WOW! We can’t believe how fast each week comes around but it did and what a treat it was to be with you all again. Our subject this week was “communication skills”! What an important key this subject is to the success and health of every marriage. We could easily have done 3 hours of stuff about communication but in just 30 minutes you will find some great tips from Christie and her counseling background and then four communications warning signs from Jim to help us all see the danger signs before we get too deep in them.

Your homework for this week was to make a list of ten things about your spouse that you love, take some one on one time to share that list with them and then post them in the comments section of the blog at www.jacobus1010.wordpress.com, or on the Facebook fan page at Ten Ten Ministries – Marriage Matters. Take the time to do this homework … we promise it will bless you!

Here is the link to the Week 2 Webinar recording – http://www.screencast.com/t/rfirYECfm .

If you haven’t joined the Marriage Matters Webinar Series it is never too late! Each week we record the sessions and share them with all of those who have registered. Make one, make none or make them all we will still share with you the recordings and handouts so you can review them on your own time. To register for the series just Click Here and look for the registration link at the bottom of the page. We hope you join us because … Marriage Matters!

Jim & Christie Jacobus

About this time last year we kicked off the 90 Day Man-Up Challenge and it was an awesome experience for me to be able to share ideas with so many awesome men, and a few ladies, through this blog. Well, 2011 is upon us and it is time for a new adventure and I think it is going to be an exciting one as well!

I am kicking off the “What Would Jim Do” project in another blog. The idea is simple … what would Jim(that would be me) do in a wide variety of life situations, dilemmas and challenges? Who am I to be answering such questions? Nobody! That is the point of the project … what would a regular guy (that would be me too) that is trying with all of his heart to be a good, honest, trying his best to be a Godly man do in the face of tough day to day, real world life situations?

I will be entertaining tough questions from people everywhere, like you, and trying to come up with real world answers that are congruent with the values of being a man of integrity. Work, play, family, friends, business, church, the bible … all are topics I am hoping come up during the course of our conversations. I will be asking some men and women who are a whole lot smarter than I am to help us out from time to time with the tough ones but will promise the responses will always be real, positive and actually doable.

So, join us over on the blog and pose a question, a challenge or a dilemma you are facing, or of course … a friend of yours is facing, and we’ll all learn from each other and have some fun in the process!

Click Here To Go To the New Blog!

Blessings and Happy New Year to each of you!

Jim J

4 Questions We Should Ask Ourselves To Have A Great Year In 2011!

Hey folks! We have just wrapped up an amazing year in 2010 with so many blessings and with God moving in so man ways! We expect that 2011 will be even more eventful but we aren’t just sitting around “hoping” it will be so … we are planning for it to be so. Christie and I just returned from a couple of days in Rockport, Texas on a little retreat where we asked ourselves 4 Critical Questions to make the most of what God has blessed us with! We want to share with everyone those 4 questions you can ask yourselves to make your 2011 a great year! The short version goes like this!

To have a killer year in 2011 ask yourself, personally and professionally, individually and collectively (family or business) these 4 important questions …

#1 – What did we do this year that worked? How can we do more of it or make it even better?

#2 – What did we do that didn’t work or deliver a solid ROI for our time and/or money? How do we make it worth our time or just get rid of it?

#3 – What do we want to try that is new?

#4 – What do we want to do that is big?

Last year I did a webinar for our business clients covering the subject … to check out the recording just click on the image below! Let us know what you think …

God bless each of you and make 2011 an amazing year!

Jim & Christie Jacobus

Is She Beautiful Or What?

As I write this I want you to know that I am well aware that a number of those reading it could care less about what is going on in my personal life and in our business. To those of you who fit into that category I offer my apologies for taking up the amount of time you have wasted reading this far and encourage you to exercise the option to hit the delete key and get on with something that more effectively leverages your time.

To those of you who fit into one or more of the following categories … friends, family, colleagues, one of the more than 1,100+ clients we have served or the insatiably curious types I/we have what I think is an awesome announcement and story to share with you!

