Carlos Whittaker, talks about lies and killing spiders at Catalyst Atlanta (October 2017)
What’s holding you back? Have you fallen prey to false narratives about yourself? A narrative that may be keeping you from all you are and all you could be. Some people have believed lies about themselves for so long that they no longer pursue dreams or goals. Some would rather stay frozen in fear, bridled in mediocrity, or stagnant from avoidance, rather than face difficulties and deal with the cycle of lies and destructive decisions preventing them from living out their purpose.
Those lies, behaviors, or cycles, may actually be “spiders” in disguise and you just may need to kill them. That’s what self-described “hope dealer” Carlos “Los Whit” Whittaker, has come to believe, and if you’re gonna wipe out all your cobwebs first, then you’re gonna have to take out the spider--because according to Los, until you do, things are never going to be “quite right”.
Whittaker wants you to get rid of what’s holding you back, and he’s sharing his secret in his latest book. Kill the Spider: Getting Rid of What’s Really Holding You Back. Los readily admits to learning from experience and he wants to help others break free.
“How I describe cobwebs and spiders in the book is that a spider is an agreement that you've made with a lie at some point in your life. We all have agreements with lies that affect the way we live and decisions we make.”
And according to Whittaker, the cobwebs can be essentially as bad as the spiders because they perpetuate a cycle of defeat without ever dealing with the real problem.
Whittaker sees it this way, “Cobwebs are medicators that bring us some sort of false comfort, those things that we spend time cleaning. ‘I want to stop drinking, I want to stop looking at pornography, I want to have a better marriage, I want to do this.’ He’d tell you simply cleaning out the cobwebs now and then is not the solution for lasting change.
“Every time we try to clean them out we find ourselves wrapped back up in them. We need to stop cleaning the cobwebs and we need to get to the root of the spider that's creating those cobwebs and kill that.”
On one hand, Whittaker’s theory sounds easy. On the other, it seems almost impossible. However, he says people need to be ready to do the hard things.
“I think a lot of people want fluffy and they want easy. We live in such a Twitter culture, a culture of quick fixes. When people read the book they're going to realize, ‘okay I'm going to need to roll up my sleeves, do a little bit of work’, but the work is going to be worth it.”
Carlos Whittaker’s, Kill the Spider: Getting Rid of What’s Really Holding You Back Released October 2017
Whittaker, a self-described social media maven somewhat annoyed by Twitter’s recent increased character limit, suggests that a tweet (of 140 or even 280 characters) can’t solve your problems, and he freely admits he can’t solve your problems for you either.
“I can't fix your problem with a 240 page book. There's going to be some work you're going to have to do.”
Whittaker’s advice couldn’t be timelier. Recent statistics in the US continue to point to increases in depression, and mental health trends point to more people in need of strategies for dealing with life in general.
Whittaker cautions that merely cleaning out our cobwebs is just not enough.
“Cleaning cobwebs is easy. It's self-help, it's quick fixes, it's medicators…the behaviors are never going to change unless you break the lie--the agreement with the lie.”
When it comes to that sort of self-medicating Whittaker speaks like an old pro. The former Christian music artist, current author, speaker, says he has seen the benefit of professional counseling and encourages anyone who feels the need to seek professional counseling to do it. But Whittaker recognizes that many people are reluctant to seek counseling as a solution because of stigmas, stereotypes or other reasons.
Whittaker uses his national speaking platform to speak about leadership, family, his Christian faith, and now spider killing—and maintains that for some therapy may be a necessary piece of the solution to permanently exterminating tough issues. One such issue he refers to as ‘artificial intimacy’ that leads to affairs, or pornography, and other addictions---addictions that often have spiritual components and consequences that must be confronted head-on.
“I'm a big believer in therapy. I've seen the same therapist for many years, but I also believe that you can only really identify, locate, and ‘corner’ your spider in therapy. You can't kill it there.
You're going to have to kill it in your time with Jesus. You're going to have to kill it doing the work with the Holy Spirit.”
For Whittaker, his faith has played a huge role in his personal life struggles and healing especially as it is related to his Christian spiritual life—and he encourages people who struggle to leave professional therapy on the table, and to be willing to ‘take a look at yourself’.
