Join the Empowered Catholic Podcast, where we come together to seek empowerment to become the people God created us to be. Your hosts are Karen and Curtis: life coaches and public speakers. We are on a mission to spread the vision and tools of empowerment to all Christians, so you can experience the full power of the Holy Spirit active and free in your life. We invite you to engage with this group and seize the opportunity for personal and spiritual growth, transformed relationships, and new ...
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Surviving in the muddy waters of the App Store as an indie isn’t easy. Alice Zhao, Curtis Herbert and Daniel “Jelly” Farrelly explore what it means to them, what they do to make it work, and how to claim your independence.
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171 | How does Coaching Make You a Better Christian?
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16:27“How does coaching help me as a Christian?” was a question recently asked of us. We see people undergo transformations that make a HUGE difference in their life. The kind of changes that change everything. It impacts who they are and how the do things. It impacts whatever roles they have in life, like mother, father, worker, leader, child-raiser… T…
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170 | Excellence and the Desires of Your Heart
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19:05Part of our job description as humans is to get busy with the work of the Holy Spirit. Removing interior obstacles is a big part of that job. We have seen, many times, how a focus on what’s really important, what we really want, is so helpful to discerning what the Holy Spirit has in mind for us. We often worry that checking in with what we want wi…
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169 | Excellence: Everyone is Doing their Best
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18:55Lean into this mindset: Everyone is Doing the Best that They Can with the Resources that They Have. It’s surprising how useful it is to keep this in mind. It takes so much of the drama out of people and circumstances that are obstacles to you. Instead of indulging in the drama and responding to THAT, you can respond as seems best without taking mos…
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Sometimes we lack IMAGINATION when we have given up in some area of our life. Imagination is the creative faculty for envisioning various possibilities based on what we know, perceive, or otherwise experience. When we start to think about ACTUALLY pursuing excellence and imagine what SPECIFICALLY may be involved, what is POSSIBLE moves into the rea…
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Focus on excellence. Likely you are focused more on solving problems, avoiding pain, getting by, or putting out fires! That’s human nature. And we naturally resist change. And yet. And yet we crave freedom, opportunity, and beauty. Seeking excellence is so rewarding. Let it be more top of mind for you. What if you pursued excellence in one of these…
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166 | The Shroud of Turin is the real deal; Get all the details with Fr. Spitzer
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40:07Under one single cover, you can get the latest up-to-date science showing how and why science supports the truth and reality of Eucharistic miracles, the Shroud of Turin, and Marian visitations. It’s all in Father Spitzer’s book Christ, Science, and Reason, What we can know about Jesus, Mary, and Miracles. You can hear fascinating details in this l…
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165 | Shroud of Turin is Jesus’ Burial Cloth
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28:08The Shroud of Turin is the burial cloth of Jesus. That seems pretty clear. There was some carbon dating in the 1980’s that said the Shroud wasn’t old enough but, after some freedom of information demands for the original data, we now know that 1980’s dating was flawed. And there are other dating methods that point to much older origins. We still do…
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164 | The Metaprogram P and J in your Myers-Briggs
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23:39Myers-Briggs Type Preferences (MBTI®) test is familiar to most of us. Do you remember if you are a Perceiver or a Judger? The MBTI measures certain metaprograms that you use. A metaprogram is your default style of responding to what is happening around you. If you want to get things done, to have influence, to be impactful, then you need to deal ef…
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163 | What’s your metaprogram got to do with your relationships?
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23:10Metaprograms are high-level patterns we run in certain situations. Introverts and extrovert are examples of different metaprograms. Sensing vs. Intuiting. Big picture vs details! There are many many metaprograms. We discuss several of them and it’s helpful to realize when you are interacting with someone who’s on the opposite page as you are. There…
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162 | Easy and Joyful Affirmations for Relationships
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18:11How about a little affirmation? It might be easy to forget to tell people in your life what you like about them or what they are doing well. It’s so easy to focus on the negative! Or to be self-absorbed. Or simply to lose sight of pointing out what’s good. Compliments are great and telling somebody how much you love or appreciate them has an import…
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161 | Empowered Listening for Beautiful Relationships
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20:13Empowered listening will build your relationships. Any and all relationships are better with better listening. You can take the initiative to make this happen: you are empowered to listen well. There’s a few habits to practice and cultivate to become a great listener. Here’s one hint: build habits that set the stage for a pure and simply curiosity …
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160 | Better Relationships through Better Conversations
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27:20Have you ever been talking to someone and realized that they aren’t listening to what you have to say, or they don’t care what you say because they just want to tell YOU something? Instead of THAT, what if every conversation you had brought a positive and deeper connection to the person you spoke to? This episode provides a critical skill for havin…
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Happy Ash Wednesday! Woo-hoo, right? Let’s keep talking about hope because the POINT of Lent is to prepare us for EASTER. St. Paul did some talking to the folks in Corinth in his letter to the Corinithians. In chapter 15, he’s talking about being resurrected. Apparently, Paul is getting questions from those early Christians, something like: How doe…
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158 | Hope for the people of the kingdom of God
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28:20Let’s keep talking about hope! Karen works on your imagination by sharing multiple images of what the kingdom of heaven looks like. These are all images used by Paul in scripture. Marriage. Brides and bridegrooms. Citizens, like Roman citizens. Birth. There’s hope to be had when you enter into the kingdom mindset that is central to the New Testamen…
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157 | Hoping in new creation instead of Heaven
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22:51Romans chapter 8 compares being in this present age to the pangs of labor. Men comparing something to giving birth is risky but we’ll give St. Paul a pass this time. It’s as if the present age is giving birth to the new creation. It’s one of the themes we mentioned in Episode 115 on hope. We’ve been talking about our personal hope, you, my hope for…
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The “hope” in St. Padre Pio’s famous proverb “Pray, hope, and don't worry” is an active verb. When I try to skip from “pray” to “don’t worry,” I can’t “do” the “don’t worry.” That’s because I need to EXERCISE my hope. I need to lean on my trust in God. The letter to the Hebews chapter 6 says our Christian hope is like an anchor. And not just any an…
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St. Padre Pio was known for saying this simple phrase to anyone who came to him with a troubled heart: “Pray, hope, and don't worry.” He then went on to say, “Worry is useless. God is merciful and will hear your prayer. Have courage and do not fear the assaults of the devil.” How well do you live this proverb? How true do you think it is? Is it OK …
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The Four Easy things to do to be Empowerment are… Wait, we don’t know four easy things that will “make” you be empowered. We DO offer four pillars that will take you very far, and indeed very far, on your own peculiar path to empowerment. As you place yourself “at cause,” think about implementing these practices. A first pillar is being fearless. O…
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153 | Should You Be More Than a Conduit of the Spiritual?
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26:00What are we supposed to be doing, anyway? What are we called to now? What we are called to now is an exciting collaboration with God. It’s like the opposite of God ordering us around. Don’t let God become the One Who Orders Me To Do Stuff and I Gotta Do It. Of course, there’s stuff I Gotta Do, yet the point is to be in an active collaborative relat…
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Live like this; be at cause. We can easily act as if “things happen to me” and I am more or less at the mercy of what’s happening to me. I am impacted by events, by my past, by accidents, by circumstance, and there’s not much to be done about that. This idea of being at the mercy of my circumstances is what we call being “at effect” because the (po…
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151 | Empowerment: Deletion, Distortion, Generalization, Oh My
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27:56Your brain is sitting inside a closet (your skull) and has zero idea what’s going on around it, except that it has your bodily senses feeding it signals. Those signals, like photons and vibrations in the air, mean almost nothing to the brain EXCEPT that your brain has past experience about what those mean. Everything you experience, everything you …
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150 | Empowerment: Unconscious Mind Twist
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19:52Do you find yourself often thinking in terms of getting cooperation from your unconscious mind? Or learning how to give it great instructions so it can support you easily? We have all had the experience of “deciding” to do something (like a New Year’s resolution, hmmm?) and then, a few weeks, or days, later - it has fizzled out. You had decided to …
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149 | Christmas, Baby Jesus, and Your Lineage
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18:30Christmas! Perplexingly, we were inspired to talk about those genealogies that are part of the Christmas story, like in Matthew where there’s a list of Jesus’ ancestry. t It turns out that reflecting on what it means to be part of a lineage means a lot. We are part of the nativity story because God has brought us into the lineage of Jesus and Abrah…
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148 | What Is Empowered? | The Empowered Catholic Podcast
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23:25Empowered Christian. Empowered Catholic. Empowered Person. Yes. Yes. Yes. Empowered is a state of being that addresses the whole person. Because God acts on the whole person. The Spirit leads us and prompts us, as Christians. Yet we have a huge role to play in seeing, hearing, feeling, and responding to these prompts. Grace builds on nature. If you…
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We are now The Empowered Catholic Podcast. Why? And Why “empowered”? These are big questions! We have increasingly been aware that we are being called on to breathe some bigger themes into the Church and the world. We started seeing patterns and key themes in our work and podcast. We are on a journey of empowerment as persons and as Christians and …
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Revelations 21 beautifully and dramatically describes a new heaven and a new earth, with the new Jerusalem coming down out of heaven, and God coming to dwell with His people. “Behold, I am making all things new.” Our ideas of the end-game, the point of it all, the final-final Where All This Is Going matters because it has a big impact on how we liv…
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145 | What you never heard about Faith and Grace II
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20:19St. Paul and the writers of the gospels make some cultural assumptions when talking about FAITH and when talking about GRACE. We miss a lot of what they are writing about because modern people are oblivious to these cultural assumptions that were common in the ancient world but are absent from the modern mindset. The patron-client relationship is o…
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144 | What you never heard about Faith and Grace
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22:19The Bible makes assumptions about what you know because in the ancient world, there were some things that everyone knew and took for granted. They were so basic, it was hard to explain. That’s why Westerners and modern people often misread the Bible. It’s because we are importing our own cultural assumptions into our reading. Think about stories yo…
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What are some positive signs that Boundaries are working for you? Did you know that resentment is sometimes a good sign? What about viewing boundaries as a very positive way to help you build relationships with family, friends, and the groups that you belong to? Karen and Curtis wrap up the podcast season on boundaries with some signs or steps that…
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“What? You can’t do that! Change back, right now!” is an almost inevitable response that you get when you change your boundaries in a relationship. The push-back might be small or large however it’s almost always there. We all resist change. It’s natural. When someone’s changing things up, our default reaction is to resist that change. When you are…
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Yikes! It’s time to set a boundary! How do you know what boundary to set? What do you need to avoid when communicating the boundary? What if people don’t seem to respect the boundary? Let’s get together in this episode and talk through key boundary issues. . . because boundaries are good. They serve you, and they serve the Lord. Contact Info Text u…
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When you get right down to it, it can be hard to define a boundary. What is it, anyway? What would a good boundary sound like? How do I know if I’m setting a good boundary? Join us for this week’s episode as we dig deeper and give some great examples to get you thinking. Remember, you have to do the work to set the boundary. . .but we can help you!…
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There’s quite a few wrong ideas about boundaries, especially when it comes to our desire to be generous as part of our identity as Christians. How can creating healthy boundaries help us serve more and better? Join the discussion. Contact Info Text us: The Catholic Midlife podcast: 612-208-9150. Email us: [email protected] Facebook: The …
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You want to be really good at having healthy boundaries. Sometimes they are your bottom-line boundaries that are non-negotiable. Other boundaries you negotiate with other people. Often, however, your boundaries are semi-conscious and don’t become an issue until they are crossed. What are the signs that you should reconsider some boundaries? What’s …
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Did you know that you love having and enforcing boundaries? Did you? Well, you do. Think about the last time someone's repeatedly annoying behavior made you blow up. Heh. That was not fun, was a bad look for you, and probably shifted the focus from their poor behavior onto you with the double-lose result that you look bad and their poor behavior co…
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What could you do with your list of values? Do what? That’s a valuable list that will motivate you and others, make decisions easier, help you navigate relationships and keep yourself pointed to the things that you actually want. Karen and Curtis talk about what to do with your values list and give some examples. Contact Info Text us: The Catholic …
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Curtis was working on a breakthrough session and was asked to define his values in the area of work/career. This process made for an interesting discussion. What are your values in the area of work/career? Getting a handle on your values and bringing them up into the conscious level is helpful in many ways, not the least of which is being better ab…
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134 | Left Brain, Right Brain, Who Cares?
