(Here at the Willow Creek Global Leadership Summit praying for God to give me new insight to help me in leading with Operation Christmas Child. To learn more about OCC click here...)
Leadership Illusions
Bill: A few
years ago I talked to you about blind spots—weaknesses a leader can’t see. I’ve always wanted to speak about what
I think is almost a universal blind spot in type A, driving people – there’s a
blind spot about reflection and pushing the ‘pause button’ and realizing the
importance of self-reflection and getting a picture of what’s really going on
in your life. I’m activistic and
want to keep moving forward but I’ve learned the hard way that if I don’t
punctuate my activity with self-reflection I pay and everyone around me
pays. What we’re going to do in
this session—we’re going to provide you the time to experience a few minutes of
reflection on the illusions of leadership:
1.
The illusion that you can carry ever-increasing
amounts of speed in your life and simultaneously keep your soul line heading in
the same direction with the same margin.
As God blesses us He gives us more to manage and we just go faster and
faster but at some place on this line of increasing speed I start losing touch
with my soul. The connection with
God gets a little more distant and I just start asking God to help me keep my
speed up. I start going too fast
for the people in my life. It’s
not just God and other relationships—it can affect your health, your
recreation. The illusion all of us
suck into—in my experience you can’t keep going. It must involve flattening out the speed and having new
relational practices and goals.
Speed Vs. Soul – Take 2 minutes to evaluate
your own life and what God is whispering to you to do about it
Dr. Henry Cloud – new book “The Power of
the Other”—
2.
The most important thing is: who are you
connected to? Here’s a GPS—Write
down this map of connectedness—the map of the leader’s world. There are only 4 possibilities of
connectedness—
Corner #1= no connection
(leadership can force you into no connection) Corner #2= bad connection (someone’s in it with me but
it leaves me feeling I’m bad and a loser)
Corner #3=fake good connection
(relieves the pain but a pseudo connection like an addiction or driving to greater
numbers)
Corner #4=real connection (the
power of the other—real relationships that operate with a particular formula
and that is I must walk into that corner from a place of need and accept the
help of the other—God calls us to come home to corner #4—we need to surround
ourselves with people who can be in corner #4 with us)
Take 2 minutes reflecting on which
corner you are in most often? Why?
What keeps you from going to corner #4?
3.
The illusion of achievement. Shauna Niequist (my daughter) sent me
the
manuscript of her new book “Present Over Perfect” and she will now read
me an excerpt from that book:
(paraphrase) thinking that achievement would make me happy—my life began
to feel like an obstacle course and I felt exhaustion and isolation—so I began
the journey back to grace and love and connection and rest. This is my greatest regret: for a season I placed my marriage and
my family on the altar of competency and efficiency. I was giving the best of myself to people “out there” while
the core of my home was fragile. I
thought I would feel gladness if I broke my back for my work but that didn’t
come. You find the gladness in the
people around your table, in prayer, when you sit in silence. It’s not in numbers or bank
accounts. The love you’re looking
for isn’t something you can calculate; it’s something you receive. In the silent space the love you’ve
been looking for that comes from God Himself will come.
For the next 2 minutes do a “satisfaction
audit” on a 10 scale. Are you
satisfied? Where are you finding it?
Where are you not finding it?
Are you open to the love of God and the work of the Spirit in your
life?
No matter what illusion you’ve believed in
the past, God love rewriting stories and making things new. He loves to mend and restore. You think about that as this promise is
sung over you.
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