Finding Your Faith In God When You Lose Your Way With Jake Jordan
If you ever lose your way in life, it's always best to find God. Listen to him and take action with him. This is what Jake Jordan has been doing ever since he found his way in life. Jake is a business coach and life coach with a Christian twist. He helps people succeed in life by finding themselves first. He believes that once you find yourself, you will find God, and amazing things will happen. Join your host Chad Burmeister and his guest Jake Jordan on finding and listening to God. Learn about his struggles and how he was able to ignore the money ladder and focus on helping the people around him. Find your way with God today!
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Finding Your Faith In God When You Lose Your Way With Jake Jordan
I'm with a cool guy out of the Dallas, Texas area. Jake Jordan has been doing business coaching and life coaching with a Christian slant. His website is ImpactOverAttention.com. I'm sure we will get into why it's named that. Jake, welcome to the show.
Thanks, Jeff. I appreciate you having me.
I love the background. It's a constantly moving life there. Does it change? Do you get on a roller coaster at some point?
That would be cool. It's one of those things where you get to choose your stuff. It’s a little grainy at the moment but I can tune back in and get back on the ride.
That is a good use of technology, which is what all of us are using now. Let's rewind the tape to pre-technology. We go back to the dinosaur age maybe, probably not, but somewhere in there. Maybe iPhones didn't exist. Foot phones were there. Pagers were starting to come on the scene. My dad had a phone that was the size of a brick. When you were 5, 6, 7, 8 before the filters of the world were put on and you learned how to wear a mask to be someone you are not, what was Jake like as a child?
Competitive but I enjoy life. I love people. I love competing and growing. I played all the sports, every single one and went to church for as long as I can remember. I learned how to support a family. I have a fun childhood memory up until high school until we’ve got into what competition looked like in the real world. It was a good time to be Jake.
Back in those days, it’s not like everybody gets a trophy. There was competition, even at a young age. Maybe everybody did get at least a ribbon for the swim meet, the soccer game or whatnot.
Not in Texas.
You and I have that in common. My dad gave me the old hockey stick that I used to play roller hockey, not ice hockey. I could run around the kids in that game.
Baseball is my sport. Baseball with my true love but I played them all.
I can hear it hitting the wooden stick and crack, hitting it out of the park every so often. What's the thread between then and now in terms of competition? Have you put a finger on that to recognize, “This is part of my strength?” How does that play into what you are doing now?
When I went through high school and had to weave through all that muddle garbage that you have to deal with being in school and even college a little bit, I figured out that I appreciated excellence and performance in myself and others. It wasn't necessarily even the competition. I love performing and I like failing, honestly. I know it sounds like a cliché thing to say but I like testing things out. When they fail, it's not a failure to me. I don't know if that's something I was endowed with as a personality trait. I have high-performing parents, too. When I’ve got older, like a lot of people, I started doing things and realized I wasn't happy doing them. I was more just filling a gap. I recognized that at the end of the day, I like testing things out, try things out and figuring out what works and what doesn't work, and that makes me happy in my own business and other people's.
I can almost hear the title of this show. "It's okay to fail and to have permission to fail."
Please fail.
I remember the Marine from San Diego that says, “If it's bad, good.” He had a three-minute video on it. It's like, “You’ve got fired from your job? Good. Did you get in a fight with your spouse? Good.” You learn when you can run into those situations.
One of my favorite books is not a Christian book but it's by Ryan Holiday, The Obstacle Is the Way. It's all about stoicism but their view is good. Now we know the way to go because there's a block there so we are probably heading in the right direction.
Finding God: When you let God work with you, you will look more at how you can help people instead of just trying to climb the ladder to make more money.
I have had a couple of those. Going into them, you are like, “Been there, done that. I can still walk. My mouth still works. I can breathe, smell, see. It's all there.” I talked to one guy on the show and I always used to use the example. When I went to the Elevation Church in Charlotte, I would walk out and I felt like I had the suit of armor every Sunday. You could cut off my right leg and I would still be okay. I told the story to two people on the call and I didn't know they both lost their right legs. One lost it in a car accident and one lost it from doing drugs, went into a coma three times and almost died. I looked at him in the eyes and I was like, “I have always used that example and now you are exactly the person who's lived through that. You are living the glory of God for the glory of God just as I said I would if it happened to me.”
It's nice to have examples.
I'm sure they would like to have their leg back. There's a book on that. A lot of times, your hardest thing in life becomes your greatest gift. He's like, “I wouldn't trade it for the world. I absolutely would want my leg to be gone now. It's what caused me to be who I am.”
What happens, happens. It either becomes an idol or a blessing. There's no way around it. It's one or the other.
Let's talk about that. I have heard you a couple of times talk about high school and trying to be someone you are not and it led a little bit into college. It sounds like there's something there. What are you comfortable sharing maybe then or anytime? Everybody faces a mountain and a lot of times it becomes something that's a gift. What was your mountain that you had to face?
I don't know if I can label it other than to say that when you come from a household that values excellence and doing well and it's not housed in a necessarily healthy way, it becomes an idol. Especially in the society and the culture we live in where if you are not winning, you are a loser. It's not like you are losing. Losing is one thing. A loser is a label on your character. I didn't have a lot of friends in high school. I was skinny up until 9th and 10th grade. I did not have a good idea of who I was and why I was valuable.
I’ve got through high school barely. I failed English in my senior year and had to go to summer school to get my certificate. I went to college and I flunked out of college because I wanted to be a Major League Baseball player. That was my genuine goal in life and it didn't work out for me. I’ve got an injury and blamed God. I was not happy with the fact that He put that fire in my heart and then quenched it. I flunked out of school and went into business for myself because entrepreneurialism is awesome. It was a struggle of understanding who I was, why I was viable and how I didn't have to do anything to be valuable.
Quickly, when I was listening and ready, it translated everything to my faith. I didn't have to do anything. I earned God's grace. It was a gift and even the faith He gave me according to Ephesians. It became this theme in my life from the time I was 16 to 36, honestly, where Jacob, my namesake, is struggling with God, for a blessing and the wrong blessing. Until I understood and struggled in a pure way, God finally let loose those walls and put me in a place where I could say, “This is how you built me to help other people. Now I'm willing to listen how you want me to do that.”
There's a friend of mine that I met a couple of years ago at a TED Talk and he was one of the TED Talk speakers, Darryll Stinson, who wrote a book called Who Am I After Sports? He similarly was playing basketball and football and thought he would be a superstar at one point, and then he wasn't. He had an injury and then he started taking pills to solve for that injury. He went back out on the football field. “Coach, put me in,” and that led to even worse problems.
Now he helps athletes. His company is called Second Chance Athletes. You would relate to him. He would be a good connection for you to have because he said, “Ninety-eight percent don't make it to the Major Leagues,” or probably higher than 98%, 99%-something. That's a real thing and there is life after sports. It turns out you can leverage those skills and those mindsets that God is putting towards almost anything else you want to do. You could do a sales job. It doesn't matter. Those skills are highly transferable, it turns out.
That's like the military or high-level sports or any of those things. The lessons and the discipline are so valuable. Not even a career but how you communicate and show up with people. That's something I discovered. I don't have the big sob story where I hit rock bottom but I drank a whole lot in my twenties. I was in a crisis in my faith from the time I was 21 to 27. I studied lots of religions. I struggled like a lot of people did. Probably, by the grace of God, I did not have to smack my face against the curb.
I interviewed the founder of On-Purpose. He's got an app called OnPurpose.me. It puts these competing purposes head-to-head until you get to your final two words. It's interesting because mine aligns 100% with yours and I would never have done this without the exercise. It's hard. Embracing grace. You start from, “You are perfect. I made you. You are my son. You are my daughter. You are exactly perfect so be the perfect person that I made you be.” The transformation I have gone through is, “I've got my dad who's imperfect, as imperfect as I am. It turns out he's a freaking amazing dad.”
When I was a kid, I was like, “He doesn't come to my games.” He's a radiologist and he’s always busy. I was like, “Does dad love me? He doesn't say he loves me.” I'm going to make up the stories. I had a good upbringing, Christianity and everything else. Yet, you wouldn't know it because I built that story around my head. Embracing grace, if you can reallocate that and say, “There is another dad and he's a perfect dad.” You go, “That guy created me for a purpose.” When you embrace that grace, forget about it. The rest becomes much less painful.
