Written by Tanur Badgley (PoP’s Creator & Host)
Getting to interview Evan was an amazing and much-needed experience.
Evan has so much to say about how to balance life.
He tackles about stacking up the dominoes in your life so that you can identify your lead domino. This process will guide you to start making major transformations in your life just by being aware and being a student of life. It was essential for me to hear these ideas.
With so many people having struggles in 2020 and with so many things on our plates, interviewing Evan was so refreshing. He thinks through things in a different way than I'm used to hearing. His theories on personal development, being intertwined with business development are very true in my opinion and certainly not surprising to hear. But when you dig into it, he has a unique worldview about how we overcome ourselves and allow for our businesses and lives to thrive.
Evan talked about how we have to get new habits in place of our bad habits.
That good habit becomes the first domino in a row of dominoes that triggers other dominoes. It was like an essential take on how change happens.
He is an expert on how to love yourself through the process of change.
It's because he learned how to love himself. He was changing. He was in a marriage that he was way too young to be in. He had so many career shifts. He moved to and from locations always to come back to his hometown. He thought he had a career as a pastor, and then that all fell away from him.
Evan had so many struggles, challenges, and points of resistance.
He is so raw and authentic about it in this episode. I think he is incredibly relatable and should be considered an authority in this matter. He talked about balancing the wheel of faith, family, finances, friendship, fitness, and fun, and how everything should be inflated. Otherwise, it's going to be a bumpy ride. That was an eye-opening statement for me.
As you know, people that do business and live in Western society tend to overinflate certain aspects of this and under inflate others. Evan was able to talk about how he lives with open honesty about the vulnerability of his struggles, where he's at in his life right now. He makes space and creates a margin in his life. Evan decides to not put too much on his plate so that he can reach success without getting burnt out. This was very needed for me to hear.
His whole reframe about how we have to live life not for the destination but for these failures and struggles to become our bridges, to an understanding about how to better lead ourselves in the journey is admirable. Once we lead ourselves in the journey, we can lead others too.
Finally, the thing that stuck out for me was discussing what it means to accept Christ.
He was a pastor for a while. He formerly trained in the Bible and studies the word all the time. His take on what it means to be a Christian is to accept that Jesus is the son of God, that he died on the cross and rose again. That he died for our sins and that nobody can come to the Father except through the son. And that there's also no other God, and nobody else has ever died for the sin of man. We are full of sin and evil, but we have been redeemed by Jesus who never sinned.
We must believe in our hearts that Jesus is our Lord and our savior.
That means we have to give our lives over to greater power than ourselves to be our Lord. Therefore that's how we receive our saving. It is not about fire insurance, nor about avoiding hell. It is about recognizing sin for what it is and accepting the grace and forgiveness that we can be saved. I thought that this was a wise and concise pointed take on what it means to be a Christian.
Overall, Evan is a very articulate individual who expresses himself honestly and authentically.
He has a brave heart to share about his struggles with sugar, addictions, pornography, depression, and the challenges of having a dozen close people that he loved in his life dying in the last dozen years.
The whole interview with Evan was a very conversational episode. I look forward to you digging in and going through the exercise he put me through on the podcast. This exercise allowed me to identify my one lead domino that would start to put my life in motion. We were able to discover that I needed a time block, time to study the word, and I needed to invite people to a Bible study. And that is what I will be doing.