Melissa Clark

Can you believe that 2022 is winding down? We only have a few more months till we are in a new year! We are also window down in our year-long series as well we are going to be diving into some fantastic conversations over to next several months to help you thrive in your life. 

Today, I’m excited to share my interview with Pastor Mike Novotny. Are you struggling with your spiritual health? Your relationship with God? Well, finds, today’s interview will be so impactful for you! 

 

Pastor Mike Novotny is my special guest today to discuss growing your faith and how we need to work on the small things so that they can grow into bigger things. He shares with us how to celebrate cultivating and honoring the small things in our life! 

Pastor Mike Novotny has served God’s people in full-time ministry since 2007 in Madison and, most recently, at The CORE in Appleton, Wisconsin. He also serves as the lead speaker for Time of Grace, where he shares the good news about Jesus through television, print, and online platforms.

 

Some amazing things we talk about in this episode: 

• Habits are essential, but also have habits of not having too many habits 
• Sometimes our faith isn’t growing because the soil is too cluttered. 
• Practical tips to help us release some of our daily clutter to grow our faith. 
• God wants to use the little things in our hearts to produce the things down the road. 

Resources: 

What’s Big Starts Small
Time of Grace
The Core Church

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Have a great week! 

Melissa 

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As we continue our series on how to thrive in your life, one of the necessities is setting and keeping boundaries in your life.

I’m so excited to have Dr. Sasha Shillcut back on the join today to talk about her new book, Brave Boundaries. We discuss how to live your priorities, and you have to have boundaries, how to set boundaries, and much more! 

Dr. Sasha Shillcutt is a physician, researcher, speaker, author, wife, mom of four amazing kids, and Founder/CEO of Brave Enough. Sasha’s greatest passion is empowering and encouraging others to achieve well-being in their professional and personal lives. Thousands of people viewed her TEDx talk, Resilience: The Art of Failing Forward. She also leads conferences and retreats for professional women.

 

• How alone time is the start of healthy boundaries
• The importance of self-compassion
• False beliefs about boundaries
• The 4 parts of the Brave Boundary Model
• What is Boundary Backlash?
• ” Without boundaries, we become Grade A people pleasers and lose so much of our identity that we do not even know who we are anymore.”

Resources: 

Dr. Sasha Shillcutt

Brave Boundaries

Between Grit and Grace

If you loved this episode, I’d love a 5-star review! Be sure to subscribe and check out all my new episodes on YouTube.

 

You can find me: 

Website

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Have a great week! 

Melissa 

 

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Hey friends!

I just wanted to give a quick trigger warning – especially if you have little ones in the car or around who may be listening …  it might be a good idea to pop in some earbuds or save this episode for later. Also, I believe is this a great episode for those that have a team – encourage your team to listen to this as well.

September is Suicide Awareness Month. Around the globe, someone ends their life every 40 seconds. Let that sink in.

As a counselor, I’ve often listened to my clients discuss ending their lives. This takes so much courage! I’m always honored and grateful when my clients bravely talk about their thoughts, especially the dark ones.

Kids and teens are more likely to think about and commit suicide: one in five adolescents contemplate suicide daily. Suicide is the second leading cause of death for young people from 10-24.

Many people don’t know that when I was a teenager, I was suicidal.

I thought ending my own life was the only way to be done with all the pain. I’m so very grateful that my parents listened to me when I told them that I wanted to end my life, and within the week, I began counseling. This was the first of many steps that helped me become mentally healthy.

As a parent or a loved one of a young person, you may wonder what you should do if your child or their friend is thinking about ending their life.

Today we are talking about suicide prevention with Scott Erickson. He was on earlier this year to talk about what to do when things don’t work out or go as you planned.

Scott Erickson is a touring painter, performance artist, and creative curator who mixes autobiography, aesthetics, and comedic narrative to create experiences that speak to our deepest stories. He is the co-author of Prayer: Forty Days of Practice and May It Be So, the author of Honest Advent, a spiritual director to brave women and men, and a professional dishwasher for his food-blogging wife. Scott lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife and three children.

