Welcome to the Excel Stillmore podcast.

I am your host, Chris Emerson.

I'm here to encourage you in your walk with God.

Thank you for joining in.

Today's podcast is sponsored by Cunningham Financial Group.

John Cunningham is a friend of mine and a brother in Christ,

and he can help you with financial decisions and future planning. He's been a big help to me

and my family, and I commend him to you. You can reach him at 205-913-1720. I am so thankful you're here, so let's get started.

Welcome back to the fourth episode of 2021. It is important for you and me to get this year started right. I wanted to take all of the

episodes in the month of January and give you some action terms that can help you build a vision

for the year. As you've heard me say, many times, everybody wants to get better. Very few people actually

know what better looks like. What is a better version of you? How would you be different at the

end of this year if you had grown? We need clarity, a vision, and I'm hopeful that these four terms can help, that you can reference back to them

throughout the year.

And if you did nothing else this year except grow in these four things, it would have the

potential to change enough relationships in your life, to change your level of commitment

to make it the best year you've ever had. So let's recap the three action terms we've covered so

far, and then we will introduce this final one. I hope you will see today that these words are about balance.

We want to create a vision and we want to grow, but not in an imbalanced way that does a whole

lot of one thing at the total neglect of the other. To best illustrate that, let's talk about the last

two episodes, weeks two and three

of 2021. We looked at the word teaching and then came back the next week and talked about the word

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