E is for Embed

The LAYER Method, Part Four

Sometime around year seventeen of my federal career, I had what had become, by then, a familiar moment of reckoning.

My agency was in the middle of a major transition, moving from one parent federal agency to another. There was a lot of uncertainty, a lot of frustration, and more questions than answers. During this time, a debate surfaced about something that, on the surface, sounds incredibly trivial: business cards.

Specifically, whether our public-facing field employees, most of whom worked out in the community and could be upward of a hundred miles from an office, should be required to list the physical field office address on their cards. The work these employees did regularly placed them in dangerous situations. Safety was not a minor concern, especially from disgruntled people who might view their work as intrusive or potentially negatively impactful on their future employment. Safety was a core operational responsibility of the leadership in my organization, and requiring a physical office address on those cards served no functional purpose and could compromise that safety. The decision to do so was, as it became increasingly clear to me and others, purely about optics.

In what would be the last meeting on the topic, I advocated hard. Respectfully, but with real conviction and passion. The workforce and several of my peers were behind me, outspoken about their concerns, and looking to me to lead. So I made the case. I laid out the concerns, named the risks, and pushed back on a decision that I genuinely believed put people at risk for the sake of appearances.

And then I was told, rather firmly, to stand down.

The meeting ended. I walked back to my office. And I did exactly what I was told.

I felt defeated, but mostly, I felt like I had let the workforce down. The mission mattered deeply to me, but I had always believed there was no mission without the people executing it, so they were always my first priority. And yet, despite that moment of reckoning, despite how strongly I felt it in my spirit, I went right back to operating inside the system that had just made the feelings of misalignment I’d been wrestling with, more undeniable. It was another moment of asking myself, “if I can’t take care of my people, why am I even here?”

I have had more moments like that than I can count. And I’ve let more of them go than I’d like to admit.

What I know now, that I didn’t understand then, is that when we feel purpose slipping and we don’t know what to do with that feeling, staying still is not the answer. We have to do something, or we risk abdicating peace and purpose for compliance, convenience, and comfort. We continue moving inside the system because purpose and alignment are overridden by the expectations and rewards that come with it, a paycheck, a title, a sense of stability, and the comfort of knowing exactly what is required of us even if what is required compromises who we are created to be. So we trade the signal that something is misaligned for the silence of compliance. We file those moments of reckoning away somewhere so we don’t have to look at them, and we keep going, losing more and more of our sense of self every time.

And that default is its own kind of practice. A practice of prioritizing comfort over conviction. Performance over purpose. Belonging over truth.

The danger is not that we make one compromised choice as a result of one difficult meeting. The danger is that every time we let a signal go without doing something with it, we are reinforcing a way of living that takes us further from who God created us to be. And we do it so gradually, so reasonably, that we rarely notice it happening until the gap between who we are at work or in our personal lives, and who we know ourselves to be in our spirit, becomes almost too wide to bridge.

That is what Embed is designed to interrupt.

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f you’ve been walking with us through this series, you know...

In Listen, we slow down long enough to actually hear God’s voice. Not passive hearing, but the intentional, disciplined practice of separating His truth from the noise the enemy and the world work hard to fill our lives with.

In Align, we hold our choices, habits, relationships, and identities up against a different standard. Not the world’s standards, but the standards that reflect the true nature of the God who created us. We ask, honestly: what is God calling us to align with in this season of our lives?

In Yield, we stand at the crossroads and start making some real choices. We identify what we’ve been doing out of habit and convenience in default to what society expects, and we make a decision to surrender those things that do not support God’s purpose and will for our lives.

There are three meaningful steps, each representing a different stage of genuine, spiritual, and personal growth.

And yet, like clockwork, the world continues to turn. Inevitably, even after the work to Listen, Align, and Yield, we find ourselves back in the very environments that create the friction in our lives. The pressures didn’t disappear. The old habits didn’t dissolve because we had moments of awareness, revelation, and breakthrough.

And that is exactly where most of us get stuck.

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This is where so many of us quietly fall off. Not because we aren’t sincere in our desire to move past our challenges. Not because the revelation we’ve had isn’t real. But because we have not created space for these revelations to permanently live so that we can thrive in them.

Embed is the practice of giving what God has revealed a place to exist within our daily lives. It is the intentional, specific, sustainable work of building rhythms, habits, and practices that reinforce the new story God is trying to write in us, so that story has a fighting chance against the old one that is squatting and refusing to vacate residence within us.

