SHIFT YOUR LIFE: Let Go of Survival Mode, Seize Your Moment, and Build the Future You Were Created For

Review

SECTION ONE Joshua Giles wrote Shift Your Life for people who know something in their life needs to change but keep arriving at the same dead end. The book's argument is explicitly theological, not merely psychological: Giles, the lead pastor of Kingdom Embassy Worship Center and a self-described prophet, frames stagnation as a spiritual condition — "survival mode" — that keeps a person from the future God has already prepared for them. He guides readers to recognize when they are in a "night season" versus a "day season," to identify spiritual resistance at pivotal moments, and to discern divine timing rather than simply optimize behavior. The target reader is someone at a crossroads: a professional who has plateaued, a person recovering from a significant loss, or anyone cycling through standard productivity advice without traction — but the book's own register is prophetic and charismatic throughout, not secular self-help with religious garnish. Published by WaterBrook, it asks the reader to discern what God is doing in this season before asking what to do about it. SECTION TWO **Created:** The book's architecture assumes the reader is capable of genuine self-examination and is called by God to a specific future — a practical affirmation of the CCMMP's premise that the person, as created, is endowed with intellect and will directed toward authentic goods, here framed explicitly as a divine calling rather than a merely human capacity for growth. **Fallen:** The central diagnosis — that people remain in "survival mode," clinging to a familiar but diminished identity because change feels threatening — maps onto the CCMMP's account of concupiscence as disordered attachment. Giles names this partly in spiritual terms (as resistance to be discerned and overcome) rather than purely as a cognitive habit, which brings his account closer to a Catholic sense of the Fallen condition than a secular self-help book typically reaches, even though the operative theology is charismatic rather than sacramental. **Redeemed:** The book's arc moves from naming spiritual resistance toward stepping into what Giles frames as God's prepared future. This is a real, explicitly theistic gesture toward transformation — the source of change is located outside the self, in God's plan, not merely in willpower. The CCMMP would recognize the basic movement (cooperation with a call toward a truer self) while asking different questions than Giles does: not "is this God's timing?" but "is this grace, and how is it received sacramentally and habitually?" **Prudence (foresight):** The structured sequence — recognize the season, discern resistance, act on the opening — trains the reader in what Aquinas calls the temporal ordering proper to prudence: apprehending the end, deliberating about means, and commanding action. Giles frames this discernment as prophetic rather than deliberative in the Thomistic sense, which is a meaningfully different account of how one comes to know the right course of action. **Prudence (teachability):** The book's charismatic framework requires the reader to submit to prophetic insight — Giles's own, and by extension a broader charismatic authority structure — before acting. This is a real form of docility, but it is docility toward prophetic discernment rather than toward the Church's teaching authority or a spiritual director formed in that tradition, which raises a different set of formation questions for a Catholic reader than a secular self-help book would. SECTION THREE The book's core claim — that meaningful change requires releasing a prior version of the self before a new one can emerge — finds a sharp secular parallel in Hayes[^1], who argues that waiting for pain to subside before engaging one's values keeps people perpetually on hold.[^1] Where Hayes frames this as the trap of experiential avoidance, Giles frames it as the trap of an outdated identity; both diagnoses point to the same failure of what the CCMMP calls practical wisdom in its self-governing form. The psychological flexibility Hayes grounds in ACT — openness, awareness, active engagement — requires a kind of willingness to release rigid self-concepts that Hayes himself describes as trading problem-solving mode for a 'witnessing mode of mind,'[^2] a posture not far from what Giles calls the shift in self-understanding that precedes behavioral change. Peterson's image of the monkey who cannot retrieve its hand from the jar because it will not unclench its grip[^3] — 'it's time to let go and to sacrifice who you are for who you could become' — is perhaps the sharpest single illustration of what both Giles and the CCMMP's account of disordered attachment are describing: the fallen will's preference for a diminished certainty over the risk of genuine transformation. ## References [^1]: Hayes, S. C. (2005). *Get out of your mind and into your life: The new acceptance and commitment therapy*. New Harbinger. p. 1 (opening commitment chapter). [^2]: Hayes, S. C. (n.d.). *ACT and RFT* [video lecture]. Retrieved from DMU canon. Timestamp 11:28-12:03. [^3]: Peterson, J. B. (n.d.). *Cain and Abel* [lecture]. Retrieved from DMU canon. Timestamp 37:11-37:45.

✓ Strengths

• ✓The book's central premise — that meaningful change requires a willingness to sacrifice a current version of oneself for a better one — resonates with the CCMMP's account of the Redeemed person as someone who cooperates with ongoing transformation rather than merely adjusting behaviors.
• ✓The framing of "seasons" and spiritual resistance takes seriously that change has a timing that isn't purely under the reader's control, which corresponds to a Catholic sense that grace, not willpower alone, drives real transformation — even though Giles's account of how that timing is discerned (personal prophecy) differs sharply from a Catholic account (sacraments, spiritual direction, the Church's discernment tradition).
• ✓The call to identify and release self-limiting patterns echoes the CCMMP's treatment of fallen disordered attachment — the habit of clinging to familiar but diminished arrangements rather than risking the discomfort of a divinely initiated change.
• ✓The book's genre as a structured workbook supports the CCMMP's premise that virtue is acquired through repeated, ordered acts rather than through insight alone, providing a scaffold that can support genuine habit formation.

⚠ Considerations

• ⚠The book's theology is charismatic and prophetic rather than sacramental: personal revelation and discernment of "spiritual resistance" function as the primary means of knowing God's will, with no reference to the sacraments, the Church's teaching authority, or a tradition of spiritual direction. Catholic readers should be alert to this difference in authority structure, not just a difference in vocabulary.
• ⚠Ignatius's Rules for Discernment of Spirits offer a useful counterpoint here, since the book's genre depends heavily on discerning "consolation" (a sense of divine breakthrough, momentum, calling) as a marker of God's action — precisely the kind of discernment Ignatius cautions requires testing against fruit and obedience, not felt certainty alone.