The Short Version Goes Like This … after 19 years in the consulting, speaking and training business we are in the process of closing down Champion Education Resources. It isn’t because we have succumbed to the challenges of the current economy and the shrinking of the marketplace for sales and sales management consultants. As a matter of fact, in the last 30 days we have walked away from enough business to keep our company doing well for the next 2 to 3 years!

The reality is, as strange as it may sound to many of you, God called! On Thursday, March 4th Christie and I attended a luncheon on the invitation from a friend of a friend I had never met before. This was a pastor’s luncheon introducing a Campus Crusade for Christ ministry called Global Media Outreach that leverages the power of the internet to share the gospel and bring people to Christ. I was absolutely blown away by what I heard and saw at this luncheon and a few short weeks later I have accepted a full time opportunity to develop and lead the sales efforts for this amazing (read the details if you want to know how amazing!) work that God is doing!

I share all of this to say “thank you” to so many of you who have so richly blessed our lives and our business in so many ways. Our 19 years speaking, training and consulting have been an amazing time in the life of my family. While it was a no brainer decision to accept this new challenge we were aware from the start that it meant unplugging in varying degrees from a lot of things that have been part and parcel of our daily lives both professionally and personally. I have struggled to write this message for a few weeks now because I didn’t know how to express the gratitude I feel toward so many. I didn’t know how to express the joy I have in this new journey that is mixed with the sadness of saying good bye to what we leave behind. Perhaps I should just say from the bottom of my heart and from Christie and Jason as well that our prayer is that God richly blesses each of  you for all that you have contributed to the fullness we have experienced in our lives.

I invite you … to jump on board and join us for the next leg of this journey! I can promise you from what we have already experienced in the last couple of weeks that it is going to be filled with amazing stories of what God is doing in the lives of people all around the world, ours included and perhaps yours as well! If you want to keep up with it all then do nothing and we will make certain to keep you informed on what’s happening. As always we promise to do nothing other than push great information your way in all of our communications and not invade your privacy with sales and marketing messages! If this is a jumping off place for you then we completely understand and again say thanks! Simply respond to this message and ask to be removed from our database, or simply unsubscribe from the email tool we use and we will honor that request with no questions asked.

The Details!

Here are the details and the back story to what you read above! A little preface to set things up!

About 10 years ago Christie and I began to sense that God was calling us to use the gifts he has so graciously given us to earn a living to serve him. Knowing what God had done in our own marriage we were excited to be able to give back by becoming involved in a number of different ways over time. Fast forward to recent history and we are actively and deeply involved in at least a 1/2 dozen ministry activities from our pre-married work with Prepare To Last workshops, our R3 Marriage Retreats, Christie’s counseling practice, me leading Divorce Care groups and a number of other ministry opportunities.

With all of that going on and the opportunities growing every day to do more I started vocalizing (about 5 years ago) to people close to us that I felt one day God would call us into full time ministry. Now my little “pea sized brain” thought that our ministry work would grow to a point where we would just walk away from what we had been doing and into our varied marriage ministries. A number of you have heard me state that when that day came I would gladly leave everything behind to serve the Lord! Little did I know what he had in mind!

Enter the invitation to attend the Jesus 2020 Global Media Outreach luncheon! It is no exaggeration to say that 20 minutes into that luncheon I knew where God had in mind for me to serve full time! I didn’t know how just yet but I knew where. Here’s why …

Global Media Outreach is a Campus Crusade for Christ Ministry that leverages the internet to share the gospel with people all over the world. Every day somewhere around 2,000,000 people do an internet search for God, Jesus or some sort of spiritual guidance. At GMO we have approximately 100+ websites in a dozen different languages designed to capture those searches through simple SEO techniques and the use of Google Adwords technology. With these tools we have somewhere on the average between 300,000 and 400,000 people a day hitting the sites we have created. We have topped 500,000 on a handful of occasions!