Because breaking free of old habits is probably the most difficult thing we’ll ever do. Letting God transform us to align us with His plan and free us from the world’s is no easy task. A transformed life, a new narrative for our work lives or personal lives, doesn’t just emerge because we’ve had a breakthrough. The old habits sit patiently while we go through the process of figuring out what is wrong and how to make it better. Our subconscious knows our triggers, knows the exact conditions under which we are most likely to go back to default, and those old habits will eventually show up, often in the most ordinary moments, to offer the ease and comfort of themselves to us once again.

The antidote to that is not willpower. It is not spiritual intensity. It is practice. Consistent, daily, faithful practice.

Hebrews 5:14 says, “But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil.”

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Embed in the LAYER Method has two movements that build on each other.

The first is finding God’s fingerprints.

Before we build new practices, we have to see what God has already been doing. Because I promise you, if you look honestly at your own story, even in the most complicated seasons, there are moments where a truer, more aligned version of you was already trying to show up. Moments where you led with integrity when it would have been easier not to. Moments where you chose rest over performance. Moments where you held a boundary you had historically given up without a fight.

Those are not accidents. They are evidence that God was already at work within you. Finding God’s fingerprints matters because it interrupts the lie that says “I’ve always been this way” or “nothing ever really changes for me.” Evidence says otherwise. We just haven’t been collecting it intentionally.

The second movement is building the practices.

God’s fingerprints alone are not enough to sustain a changed life. We need rhythms. And rhythms are different from goals. Goals live in the future. Rhythms live in the present and set a new roadmap for the future. Rhythms are what you actually do each day, how you respond and recover when the day gets complicated and the world starts making its demands.

For some of us, the rhythm is morning prayer before the first email gets opened. For others, it’s an honest conversation with a trusted person once a week, someone who knows who God is calling you to be and has permission to ask whether you’re actually living like it. It might be a short journal entry at the end of each workday identifying all the places you saw God throughout the day and even where you may have resisted Him. It might be a boundary you practice holding, not dramatically, but quietly and consistently, until it becomes your new default.

For me, every morning before I do anything else, I spend a few minutes talking to God and asking Him to “get in my head and order my thoughts” before anything or anyone else does. That lays the foundation for giving Him full authority over my day and my life, and placing my full trust and reliance on Him to manage my emotions and lead my words and actions. I’ve also learned to stop filing the signals away. When conflicts arise between my principles, values, or purpose, I return to the Listen, Align, and Yield practices to ensure that whatever response I have to the conflict, it does the work to keep me on the path God created for me.

I realize none of my embedded practices are particularly impressive. They aren’t long, complicated, or dramatic actions that require a lot of thought on my part. But I think God appreciates the simplicity of it, and simplicity is one of the things He has revealed to me about my current season. This simple act of surrender has given what God is doing through me a place to breathe. A place to settle. A daily, ordinary opportunity to demonstrate that I believe in Him, I trust Him, and I want Him to use me however He sees fit. That I am not going back to what was (old habits), that I am available for what is (present), and what is to come (future).

That is what Embed looks like in practice, at least for me. It feels like the quiet, faithful accumulation of small choices that, over time, are producing a different kind of person. I am much happier. I am more fulfilled. I operate more fully in purpose and alignment. I am confident in my discernment and capable of rejecting what doesn’t align. And I am wholly available to the people, experiences, and responsibilities God has assigned to me in this season.

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Colossians 3:23-24 says, “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving.”

Whatever you do. Not just the big assignments in your life. Not just the most visible moments. Whatever. You. Do.

That is the whole point of Embed. Every day is an opportunity to practice what God is revealing. Every email, every meeting, every interaction, every boundary held, every moment of choosing patience over frustration or truth over comfort, is a small act of Embed.

The breakthrough moments give validation and vision, but it’s in the valley that we practice living it out.

So what does Embed actually look like in your daily life right now? What are the habits you have, and what do they support? Do those habits align with your purpose in this season?

If the answers are unclear, that is okay. That is exactly why Embed exists.

You don’t need a perfect practice. You just need a starting point. One rhythm. One specific, doable action that gives what God is revealing to you a place to land, grow, and live.

Start there. Stay there. Let it become ordinary. Because ordinary, practiced faithfully over time, is often how God does His most extraordinary work.

I appreciate you walking LAYER with me. We’re almost there.

Zia

The My Faith at Work (MFAW) Coaching Methodology, LAYER, stands for Listen, Align, Yield, Embed, Release. This is the fourth in a MFAW series walking through each principle of my coaching framework.