“It takes so much work to look in. Gosh but I'm telling you the freedom that's available to us when we do that. It is massive.”
Whittaker’s life these days is an example of the massive change he talks about. After he began cornering and killing his own spiders, he says he felt God leading him to give up leading worship as a profession and become a speaker.
Los and his wife Heather and their three children relocated to Nashville, TN, and in 2014 with Heather’s encouragement, he gave up his worship tour, made a clean break and canceled the remainder of his tour dates.
“She's like, "Pray about it." So I prayed about it. Sure enough, we both together walked to my laptop and canceled 78 worship-leading gigs through the rest of that year. All of them. I canceled them. I canceled them all. And I emailed them and I said, "Hey, but if you need a speaker, I feel like God's asking me to start speaking." Crickets. Not one person emailed me back. A week later, crickets.
Though he admits he was already scoping Home Depot and Starbucks for jobs, he didn’t have to wait years or months. Just fourteen days later, he received affirmation that he made the right decision.
“I got an email in my inbox and it said, ‘The White House would like to ... ‘, and so I deleted it because that's obviously spam. Then 30 minutes later, my publicist called me and she says, ‘Why'd you delete the email? They know you deleted the email.’ And I said, ‘Who’s they? What are you talking about?’ She goes—‘Go look right now in your deleted files.’ So I looked in my deleted folder, and it said, "The White House and President Barack Obama would cordially like to invite you to speak at the Easter Prayer Breakfast’-- in seven days.”
Whittaker says he has learned there is power in obedience—and while it’s not easy, in the end, it’s worth it.
“I tell people all the time, obedience is so difficult, especially when we obey and then wait. The waiting. That's where the torture is, right? Oh, my gosh. Just seven days after that, I found myself having breakfast with President Obama, giving him a 10 minute devotional and the first talk God asked me to give…was at the White House.”
And the full-time faith-based, speaker, husband, father of three believes we don’t always give credit where credit is due.
I remember leaving (The White House) thinking, "You know what? ---God. I don't ever give Him the credit. I don't ever give Him His due." He's like, "Just because I tell you to do something, doesn't mean it's gonna happen that day. Just have some patience."
A lesson in patience and obedience isn’t the only lesson Los has learned, which is why he stays on the road speaking at events like the Catalyst Leadership Conference in Atlanta. He wants to encourage leaders to have that patience, and to be obedient, and he suggests leaders take stock and lead themselves before they can effectively lead others. Part of that process he says, of course begins with killing those spiders.
“When leaders begin to deal with personal issues, listen to what God is saying and deal with their demons or your spiders—when they finally trap them, corner them and kill them they’re going to end up places they never expected.”
Since he’s learned to kill his spiders, every day is a new adventure for Los. Sure, he stays busy speaking and promoting the book project, but he’s also started a new podcast project, and he’s even involved his family. It’s called “Enter Wild.”
“It's helping people enter into the wild part of their faith. I feel like too many Christians live in the safe space. With Enter Wild, my wife and I just sit across from each other--I don't interview famous people or influencers or authors. There are many great podcasts that do that, but this is just a podcast with me. I've interviewed my dad, and we talked for an hour. And I interviewed my wife's grandma, and we talked ... and so I like to find people that no one's ever heard of and ask them about wild seasons of their faith.”
Los’s deep commitment to family and roots (he is black Panamanian American) recently led him to Panama with his brother and his father to explore their heritage. Los’s father was raised in Colon.
Whittaker maintains the business of killing spiders is crucial and vital to clearing your personal life of personal demons, addictions, and distractions that keep you away from the important things like family and faith. To him it’s more about realizing you actually need to stop believing the lies, and you have to ‘stop doing that thing you don’t want to do’, not just “try to stop” or by just ‘saying you will stop”.
His advice is rooted in his deepened commitment to his faith: “Stop trying to ‘stop doing that’. That's not going to work. At the end of the day, you've got to find the lie, you've got to confess it, confess it out loud, and then you have to replace it. You have to replace that lie with God's truth in your life.”
In other words, some of us---most of us, would do well to take Whittaker’s advice, and just “kill the spider.”
Learn More about Los’ trip to Panama with his father and brother by watching this video: