Living Life in Survival Mode

I received some really good insights from listening to a devotional that was given at BYU back in February of this year, entitled “Live Your Life With Purpose.” I originally started listening to the devotional when I was thinking about my life mission, and learned a few good things regarding that, but one idea that Sister Janie Penfield shared applies to a much wider variety of situations.

She said:

 “We are constantly making decisions, and if your life is like mine, most of those decisions are made while in ‘survival mode.’ This is decision making in the moment, instead of planning out a course and moving forward when the time is right. This is not the best way to make decisions, for when I live in survival mode, I too often fail to accomplish the things I prioritized in my mind—that phone call to a friend, lunch with my brother, an evening at the temple, a workout, and even what I’m going to do on vacation. It is also while I am in survival mode that I see opportunities pass me by—a weakening friendship with a kindred spirit, waning family relationships, a decrease in desire to do the things to stay close to the Spirit, decreased fitness level, and even a missed opportunity to kayak the Napoli Coast in Hawaii! (How did I let that happen?)”

Survival mode often exists when we are stressed or have a lot to do. We slip into the mentality of “I will just focus on the next thing that needs to be done, and then I will focus on the next thing that needs to be done after that. When that is done, I will focus on the next.” It is “I have a paper that is due in one hour so I will work on that now, after that, I will prepare for the lesson that I will be teaching in two hours, and if I have time, I will eat dinner.” Our life becomes segmented and we lose the overall vision of what we are trying to accomplish. I think we can all relate to this idea and understand how when we live in “survival mode”, we lose purpose and often do not accomplish the things that we really intended to and found most important.

On a smaller scale, the missionaries we teach may also at times lose the overall vision of what individual tasks, activities, and experiences are supposed to be accomplishing in the overall vision of missionary work.

This last week, I was in a classroom with a group of missionaries who were struggling with their studies. Some of them had already finished planning for investigators and others were confused about how to prepare for TRC investigators that they had never met, and so didn’t know what to do.

The missionaries were caught up in the Plan, Study, Teach cycle, which is great, but as soon as they planned all of their lessons or were trying to prepare for a first lesson in the TRC, they panicked and didn’t know what to do with their study time. These missionaries had lost sight (or never understood) the bigger picture of what their studies are accomplishing: not just to prepare for the next lesson they will teach, but to simultaneously prepare for every lesson they will ever teach and to receive conversion themselves.

This is just one way the idea of “living in survival mode” could apply. The same thing could apply to the way that they teach, even the way they live the white handbook. And of course, it applies to the way that we think as teachers, as well.

A question to ponder: In what was are you living life in “survival mode”?