It's always in layers. You get a little bit more each month, each year. Once you decide you want to try and embrace that, it unfolds in different layers year after year, which is also a gift. There's no way we can understand that all at once. He does it slowly for us so that we can fully appreciate each layer and level of graciousness. That has been cool to see. I have been probably in the marketplace for 22 years or so. I have spent about 50% employed and 50% self-employed so I feel like I've got a good experience level to talk to both sides of that.
When I was in an ad agency as a CMO, the initial thought for the name Impact Over Attention came from being tired of competing for attention for these companies I work for. It's relentless and at the end of the day, a lot of times, worth little. I was like, “I want to make a huge impact on these people in the business, their bottom line and profit.” As I let God work with that, it became way more about how I help the leaders and the group be more impactful with their actions each day instead of trying to climb the ladder or make more money for their organization.
God could have revealed that all to me at once and I probably would have run towards it in a way that wasn't as honoring as it could be but instead, I felt like over 1, 2, 3 or 4-year and still revealing to me what that means for his kingdom versus me going, “This is who I am. This is who I care about. This is why he should hire me.” I'm starting a discipleship portion of my business where I'm taking guys out to do solitary time. Leaders spend little time in solitude with God outside of possibly their morning devotionals and Sunday mornings. God wants to talk to us.
Finding God: You need to give people a couple of tools to where they can go and find solitude by themselves. At the end of the day, that's a win because they get to hear from God and be more faithful.
That's another thing God's put on my heart personally like, “I need you to put some time away that's not your Bible study because you still treat that as a checklist, even though you are trying not to. You still pray like you are going down to a to-do list. No matter how much you are trying, I need you to just be quiet and listen.” As I have been learning that, I want to turn around to hopefully tell people, “This is what God showed me and it's biblically-backed. Would you like to try it, too?” I love how God reveals things in layers so that we are ready. He's kind that way.
It's interesting because I went to this non-Christian executive retreat. It was a business thing. There are 48 CEOs and I was probably the lowest. $1 million in sales was the cut line. You have to show proof and everything. The top guy was $5.4 billion. I'm at dinner and there are 48 of these folks. There was a snowcat trip in Canada and I had been doing meditation for about a year mainly using the Calm app, which has pros and cons to it but for me, it’s pros. It’s fine.
I go up to the sauna at the end of the night after a big day of skiing and there's me and two people. I'm like, “Let's meditate. This will be interesting. I have been doing it for a year.” It's ten degrees. I'm like, “Let's do it. We are going to sit on the mountain.” One guy has been doing it way longer than me. He jumps into the snowbank. We get through ten minutes and he's in the snowbank for ten minutes and then I'm with the other guy. We did it and the other guy made it about six minutes. It was his first meditation. I had clearly built up a muscle and the other guy in the snowbank built up an even bigger muscle.
We start telling the story the next night in front of all these other 48 CEOs. We had 16 of the 48 people sitting out there, including the $5.4 billionaire. To validate your demand for this solitude seeking of that was powerful. To be the person on the hill going, “I'm God's vessel,” that's when I started to say, “I don't have to be a preacher. I don't have to memorize every verse in the Bible. I did my piece,” and then I can start to say, “What other things can God use me for if I can get a multibillion-dollar guy to sit on a mountain in ten-degree weather for ten minutes?”
What's cool is as someone who has some authority and some influence as an entrepreneur, you get to do some things. When you turn around and you hear God tell you something, then you go do it. You go out there and say, “Yes, sir. I'm doing faithfully, hopefully, what you asked me to do.” To see those types of things happen is such a huge boost to your faith. Lots of people are like, “How do you know God exists? God talks to you. Is that a thing?” There are many opportunities to hear and obey that we write off as our conscience or something else. It's awesome.
It's the Holy Spirit, no doubt. We are launching an app. We keep saying that because it has to get perfect so we keep changing one little piece. It’s called 77Pray. It's funny, I talked to someone on the podcast who has been a mindset expert for years. She said that 64 days is the real-time it takes to fill a habit. I was taught twenty. It's funny that we created 77. I fashioned it after 75 Hard, the mental toughness app. 77Pray is a prayer when you wake up, which I never used to do. I always did it at the end of the day and then bookend it. You pray in the morning, pray at night, and then you read a Bible verse. Randomize the verse and you check the box. I did it. It holds you accountable.
I'm in the alpha and it's now a total habit. I could delete the app and I'm good. Yet, my ability to tune into that station is it's back to the level that when I was a kid. I would go to bed at night and I could have that connection and I have reestablished it. No evilness's allowed on that channel. There's no way a hacker is coming into that channel. It's fun so I'm excited to roll this thing out to a lot of people.
That's the same idea. If I can figure out how to give people a couple of tools where they can go and find solitude at least once a week themselves, then that's a win because, at the end of the day, they get to hear from God and be more faithful in what God’s got for their business. From a business standpoint, I'm building relationships that at some point, I'm going to have the opportunity to ask from their business, too. It's a win-win when you follow God.
That's a pullout quote. There's another name for the show, win-win when you follow God. What would you like to accomplish in life that would change everything for you? How do you know you have done what God asked you to do? Talk to me a little bit about that idea.
I don't know why this comes up. It must be Holy Spirit. There's a song that talks about more of you and less of me. That's a verse in the song. As I have thought and prayed about that over the years, I thought, “God made us in His image and He made us perfect so I don't want less of me. I want more of God in me. God built me a certain way so there doesn't need to be any less of me. It has to be less of sin but only he can remove that for me.” This is hard to put a measurement on.
I do an activity with clients called Hero On A Mission where we write our obituary and then we will work backward into the projects like, “How do you want to be remembered? What projects would you have to do in your life for people to say that when you die?” I have done that. I have an obituary, ten projects and all this stuff. I have thought a lot about this. As we are talking here, only me and a close circle of people will know this. I want to stop talking and let God do more talking. That's going to be a success for me because whenever he talks and acts in my life, amazing things happen. As I get older and my faith matures, that's what I want. I want more of his influence out of my mouth and my actions. That would have been a cliché thing several years ago but I believe it now.
The app is free. It's $1 a month and it goes to charities. It's purpose-built for people to connect to God's miracles for their life. There's an optional add-on where you can say, “Add another task,” and it's date and time-specific. If you are working with the customer and say, “I need you to do what do we mutually agree on. For 30 minutes a week, you are going to go to your cabin or walk outside and sit in the park,” or whatever that is. You can say, “Thursdays at 4:00, great. Put it in the app.” You can say, “Send me a screenshot of your app at the end of the month. I want to make sure you did that.” You book in prayer.
The other part is it's sharing the app with other people. That's why I believe this is going to grow to a viral level that only God could have planted in me. I'm like, “Holy cow. I have read a lot of books over time and I have never built a viral app.” Yet, it was God tugging on me going, “You’ve got to do this.” I was like, “Really?” People are like, “Don't do it unless it's really from God.” I'm like, “Believe me. I wouldn't have thought of building this thing but I'm building it.” We are about $40,000 of investment in, talk about a level of trust. It's like, “It's going to be fun.” I have experienced it. I’m living that day-to-day.
Whatever God is doing with it, that's the challenging part. You are always like, “I’m having a vision for what this will look like because God wanted me to do it,” and then you have this, “Are you listening to what I want to do with this app?” It’s always a challenge.
That's where I concluded the Living a Better Story event. I wrote up one with a lot of zeros and then I put my hand over it. I'm like, “Whether it's $1, $10, $100, $1,000, $1 million or $1 billion, it doesn't matter. If we reach one person, it will all have been worth it.” $44,000, but who's counting?
I have heard lots of stories of this because my brother is a developer. That $44,000 could reach one person who doesn't know Christ, who turns around and gives that back to you tenfold monetarily. It's cool to think about it that way.
I read one verse like, “Tempt me on this one.” That's not what it says. That's an American translation. We are not supposed to tempt God. The real word apparently from Greek was something like prove. “Let me prove it to you,” but it's changed into tempting.
