What is your endgame?
Leading, coaching, teaching, training, parenting. What is it all leading to?
As transformational leaders, we all recognize our desperate need to be filled and sustained in order to lead, coach, teach, train, and parent well. We know that it is nearly impossible to make good on our desire to lead if we are relying entirely on our own strength day after day, year after year.
We have a money problem. This is a hard truth that most of us try to ignore for as long as possible. We all believe we’re different. That we’re uniquely qualified to navigate the tensions that exist between the worldly pursuit of wealth and the complete surrender to God’s will.
We can only talk about doing something for so long. Eventually, those discussions must become decisions, and those decisions must become actions. If any of this is going to matter, at some point, we must do the work.
In the leadership journey of today, there is a pressure to build a platform or following. Whether it be through social media or elsewhere, if we just put on a show for other people we won’t receive the true reward. The reward for a transformational leader is inward focused before outward focused. The inward rewards we want are peace, confidence, perspective, and wisdom. The more public, the less rest in these areas for the inward life of a leader.
“This is my time!” We’re all familiar with this proclamation. We’ve likely expressed it ourselves, or at a minimum heard someone else make the claim. It’s a bold and revealing statement.
It’s most often used upon the realization that we are either on the threshold of something transformative or in the midst of something transformative. It also demonstrates that we’re present. We’re able to see the forest from the trees.
Stop rejecting the raw materials you have been blessed with! We’re constantly being reminded of an “image” we should be striving for. An image that by design will always be a little newer and a little nicer than the one you currently hold.
When it comes to our lives. We’re the one to blame. We’re the cause of setbacks. We’re the one that has made all the choices leading to this moment. We’re frustrated and discouraged because we know things could be different if we did things differently.
We’ve all been blessed with divine desires. God gives us big visions! Game changing dreams that even the most ambitious among us would be hesitant to share. We’re hesitant because we know the thing we’re called to do will require us to do something we’ve never done. To think different, to live different, to grow! Even to go!
Consistency is hard! As human beings we struggle to establish rhythms for doing the things we ought to do repeatedly. There are bookshelves at your favorite bookstore full of readings on habit and behavior change to help address this problem of consistency. Despite our best attempts we still find ourselves in situations we don’t want to be in, doing things we know we shouldn’t be doing and failing to uphold the commitments we make to others and to ourselves.
We’re all yearning for a different way. We don’t really even know what that way is, where it will take us or what it will be like when we finally take it. We’re confident it will be better, but not sure how or why. What are we searching for? Why does it seem to be so elusive? Where do we even begin?
