season sometimes. How many? No, God will cut back, prune, purge, and now you're rebuilding something in your life that needs fortifying. Maybe you're rebuilding your marriage or your career. Maybe you're rebuilding your body. Your finances, your reputation, whatever it is, friends, here's the answer to that. We don't quit.

We don't quit. We are called to endure and persevere and remain steadfast. My word for the year is STEADFAST because you have a worthy and honorable goal. But sometimes we get to the place where we just think we wanna be done. We wanna throw in the towel. Let me tell you a few reasons why you get to that place.

The first one is obvious. You get tired. Fatigue sets in and when you wanna give up, sometimes it's just cuz you're tired. My granddaughter is running tracks smashing all the records. Maybe I shared this before, I don't know, but. I was at the track meet and there's this little dude and he was running and he came around the corner and it was like he discovered for the first time what we're running hurdles. I mean, he knew he was running hurdles. These are 12 and 13-year-olds who are learning to maneuver their body and you got arms and legs flailing everywhere as they're flailing and hurling themselves over these hurdles. But this little guy, he was coming in last place. You could see the discouragement on his face. You could see that he didn't feel like he was doing well and he was tired and he got to the last hurdle and he just like stopped in his tracks and looked at the audience, shook his head. No, like not today. He just wanted to quit. He wanted to be done. And sometimes we are just done.

You know, tired has a language, all of its own, doesn't it? Fatigue will speak to you. You know you're tired when you start to complain when you're feeling overwhelmed. When you start using the vocabulary of always and never, or you feel alone, I'm in this alone. Nobody's there for me. In the 12 steps, they call it a halt. Never make a decision when you're hungry, angry, lonely or tired, because if you take yourself too seriously when you're hungry, angry, lonely, or tired, you're about to make a bad decision or you're going to act out in a way that's not well for you. It's not gonna end well. So it's just stop, just halt. You're not in a good place and sometimes. Hey, we're just tired. You wanna quit because maybe you're just physically tired.

Let's talk about that for a minute. If you're physically tired, get some sleep. Go to bed. God's mercies are new in the morning. Take a self-care day. Did I just really say that I did take a self-care day? Because sometimes you do truly need it. But sometimes it's just mental fatigue and mental fatigue or exhaustion of the soul that will mess with you, won't it? You get weary from, I think it's warfare or battle weary. Your mind is just being palliative. It is being beaten up. Let's go with demonic suggestions and devilish whispers, and maybe those around you are naysayers and problem identifiers and you're not feeling supported. Well, you wanna quit when that happens.

Frustration number two. That's another reason why we wanna quit. We just get frustrated. Frustration is the feeling of being upset or annoyed, especially because we have an inability to change something. We can't fix it. We can't change it. And we can't control it fast enough. Can all the control freaks that are listening and viewing on YouTube say, Yeah! Amen. Okay, that's me. So you might just be frustrated cause you feel like your progress is slow and you're not seeing results that happen. We think our efforts aren't making a difference, and that's when morale starts to suffer and you can see it kind of go down, what was that old joke that we used to say? And the floggings will continue until the morale improves.

If you're flogging your own mind, if you're frustrated, your morale is not gonna go up. Your courage has disked you. It's called discouragement, and you just feel like you want to quit. But sometimes we underestimate what we can do with just little incremental steps. The Bible says steady plotting. Brings prosperity, consistency, plotting little bits, and baby steps on the regular. That's what brings prosperity. You don't have to have these big, massive quantum leaps or windfalls, just do a little bit every day and you might be just frustrated ‘cause your expectation is too much. You're expecting too much, but you're underestimating or under-expecting what you can do. Little bits over time.

John Maxwell has this Rule of 5. He says this if you have a tree in your backyard that you wanna cut down, that needs to be cut down and it's a big tree, but you just take the ax and you go outside and you just give it five big wax a day. Eventually, that tree is coming down and eventually, it's gonna fall. So go ahead and give it five wax a day. Patient and endurance are what you need now because when you've done the will of God, you're gonna receive the promise.

Maybe the third reason why we wanna quit is we're just feeling afraid. I do think that the spirit of fear at masquerades is a prophet it wants to predict for you a scary future. It wants to give you a picture, but not a godly picture. It wants to give you a scary picture of a future that is dim gloomy and sad and lonely and has nothing good in it. The Doomsayer wants to say, ‘Just quit because there's nothing good in front of you, and you just fear tomorrow.’ You have anxiety, you have a concern, you have worry.

So what do you do when you wanna give up? Let me give you 4 things that you do wanna do when you're ready to give up. Of course, the first one for me, when I feel tired or I feel like I wanna just throw in the towels, I just pray because James 1:5 says, “If any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to you.” He will give you wisdom. He will lavish wisdom on you. So ask God, get some supernatural favor. How am I supposed to do this? God, what's the strategy in the choice of God? He'll show you. He'll give you that wisdom.