Each of those sites is designed to provide answers to the searcher based on the type of search words employed and then present the gospel through written word and/or video. At the end of each gospel presentation the opportunity to pray to accept Christ is presented and there is a button the person can click to indicate they have prayed to receive Christ! Every day, on the average, somewhere between 30,000 and 45,000 people are indicating they have made a decision and prayed to receive Christ! For those skeptics out there … the numbers are real! I have checked it out myself. Our research shows that 6 months later those that 87% of those that have indicate a decision for Christ are “assured” of their salvation and 60% are involved in some sort of discipleship program and are connected to a local church!Check out the “live” Google map at www.greatcommission2020.com !

Is that cool or what? Think about it … through the power of the internet (93% of the world currently has internet access) the Great Commission could be completed, yes I said completed, in our lifetime! The stated goal for GMO is that every person on earth will have had multiple opportunities (between 5 to 10) to hear the gospel by 2020! This is game changing stuff here!

So, where do I come in? Well, when people go to our websites and are presented the gospel. If they don’t choose to make a decision for Christ they can ask for more information. If so they end up being referred to a group of nearly 5,000 Online Missionaries (OM’s) that have volunteered and been trained through GMO to respond to those requests and hopefully lead them to Christ. If they make the decision to accept Christ then they are presented an opportunity to have someone follow-up with them with information about how to move forward and live a life that follows Christ. The same pool of OM’s are trained to disciple the new believer moving forward as well. Both the evangelism and the discipleship efforts are carried out via e-mail in a one on one, personal connection leveraging, guess what, the power of the internet!

My job? GMO is taking this Online Missions opportunity directly to the church believing that God intends for the church to be actively involved in this colossal effort. In short, we are taking this set of tools to the local church as a missions tool with each church raising up a community of Online Missionaries that can get actively involved in the evangelism and discipleship of people all over the world from the comfort of their own keyboard. In the process of becoming and serving as an OM each individual 1) grows in their understanding of God’s word as they respond to the requests, 2) their prayer life is enhanced as they grow accustomed to praying for each e-mail they send out, the people they are responding to and sometimes the country that individual lives in and 3) they become much more confident and bold in their day to day lives as a by-product of their experiences, repetition sharing with others and by seeing and experiencing God work directly through them to impact the lives of others!

I am responsible for the design and development of GMO sales processes as well as recruitment and management of a sales force that will take this opportunity to the church worldwide! Imagine that? For someone like me, who is a “sales guy” and who has been helping clients for the last 19 years select, develop and retain high performance sales teams it “doesn’t get any better than this”!

So … that’s the story! A lot of changes are being made around the office and around the house. Ilene, our executive assistant, has moved over with me to this endeavor. We are shutting down and turning off all of the systems and tools we used in our business or converting them over to help us in our new work! And, we are answering questions daily from friends and family about what we are doing and how they can get involved.

For more information or details and/or some crazy stories about how all of this has happened call me at 281-937-9911 or e-mail me jim.jacobus@CCCI.org . To learn more about GMO and perhaps how you can get involved check out these websites …

www.globalmediaoutreach.com

www.greatcommission2020.com (my fav site!)

www.globalmediaoutreach.com/always_ready.html (how to get your church involved)

God Bless!

Guys …

The “Man Up” brand lives on as I do my first “Man Up” Retreat 2010 for the Sugar Land First United Church mens ministry this coming weekend. Many of you have asked when I am going to be speaking and the team at SLFUMC have graciously allowed me to open their retreat up to anyone who wants to join us. The info about the retreat and how to sign up is listed below. Call my office if you have any questions at 281-937-9911 or e-mail me back through this post.

Here’s the info …

We wrap up with an overview of 5 Critical Things every man needs to make the most out of being a man in today’s world. I hope you enjoy this last video!

God bless everyone!

Click Here To Watch the Video!

Good to be back in the “video saddle” again! the laptop crash has been a real experience to say the least. Thank goodness for Mozy, our online computer back up system! Not sure what I would have done without all of the info that is so important to me personally and to our business stored in a safe place!