Great things we discuss:

• Behavior changes to be aware of that may indicate suicidality
• Mood changes to be aware of that may indicate suicidality
• A greater understanding of why people may feel suicidal
• Prevention awareness of suicide

Helpful resources:

• Scott Erickson 

Hotline numbers:

• 988 – 24/7 Suicide Lifeline 
• Trevor Project 
• NAMI Helpline: 800-950-6264
• SAMHSA – Substance abuse support helpline

If you loved this episode, I’d love a 5-star review!

You can find me:

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Instagram

YouTube

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Hey Friends,

As I’ve mentioned, we are in the middle of a year-long series about you learning to live healthier lives. We’re talking about taking small and easy tips to increase your happiness, build better relationships and feel stronger.

When I think about freedom and living healthy, we want to look at the fun stuff, but we also need to look at the roadblocks.

Today’s discussion will shed light on what may prohibit your growth. What is it? Control or, more specifically, the illusion of control. In today’s episode, we’re sitting down with Sharon Hodde Miller to talk about her new book, The Cost of Control: Why we crave it, the anxiety it gives us, and the real power God promises.

I loved this interview with Sharon so much. I love her curiosity about what is going on in her.  We talk about how as humans, we cannot tolerate uncertainty, and the more control we seek, the less control we have,

Sharon Hodde Miller, Ph.D., is a teaching pastor at Bright City Church in Durham, North Carolina, which she co-founded with her husband, Ike. The author of Free of Me and Nice, Miller has blogged at SheWorships.com for over ten years and has been a regular contributor to Propel, Her.meneutics, and She Reads Truth. She has written for Relevant, Christianity Today, (in)courage, and many other publications and blogs. She lives with Ike and their three children in Durham, North Carolina.

Listen in to learn more about :

• Is it worth the cost to our relationship to have that control we seek?
• We need to pay attention to how we are feeling in the moment.
• Our culture and its need for control atrophy our spiritual muscles.
• The importance of the practice of self-examination and tips on how to do it.

Visit my website, MelissaClarkCounseling, to get the show notes. Also, I’d be grateful if you could leave a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts and tell a friend about the show.

Connect with Sharon Hodde Miller

• Website: https://sheworships.com/
• Instagram: @SharonHMiller 
• Pick up a copy of Sharon’s book, The Cost of Control == Why we crave it, the anxiety it gives us, and the real power God promises. 

Connect with Melissa

Instagram: @MelissaClarkCounseling 

Website – www.melisaaclarkcounseling.com

Check out this episode!

Hey Friends,

As you know, we are in the middle of a year-long series all about living healthy. We have discussed the small, easy steps to increase happiness, build better relationships and feel stronger.

Today’s episode fits in with our series theme just perfectly. I’m talking with Pastor and author Ray Leight on the show today.  I couldn’t have designed a better book to fit this year’s series. Ray and I discuss how to mature into yourself, exploring wings to hold you back, and the specific process to help discover who you are through a maturing process. We also discuss Ray’s new book, Maturing Into Yourself. 

We are made in God’s image, His masterpiece. It’s a shame if we are not who God has made us to be. That’s what this interview is all about – helping YOU to discover who you are.

Ray Leight and his wife Kathryn have served as missionaries with Life Builders (a ministry of Cru) and as pastors of a missional community in Annapolis, Maryland. They have served (and Ray is currently serving remotely) as pastoral counselors at the Transformation Center of Bethel Church in Redding, CA.

Listen in to learn more about:

1. How does the age of our emotional maturity affect us and others?
2. Your feelings don’t lie to you – your thoughts lie to you.
3. Ways that we try to protect ourselves from our emotions.
4. Practical tips on ways to manage unhealthy people when we finally get healthy.

Visit my website, MelissaClarkCounseling, to get the show notes. Also, I’d be grateful if you could leave a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts and tell a friend about the show.

Connect with Ray Leight

• Website: FaithByGrace
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/faithbygraceministries/
• Pick up a copy of Ray’s book, Maturing Into Yourself.

Connect with Melissa

Instagram: @MelissaClarkCounseling

Website: www.melisaaclarkcounseling.com

YouTube:  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCypuJVvB6EPb3kgnZR45Hkw

Check out this episode!