Finding God: Stop and let God do more talking. For some people, whenever God talks and acts in your life, amazing things happen.
It’s a test in some translations.
It's like, “I will open the floodgates of heaven if you tithe.” I'm not at the 10%. My dad and brother always had been, probably my brother's whole life. I'm not up to that standard. I look at it as God's accrued a lot of interest on my 10% lack thereof tithing. I will do it for a while and then we move churches or whatever. I'm like, “God, you have accrued a lot of interest in my life. It's payback time.” That's where I'm at. If you go back to when you are in high school and you give yourself that one piece of advice, what is that?
That's tough because having kids, even more about when you were a kid because you see them and you are like, “I thought that way.” There are some lessons you can't get until you are older. When they ask that question, I don't even know if I would listen. When I listen to older me, it's almost like, “You are loved. Remember that.” When you are always seeking approval through performance, love and acceptance are ultimately what you are looking for. That's where I would start.
Let me flip that because you may not have gone through this exercise. You are welcome to steal this and use it with someone else because I did. You do it in a one-hour setting so we are going to do it in a minute. You go outside of your house, there's this huge life-sized bird like a joust bird-like in a video game. You get on the bird and you fly twenty years in the future. It takes you through mental exercise. You are in the clouds. You are safe. You are not buckled in but you are not going to fall. Now, you go down to land, it could be wherever in the world or even on another planet. It takes you down in there, and then you go up and knock on the door. There's your future self.
You take inventory of everything that's in the room, what's the house look like? Where in the world is it or the universe? Who's there with you? What's on the tape? All of it. You are then leaving and your future self says, “Think of this,” and gives you that one little nugget that you can take back to now. You get back on the bird and you come back to this moment. I run that mental exercise, I will be watching a TV show. It's fun to go out in the future and come back and tell yourself something because so many neurons are firing.
My first one, and it's still in my mind, I bought a thing of it. It's me in Greece or something in the Mediterranean on one of those white houses with a ladder leaning against the house. I was a little disheveled and my face was a little thinner, “Got it, lose a little weight.” You go through that of what's the perfect state. My other scary one, “Where's Tracy? Where's my wife?” I'm like, “She must be shopping in the market or out with the girls or something.” Did anything come to mind for you in that?
Yes, the obituary exercise brings about the same thing. I read my obituary every day. There are these things years from now that I want to accomplish. I visualize what those look like. To your point, I have a cabin in Wyoming with my wife there. I'm traveling once a month to destinations and discipline guys. I'm the head of a fund. I have a goal of $100 million in funds in ten years where I'm the chair of it. I'm not running it anymore.
It’s easy for me to visualize that because I read it every day. That's one of the things where I helped me with my coaching. A lot of times, I take away a lot of stuff and simplify people's days, and then help them find ways to cement that. “You only need these three things to get where you want to go.” That's where God is connected that solitude from a faith side is that, “I will give you what you need if you will listen.”
If I can help guys listen, and then help translate that even into their career or business at some point, then we are going the right way. I have found that in the past, I go backward a lot. “I have an idea. God, will you bless this?” That was the first stage. The second stage was, “Thanks, God for that idea. Here's how I'm going to do it.” The third stage where I feel like I'm trying to work into now is, “This is your idea. How do you want me to do it?” When you get there, then you can start with God. Listen to God, answer God, and then go out and take action with God.
I'm between 2 and 3. It's like trying to jump between both of those points.
Every day, it's a battle.
What an amazing conversation. I will ask the last question because it's an important one. Everybody answers it slightly differently. What role does faith play in your journey, in your life?
It depends when you ask. In my life, it's such an easy and such a hard answer. The easy answer is it's in the chair in the center of my life. It's one of those exercises, Campus Crusade for Christ. There's a chair in the middle of your life that you bow down to. There's a throne and whatever is in the middle is what you worship and that's what your life is about. I put Jesus there or attempt to, every day. That's how faith plays a role.
