“Mirrors that hide nothing hurt me. But this is the hurt of purging and precious renewal – and these are the mirrors of dangerous grace.” — Walter Wangerin Jr.
Through my coaching work with leaders, I’ve uncovered a secret. Here it is:
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The Vital Importance of Learning to be Present
“Right now” is the only life you really have. Why not be here while it’s happening?
I remember when I was a boy summers seemed to last forever. Each day was like an eternity. My mother would often send me outside after breakfast and I wouldn’t be allowed back in ’till lunch, then out again till the streetlights came on. (It was a different time.) I remember how those hours stretched. A single day could hold a hundred adventures or more, and still leave time for me to linger at the back door for what seemed like years, waiting for my father to come home for dinner.
Good Fuel / Bad Fuel
In my coaching work with leaders, you might be surprised to learn that one of the key areas we explore is the leader’s relationship with health & fitness. Though we don’t usually think of developing a fitness regimen as a “spiritual practice,” I’m convinced it is. The reason is simple:
You show me a leader who’s eating poorly, not exercising, and not getting enough rest, and I’ll show you a leader who is more likely to experience overwhelm, battle discouragement, feel disconnected from God, and struggle with self-destructive coping behaviors.
6 Common Shadow Motivations for Leaders
“To live by grace means to acknowledge my whole life story, the light side and the dark. In admitting my shadow side I learn who I am and what God’s grace means.” ~ Brennan Manning
One of my closest friends serves as a spiritual director for pastors and Christian leaders all around the country. One day he was meeting with a pastor who was weighed down by some leadership challenges he didn’t quite know how to navigate. They were driving together to spend a few hours out in the country, and on their way they passed a huge church that the pastor had founded and left years before.
As the pastor looked at the magnificent building, he shook his head and said, “Anger built that church.”
Mud and the Masterpiece
This week I’m stoked to welcome my good friend John Burke to the blog. John is the lead pastor at Gateway Church in Austin, TX (yep, he’s also my pastor), and the author of Mud and the Masterpiece, which officially releases this week! I’m really excited about this book ~ in fact, I believe it’s one of the most important books for Christians to be written in decades. I hope leaders everywhere will read it. See the end of John’s post for info on how you can snag a copy, plus a whole bunch of other great stuff too!
Musings on Culture Change, Part 4
“Mirrors that hide nothing hurt me. But this is the hurt of purging and precious renewal ~ and these are the mirrors of dangerous grace.” ~ Walter Wangerin Jr.
Last week, I wrote that for a leader to inspire authentic culture change in an organization, he or she must do three things:
- Facilitate a process to help the culture see itself as it is right now.
- Enlist (not force!) the members of the culture toward a more compelling vision via an open honest conversation about who we are and who we want to be.
- Fully embody the new culture he or she wants everyone to live. Go first.
Here’s what I mean by these:
Musings on Culture Change, Part 3
“Change is not made without inconvenience, even from worse to better.” ~ Richard Hooker
I’ll bet you’ve seen those nature shows where a school of fish reshapes itself into a ball when threatened by a predator. Every time I watch a scene like that, I’m mesmerized by it. It’s like this collection of individual life forms somehow transforms itself into a single entity, becoming this cloud of life that moves and reacts to its environment as if it were one creature rather than a collection of hundreds. How do they do that? How does this balled-up life form decide where to go, how to move in response to a predatory threat? It looks for all the world like those hundreds of fish are operating with one mind. But where is that mind?
