Local pastor Jason Scales’ new book, How’s That Working For You?, out now, encourages readers to take a long, deep look at what holds many back from their true potential.
Scales leads Believers Faith Fellowship, a church in Christiana, Tennessee, with his wife, Barbara Scales, who also serves as the Director of the June Anderson Center for Women and Nontraditional Students at Middle Tennessee State University.
Released in May, How’s That Working For You? can be purchased online on Amazon. The quick read includes only a little over 70 pages, but it is filled with pensive questions and broad life lessons.
“My main motivation behind writing the book was seeing a lot of people who had dreams, ambitions and goals, but their life’s direction was not going where they wanted it to go,” Scales said. “So, I wanted to write a book to close that gap in between what we want and what we are doing.”
The book is centered around the idea of “self-awareness.” Scales writes in the book that many people are actually working against themselves due to not recognizing their own shortcomings and how to overcome them.
“Unfortunately, many of us don’t realize that our behaviors are working against us until we experience failure,” Scales writes in the book.
Scales said that he was once blinded by pride in many aspects of his life. This led him to share his experiences and revelations with others.
“My eyes were opened to how my own pride was affecting my life,” Scales said. “I learned something important. That in order to fix anything in life, you gotta shift from blame to responsibility. Pride is always pointing the blame at somebody else.”
The lessons in the book are highlighted by parables and experiences from Scales’ own life. The parables center on people who have a great amount of potential but are eventually held back due to their unwillingness to work as a team or look closely at their own problems. Scales said that each parable is based on actual experiences from the lives of people from Scales’ church.
After each story, Scales discusses the major takeaways from the parables in “Let’s Talk About It” sections. Scales writes that honest self-examination is “one of the hardest things to do.”
To be able to assist people in being comfortable with self-awareness and examination, Scales poses the same question for every relationship, decision and situation in one’s life: “How’s that working for you?”
“I wanted (the book) to be like a mirror for people to see their own lives and not look at anyone else’s,” Scales said.
