I said “Thy will be done” in church for most of my life without letting it touch anything outside those walls. I prayed it on Sundays and spent Monday through Saturday chasing what I wanted—the right body, the right approval, the right version of myself that would finally feel like enough. It took losing my father, my brother, my health, and nearly my sense of self before I understood that Step 3 wasn’t asking me to give up my desires. It was asking me to let God redirect them.
Step 3 says: “Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.” Step 11 continues that surrender into daily practice: “Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.” Nearly twenty years into my Al-Anon journey, my training as a Human Architect is teaching me that these two steps hold the answer to one of the most exhausting patterns I see in people chasing personal growth: working furiously toward a version of success that was never actually theirs to chase.
The Exhausting Cycle of Ego-Driven Desire
Ego-driven desire has a particular flavor. It’s restless. It’s comparative. It’s never quite satisfied, because it isn’t rooted in who you actually are; it’s rooted in who you’re afraid you aren’t. I know this cycle intimately. I spent years chasing the right clothes, the right car, the right body, believing that if I could just achieve enough of what everyone told me I should want, the ache underneath would finally go quiet.
It never did. Ego-driven desire can’t be satisfied, because satisfaction was never its actual goal. Its goal is to keep you running, because as long as you’re running toward the next thing, you never have to sit still long enough to ask a much scarier question: what do I actually want, and why?
This is where Step 3 becomes so radical. It doesn’t ask you to stop wanting things. It asks you to stop being the one in charge of deciding what’s worth wanting.
What “Turning Your Will Over” Actually Means
I used to think surrender meant passivity. That turning my will over to God meant sitting back and waiting for life to happen to me. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Surrender isn’t the absence of desire or effort. It’s the redirection of desire away from ego and toward purpose.
Turning your will over means becoming willing to ask a different question before every major choice: not “what do I want?” but “what is mine to do?” Sometimes those two questions land on the same answer. Often they don’t, and that gap is exactly where the transformation happens.
For me, this looked like leaving a high-paying IT job to become a homesteader, author, speaker, and coach—a decision that made no sense by ego standards. It wasn’t more comfortable, more secure, or more impressive by the world’s measuring stick. But it was mine to do. I knew it the way you know the love of your life or the right calling: it fit a deep part of me that had been buried under years of chasing what I thought I should want.
Step 11: Making Surrender a Daily Practice
Step 3 is a decision. Step 11 is what keeps that decision alive day after day, because surrender isn’t a one-time event any more than Step 10’s inventory is. Ego doesn’t stay surrendered on its own; it creeps back in quietly, disguised as ambition, comparison, or the belief that you finally know better than the God who made you.
Step 11 asks for two things: improved conscious contact with God, and prayer specifically for knowledge of His will and the power to carry it out. In practice, this has become a daily rhythm for me:
- Begin with quiet before input. Before I check my phone, my email, or anyone else’s opinion of how my day should go, I try to spend a few minutes in prayer or silence, creating space to hear something truer than the noise.
- Ask the purpose question, not the ambition question. Instead of praying for a specific outcome—more clients, more weight lost, more recognition—I try to pray simply for clarity: What is mine to steward today? Where are you asking me to show up?
- Notice where ego has crept back in. This pairs naturally with a Step 10 inventory. Where today did I chase something because I wanted to look successful, rather than because it aligned with my purpose? Where did comparison drive a decision instead of calling?
- Ask for the power to carry it out, not just the knowledge of it. Knowing your purpose and having the courage to actually live it out loud are two very different things. Step 11 asks for both—wisdom and strength, together.
- Release the outcome. This is the hardest part for most of us, myself included. Purpose-driven stewardship means doing the next right thing with excellence and love, and then genuinely releasing your grip on how it turns out. The results were never yours to control in the first place.
From Ego-Driven Desire to Purpose-Driven Stewardship
This is where Steps 3 and 11 connect directly to the heart of the Next Level Human framework. Ego asks: what will make me look successful, safe, or enough? Purpose asks: what has God uniquely equipped and positioned me to steward in this world?
You were given specific gifts. Not generic ones,. Not the ones you admire in someone else but ones woven into the actual fabric of who you are. My gifts turned out to include a love of teaching, a stubborn curiosity for research, a deep tenderness toward animals and land, and a willingness to say hard, unpopular things when I believe they’re true. None of that looked like a “safe” career path. All of it turned out to be exactly what I was meant to steward.
Purpose-driven stewardship doesn’t mean your desires disappear. It means your desires get reordered under something larger than your own ego’s need for validation. You still want things—a healthy body, meaningful work, deep relationships—but you stop needing those things to prove your worth, because your worth was never up for negotiation in the first place. It was given, not earned.
Why This Is Spiritual Work, Not Just Mindset Work
I want to be honest about something: you cannot think your way into this shift through willpower or positive self-talk alone. Ego is remarkably resilient, and it’s very good at disguising itself as growth, ambition, or even spirituality itself. This is precisely why Step 11 insists on prayer and meditation rather than simply “figuring it out.”
Turning your will over requires an actual relationship with something bigger than your own reasoning—call it God, a Higher Power, the Divine, whatever language fits your understanding. Rob Bell says everything is spiritual, and I believe him. Your ambition is spiritual. Your fear is spiritual. Your desire to matter is spiritual. Which means the healing of all of it has to be spiritual too, not just strategic.
What Surrendered Purpose Looks Like in Daily Life
Purpose-driven stewardship isn’t reserved for dramatic life changes like leaving a career or moving to a farm. Most days, it looks much smaller: choosing patience over control in a hard conversation because that’s what love actually requires. Saying no to an opportunity that would look impressive but doesn’t align with what’s actually yours to carry. Showing up fully for the ordinary, unglamorous work in front of you because you trust it’s part of a larger design, even when you can’t see the whole picture yet.
This is the daily discipline of Step 11: staying in conscious contact, staying willing to ask what’s actually being asked of you, and staying humble enough to keep surrendering the parts of you that want to grab the wheel back.
A Practice for the Rest of Your Life
Like every practice in this series, surrender isn’t a box to check once. It’s a relationship you tend for the rest of your life, one that deepens the longer you stay in it. Some days, turning my will over is easy—a quiet, peaceful decision. Other days, I have to make it again and again, hour by hour, wrestling my grip off the wheel every time ego tries to take back control.
That’s the work of becoming a Next Level Human: not achieving a permanent state of surrender, but returning to it, faithfully, again and again, trusting that the God who gave you your gifts also knows exactly what to do with them.
FAQ: Understanding Steps 3 and 11
What is Step 3 of the 12 Steps? Step 3 states: “Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.” It’s a decision to stop relying solely on personal willpower and ego-driven control, and instead to surrender direction of one’s life to a Higher Power.
What is Step 11 of the 12 Steps? Step 11 states: “Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.” It turns the one-time decision of Step 3 into an ongoing daily practice.
How is surrender different from passivity? Surrender doesn’t mean giving up effort or desire; it means redirecting effort and desire away from ego-driven goals and toward purpose-driven action. It still requires showing up fully; it simply changes who is directing the outcome.
What does it mean to move from ego-driven desire to purpose-driven stewardship? Ego-driven desire seeks validation, comparison, or a sense of being “enough” through achievement. Purpose-driven stewardship focuses instead on faithfully using one’s specific gifts in alignment with a larger calling, releasing the need to control or guarantee the outcome.
If this resonated with you, Explore The Steward Within program or Start with our free 7-Day Micro-Course.