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26:42Part II: We often let our left hemispheric brain doubt the transcendent. It simply lacks the tools. We continue our discussion of philosopher-neuroscientist -doctor-psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist and his research on the connections between the right and left hemispheres of the brain. It turns out, how these hemispheres interact influences culture, r…
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133 | Left Brain, Right Brain, Who Cares?
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26:37HI! It’s Curtis and Karen and we are super intrigued by philosopher-neuroscientist -doctor-psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist and his research on the connections between the right and left hemispheres of the brain. Sounds abstract, right? Well. . not entirely. It turns out, how these hemispheres interact influences culture, religion, human society, work…
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Obstacles come in lots of different shapes and sizes. And flavors and colors and… you get the idea. Sometimes they are even stowaways in our minds. Limiting beliefs are like that. These are usually semi-conscious assumptions. Listen to yourself talk! There’s some language you use that might point the way to spotting your favorite limiting beliefs. …
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131 | I see your goals and raise you an obstacle
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25:33We’ve been talking about goals this podcast season. Now what comes with every goal? Hmmm. Yes! Obstacles! Hooray for obstacles. These are the change-makers and change-markers for your goals. We are always so surprised when our plans run into an obstacle. Yet that’s what happens every time. Let’s talk about EMBRACING obstacles. Yep. Embrace the goal…
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What would you discover by modeling the behavior of people who are very successful in the same way that you want to be successful? You would find many philosophies, approaches, habits, opinions, and ways of being. Yet you would find some things that they all had in common. One key thing is that they all had great mindsets in the areas of life where…
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129 | Example Using the Four Requirements for Change
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27:52This week Karen and Curtis discuss how the Four Requirements for Change might apply in real life. We mostly talk about how it applies to physical health because it’s full of concrete details that make it easy to see how they work. Please send us your comments, we are always interested to hear your thoughts! Contact Info Text us: The Catholic Midlif…
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128 | Four always-requirements for change
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26:36Do you want to change how you show up in a major area of life like spirituality, family, personal growth, or physical health? Or would it be better to simply keep running life like an obstacle course, jumping, ducking, and more or less weaving around the problems until you get to the end? There are FOUR requirements for any kind or REAL change in y…
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127 | Language: Speak Your Week Positively
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25:01Your unconscious mind is always listening to what you have to say and will work to make things turn out the way you say. Do you like achievement? Accomplishing things? Improving? Then using positivity in your language is a big help for you! LISTEN to yourself this week. You might be surprised by what you hear. We discuss the possibilities and some …
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What have we been talking about? The last several episodes have been about the Disciplines of a master. We discuss why these are important, give examples from our own lives, and do some wrapping-up of the whole discipline topic. You could pick one and spend a week working with it, how cool could that be?? Contact Info Text us: The Catholic Midlife …
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We can be tempted to think of religion as a personal project of seeking holiness. That’s our age of individualism breaking everything down to me: my role, my task, my burden, my initiative. In this age of individualism and atomization, we can easily forget the importance of seeking connection with other people, nature, and our own inner lights. Yet…
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124 | Hello, Confidence Energy, great to see ya here!
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26:34Confidence energy. When you remove fears that are useless and put some trust into the process (remember that episode?), confidence energy can start to show up. Decide to choose it. It’s about the power you have to create the change - you believe that YOU have the power to create the change. It’s the CRUCIAL difference. It does not look at the probl…
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123 | Fearlessness to release useless fears and choose from purpose
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19:25Fear is natural. It's a natural emotion. [00:14:10] Why, then, do we have this emphasis on fearlessness? There are things that naturally come up in life that are always going to give rise to fear. And In those situations, probably what's needed is courage. The courage to act in the face of feeling fear and doing the right thing. Fearlessness is dif…
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122 | Authenticity is crucial to your life
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25:12God made you. So live your life. It’s YOUR job. If you are living a version of your life only because it’s the version that someone else thinks is what you should do, you will feel it in your bones. It will sap your power, meaning that sense of agency that creates energy to live your life. Authenticity looks like Acting from your core; doing/saying…
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