More practically, I would say like what I have been discussing. Faith is continuing as I grow older to help me make better decisions by going to the source. The more I get rooted in my faith, the lesser my decisions, and the more they are his. That leads to so much more meaning and happiness in my life than at any other time. Every day, I feel like it is half a degree better because it's one of those cool things. It's hard to describe. I've got teenagers. There are lots of hard questions I have about faith. It's like, “How do you know, Dad? How do you know that God is real and that he's working in your life?” Sometimes, you have to go, “You will get it when you are older.” He keeps pouring into you, as long as you keep seeking him.
There's a guy, Dr. Jim Wilder, a neural theologist. He didn't start that way. His parents were traveling ministers in other foreign countries. He, at first, had no belief and thought, “What is all this? I'm a teenager.” He meets a buddy at this church and they say, “We both don't believe.” They go, “Cool. Let's test God. We are going to pray to him for twenty days in a row and let's see. Let's compare notes.” He said, “Chad, you wouldn't believe it.” It was almost word for word, the same thing that they were told each day. It was like, “Holy cow.”
When he was able to connect sources like that and compare notes, that's when he went in and studied it. Now, he focuses on both the mindset and the spirituality side, all in one. I was introduced to him and three days later, he's at our fire pit because he lives 1.5 hours away, and that's how God works. I'm like, “How did you decide to go?” He goes, “I asked God if I should go. God said, ‘Yes.’” That's the litmus test. He's able to discern things at a much higher level than most people cannot. I have met a lot of people like that these days.
I do think the more time you spend with God, that's how you get better at discerning. We spend so much time on everything else, of course, we can't tell sometimes. We are not tuned into that channel.
Finding God: If you feel like you're just filling a gap and you're not really happy with what you're doing. Try other things out. Figure out what works and what doesn't work.
We were starting to write a kid's book because we were at our retreat and a guy writes a kid's book. I said, “I never thought about it but let's do it. You are hired.” We start writing a book that’s on choices. I said, “I'm writing a book on choices.” He smiled because he had a book on choices on neurotheology in his trunk. I was like, “What advice would you give?” I would go ask my mom, she has a different answer. I asked Rich, who's at the firepit. Everybody has a different answer.
For Rich, it was, “I first look at how it affects other people, then how it affects my family and then me.” That's noble. Other people might flip it. Other people might say God first. All these different ways. He said, “Here's the thing, Chad. There are 613 or 614 simultaneous laws in the Old Testament that one was required to follow back in the day and probably still now.” “If you have two choices, it's two to the power of 613.” He goes, “Do you know how big of a number that is?” I go, “What? All the sand on the beach in California?” He goes, “No, every neuron in the known universe times 2, times 3.14.” You and I both know what 3.14 is. It’s infinite.
There's an infinite number of choices that look like there are two but that's a lie. There are not two choices. I was like, “Okay so what's the answer, then?” “The answer is, it's the what would Jesus do? What would God do? It's above your paygrade. I don't know God, what would you do?” The second one was interesting to me. It goes along with your line of the gravestone. I will even go add a cherry on top of what you have been doing. How would you optimize, not for your gravestone but for the history of time? That makes you play bigger.
$100 million? Cool. For what, and why? When I have set quotas and things, we have sold $6 million in my company since we have been in business. Originally, I thought, “If I could get to $500,000 in the first year.” A colleague of mine said, “Why would you set a quota like that? You are putting an upper limit on it.” If you optimize for the history of time playing with God's playbook, then it's a different thing than the headstone.
One of the biggest challenges we find is most people can't think that far in the future. They can't do it.
What a fun conversation. I have enjoyed getting to know you, Jake from Jacob. A cool name. I love it. My name is Chad. It took a little while to grow into that one. Now, I realize it's my 1 of 1 fingerprint. Good to have you. If someone wants to get ahold of you and have a deeper conversation, how would they reach you?
ImpactOverAttention.com is a great place to check stuff out. I'm on LinkedIn. I spend a lot of time on LinkedIn. I have a show there on Fridays. I'm active at a lot of spots there so you can find me on LinkedIn as well.
Everybody, thanks for joining. Chad Burmeister, your host and we have been talking with Jake Jordan. It’s a pleasure having you. God is good.
God is good. Thanks for having me.
I appreciate you.
