Some of you may have noticed that I haven’t posted in awhile. Part of this was intentional, and some of it was by accident. I’ve found myself having lots of things to talk about but not really anything to say. An additional issue has been that my typical weekly schedule got shifted around at the beginning of the year. Which when you set aside specific times of the week to work on writing and you no longer have that time available it makes it a little harder to write. With that being said the primary reason that I haven’t really been able to write is somewhat of a lack of focus.

While the last year has been a very interesting time, which I plan to write a recap of most of it over the next week or so, the last few months in particular have been somewhat intense. I’ve brought a lot of topics up within my own life and had to look at how I evaluate and understand them. Equally for one of the few times in my life I’ve found myself being pushed in a lot of areas from other people. This isn’t to say that other people haven’t cared about me, or that I haven’t pushed myself, or had others to push me, just in the past few months I’ve probably had more voices challenging me than most of the times in the past. This further has emphasized finding some of my own identity and the foundations for a lot of things.

If you’re following this so far then you can see how sometimes it’s hard for me to focus, which like some of my others posts this one is a bit more raw and unrefined with the intentional purpose of showing what focus or lack of focus may or may not be bringing through and from me. Throughout life there are constantly some questions that bring us into focus, such as “what do I want to do with my life?” or “who am I?” These types of questions sometimes provide few answers or at least few stable answers, and usually are much more dynamic. Which as someone who likes living in a dynamic state of being this can be helpful but also really frustrating when trying to explain it to others or to build off something solid.

Which to make matters even better, part of the last few months has involved looking at some of the various callings or signs that I feel exist in my life. While sometimes these signs are pretty obvious, other times they’re a little less helpful. Obviously most of this sounds fairly vague which to be fair is somewhat how it felt for me. Which is part of why I’ve intentionally started seeking out some answers in a more proactive way. One of the ways that I’ve done this is by starting to take some various personality trait tests, which if you know me is always a somewhat entertaining process. For those who don’t really know me the reason why it’s entertaining is because I have a background in psychology and the words “it depends” is usually one of my go to answers. So when a question says from a scale of always to never where do you fall, my go to response of it depends tends to kick in. Which means that usually I’m not super polar, which makes interpreting results fun. However, knowing this going into it I also tend to take a variety of scales that measure close to the same thing, and then compare the scores across them to see what stands out as a pretty common trait and some of the things that tend to fluctuate a little bit more.

Another thing that I’ve done recently is attend a few conferences that are focused on things like “Focused Living” or “Strength Finder”. Through all of it a few interesting trends have somewhat developed. The first of which is the idea that my skills surprisingly or unsurprisingly to some tend to focus in around the idea of smaller groups of people. As much as my inner rock star really wants to be unleashed on massive crowds, the realistic version that is represented about 99.99999% of the time really doesn’t like crowds overly much. So the idea of being better in small to medium size groups makes a lot of sense.

Additionally, one of the things that has always been a sort of interesting balance for me has been the concept of teaching. For whatever reason I’ve always had an interesting struggle with the idea of me as a teacher. Yet I’ve almost always scored fairly well in teaching categories and have some various forms of training and have a fairly significant history with education as a whole. So why the inner struggle? Who knows, sometimes the answers aren’t always easily provided. Yet one of the fascinating thinking points that I’m still working on is how I can bring a skill that is clearly apparent in line with the idea of being in smaller groups as a maximum form of where I thrive.

To make things even more fun is that I recently started a challenge that I’ve mentioned before undertaking the 5 challenges from Radical by David Platt. As part of the challenge I also helped to design a group participation format to meet/go through the challenge. Just another example of how sometimes things just kind of start adding up over and over. I could continue to go on about some of the other things that have been directed at focusing what I’m doing in life and where I’m going, but I’m still not 100% sure where things are going just yet.

Which one of the activities that I had to do recently was create a timeline of my life and include people and events that were important. As part of it I was also asked to draw some conclusions and themes. It was weird for me because there were quite a few potential turning points that I could see that I’m clearly going through but don’t yet know how they will be resolved. Also looking back most of the other turning points other than college tended to be around more negative appearing events. Which typically resulted in a quick resolution, or in some cases led to longer periods of negative cycle events happening. As such it’s weird to think that turning points are occurring in a point that I’m really quite happy and somewhat motivated, albeit somewhat lacking direction or focus, although somewhat more focused than I have been recently.

With all of that being said, I’m not really sure where things are going to be going this next year. It’s sure to be rather entertaining, at least for me and hopefully for those of you who read, but I felt that I at least needed to start getting some of these things out to stop waiting for perfection. Plus if I wait any longer than my posts are going to become exceptionally long. So here’s the start of something, what it is no clue, but more will probably be coming soon.