In fact, for me, that almost always happens as a writer and an author. I got some on my books right here, The Freedom Challenge: 60 Days to Untie the Cords that Bind You that I've written some others when I am writing. I think the manuscript looks good. I'll leave it for a few days and then I'll come back and I'll look at it and the first thing I see is like, ‘Oh, that's wrong. That's misspelled. There's a word missing.’ My brain inserted that word every time. I just needed to take a break. If you're stuck or you're up against a wall and something's not working, ‘Hey, take a break. Come back with fresh eyes.’ You'll probably easily see a new strategy, some creativity, and find supportive people. Get some advice.

We used to say when we were entrepreneurial spirits starting a church, we would say, if we weren't the pastors of this church and someone else came in and took over this church, What would they do? Then we would mention a few things that we are pretty sure that they would do. Then we'd say, Well, let's walk out that door, come back in and let's do that thing. So what would someone else do in your space? Do that.

The third thing that we need to do is just get a new focus. So again, get your eyes off of what's going wrong and even how you feel about what's going wrong. ‘Cause I wanna tell you there's four laws of focus and if you're looking at the wrong thing. Listen to the four laws of focus. So what I focus on, I find more of or I draw more of it to myself, I attract more of it. What I focus on becomes really large, just takes over all the space in my mind. That's all I can see. What I focus on becomes real. It feels real. My body and my brain don't know the difference between what I'm living up here and what I'm living here and what I focus on. I become so careful about what you're focusing on and then maybe help someone else get my eyes off of me. Start serving and being a contributor to someone else in need because that's when you get your eyes off and you get a new focus and a fresh focus. I just mentioned it before, you're gonna come back and see things differently.

And then finally, I'm gonna leave you with this last one. You need to ignite a new fighting spirit. You do need a comeback spirit. You need to dig down deep and find your grit and your glitter. You need to find your fighting spirit. You need to come back, and the way you do that is to connect with your why. Why is this important to you? Why did you have this goal, to begin with? Visualize your success. What does it feel like to reach this goal? How is it changing the lives of those you love and impacting those around you? What happens to you? How much more health do you have? How much more finances do you have? How are your relationships better? How is your body stronger and healthier? Whatever it is. Connect to your why and then remember your past victories and motivate yourself to add this victory to the list too, ‘cause you know how you felt when you smashed that last goal. You know how it was when you didn't think it was gonna happen, and then finally you press through and you got that breakthrough. Get a comeback spirit about you.

I always think of the palm tree. The palm tree during a storm. You know the palm tree is made very flexible so that it can withstand storms. God said we were gonna flourish like a palm tree in Psalm 91. He didn't say an oak tree. There's a reason why when an oak tree's in a storm, it'll snap. God said we're gonna flourish like a palm tree. That means when the storm comes, we're gonna just bend with it. We're gonna be flexible. We're not gonna snap because our roots go down deep ~ deep into the water, deep into the earth. Sometimes you can drive by a palm tree and look at it and say, ‘Ooh, man, that hurricane got that tree.’ The hurricane itself might even say, ‘Ha, I got you. I got you. Look at, you're just laid out.’ But here's the thing, it's not uprooted. It's just laying down, but it's not uprooted. In a day or two, you come by it, it's like, ‘Woo, I'm back.’ See, you have to have that comeback spirit. You have to have resilience, delay gratification, and stick with it, because if it's an honorable goal, a worthy goal, then the reward is well worth it.

Now I'm gonna leave you with this verse in Philippians 1:6, “...he who began a good work will be faithful to complete it in you.”

All right in you. That's the truth, brave-hearted sister. Don't give up. Don't quit. Don't throw in the towel. I'm gonna say it again. If you're in a desperate place, I want you to get some help right away. Tell someone, a trusted friend, an advisor, a pastor, a counselor, a medical professional. Don't go on your own.

Remember, if you're feeling tired, really emotionally and physically tired, it's because you're trying to do it all by yourself, and you weren't created to do that. If your season is done and you know you've sought the Lord and you've asked him and you feel a release in your spirit, then finish. Well, finish with integrity. Don't walk away. Leave a hot mess. Finish. Well, connect the dots. Do what you gotta do so that when you walk out of that whatever it is, it's God-honoring, and you'll never be embarrassed or never be ashamed to return back to that place. I think about it. Pastors and people who resign and leave churches do it right, and do it well, but for everyone else, you're running a good race. Keep on running. Don't quit. You gotta keep going.

Okay, that's what I have for you today. Hey, I wanna give you a free gift. If you have not downloaded my ebook, Ignite your confidence, and Soar with Self-esteem, then you need to get that free gift, and you can catch that by just clicking on the link there below.

And if you need a little coaching and you need some help and you're stuck, My intellectual property, my journey for you, my coaching program for you is exactly what you need. Just get the free gift and then you'll get an opportunity for a strategy call with me. I look forward to meeting with you and talking with you. That's what I have for you.

Thanks all for those who are watching on YouTube. Don't forget to review me, like me, and send this podcast to someone so they can listen to it. If you love this podcast and you wanna see it elevated in their rankings, I sure would help me out, write me a review. Alright, everybody, I'm gonna leave you like I always do ~ Dawn Damon, your Braveheart mentor, telling you to find your brave and live your vision.