Sharing Resources to Help You Grow Personally, Professionally & Financially

Sometimes it helps to get a little dose of encouragement—along with a good cup of coffee!—to start the day. Today we discuss "assent."

Hopefully the message below will help you get off to a good start for the week.  Please feel free to forward the newsletter on to others that you think would benefit from the content.

Assent

It’s always embarrassing to look at a word, recognize it, and have no clue about what it means or how to use the word. Assent falls in this category. Mr. Webster to the rescue:

• The expression of approval or agreement

The implications of this are huge:

• Our actions—or inactions—speak to what we believe deep down.
• All too often our actions are automatic and without thought.
• We are often assenting to life and endorsing specific belief sets without thinking about it.

While I do not often use the word explicitly, I take on the issue of assent in my life daily. That is because I tend to over-think and over-analyze things. I constantly assess the why behind the result and the impact that I had on the why. I constantly assess whether my actions are aligned with my core beliefs—whether I am consciously living and choosing OR simply assenting to the will of others.

At the risk of getting myself into a bit of trouble, I would argue that too many of us are blindly listening to too few of us on social and political topics—and assenting to the views of others by not questioning the actions we take on a daily basis.

I’m not arguing for or against any cause here. I am arguing that we would all be better off if we stepped back, listened to what is being said, and thought through things before ceding our assent.

That brings us to this week’s question:

• What do you assent to in your life?

Thanks for sharing a bit of your time with me this Monday morning.  

Have a great week!

Blog post from this past week:

Monday Morning Motivation - Purpose