That said … we only have 2 weeks left in the “Man Up” Challenge 2010! Can’t believe it has come and gone so quickly! This week we are going to focus in on how important it is to be involved in something bigger than us … something that matters because it impacts the lives of someone other than ourselves in a positive way!

Watch the video and let us know what it is that you do, or are going to do, that really matters!

Click Here To Watch The Video!

Still battling technical difficulties with the systems we use to shoot and post our video blogs! So, my good buddy and fellow Man Up Challenge 2010 weekly participant calls me this morning and shares with me that he has written an entry for his blog and offers to allow me to use it to fill in the gap this week! Thank you Lord! Thanks Mike for “Manning Up”!

Enjoy guys!

It’s Memories That Shape The Relationships We Value

My father, Joe, rolled into town 2 days ago for carpal tunnel surgery. Between the doctor appointments, tests, and lab work to prepare for his operation we had long blocks of time to reflect and reminisce on family events. Okay, we’re from Louisiana so in other words we told story after story of special times, victories in sports, great hunting trips, a parents perspective on the wacky things we did as kids.

At some point, Dad started telling of a conversation he had with one of my nieces, Amanda, when he asked if she had special memories from time spent on his farm. She went into great detail of the special swing Dad made for her and the other young ones in the family. Now this was a unique swing, not purchased from Home Depot or bought on-line from a high priced swing manufacturer touting the aero dynamics and safety features parents of today brag about. This flying platform was forged from a throw away piece of timber and an old rope. The excitement from more than 15 years before reappeared as Amanda told how as soon as she and Brittany reached the farm the first thing they wanted “Pappa Joe” to do was to hang the swing on the arm of the walking wheel he tied his race horses for exercise. The squeals could be heard across the hayfields as their personal merry go round spun counter clockwise. This adventure continued on even as their legs grew so long they had to hold them up to not making trenches from dragging in the dirt. To increase the adrenalin rush, when they thought Dad wasn’t looking they would stick their feet in the ground to stop the motion, causing tension to build on the rope as the engine pulled against them. At just the right moment the legs would fly up catapulting their version of jet plane around the circle seemingly close to the speed of sound.

When I look back on the shift from boyhood adolescence to the weight of my perception of manhood, my focus was caught on being the right dad or husband: the provider, the disciplinarian, the director, the protector.  What struck me as I heard this story told was that the true calling the men in our family have as fathers, husbands or friends was not on power, provision or protection but rather the memories we choose to create.

Our children and wives yearn to laugh and be loved. They need to feel chosen over our toys, work, hobbies or other attempts of distraction or escape. Have we lost our ability to find ways to be playful with simple gestures like an unexpected card or phone call in the middle of the day? Giving our children a new laptop is meaningful. Yet playing a game on the new machine reaches inside of their spirit so much more. Taking a night to sit and watch their favorite television show without commenting on how what doesn’t make sense or appease your funny bone creates a moment that is burned on to their relationship meter. This is our time to understand what is important to them instead of comparing what they like to what you like.

When was the last time you acted silly with someone in your family? The light hearted, carefree experiences build bigger than life memories than sustain throughout the years. My daughter, Nikki, told me her college boyfriend asked her about special memories from growing up. She called to ask if we really played in our front yard ditch after a big rainstorm when she was four. I smiled and described carrying her to the edge of the water (which was only 18 inches) and then jumped in. We jumped and frolicked for 45 minutes until we were both soaked to the bone and exhausted. Fourteen years later we both still remember it, with smiles on our faces and love in our hearts.

Despite the blurriness of busy-ness, memories are never too late to be created. It’s the memories that shape, mold and anchor our relationships. They become filled with energy through play and laughter, communicated with care and concern, gain texture with love and affection. Emotion is sometimes difficult for men to express. But gentlemen, it is our actions that show how we feel.

Memories can either happen to us or be caused by us. The choice is really up to us.

This week’s challenge is about taking time to think about what we believe about the question … “is there something out there bigger than us”?

Click Here To Watch The Video