Black Friday

What a crazy day, the day after Thanksgiving has turned out to be. I'm a little embarrassed by all the hoopla around it, to be honest. Plus, I've never been convinced that we save that much money on the deals. Why not think of another 10 things you'd rather be doing than shopping for things that aren't going to satisfy anyone anyhow?

Quiet

I haven't written much lately. Sorry. Sometimes I just get tired of hearing myself.

Being Motivated

Randy Alcorn reminded me a while back that we are motivated in three ways:

Fear
Love
Reward

My children will obey based on fear, love or reward. Each of these motivators has their place. Each has value. It's true with our relationship with God. It's true with our relationship with our leaders. There should be a balance. Think about those you follow or those who follow you... is there a balance between these three? If it's out of balance, why? What can you do to change it?

Make More Decisions

In keeping with the leadership theme of the last couple of posts... leaders don't always know the right thing to do, they just learn to live with the decision.

The more decisions you make, the more experience you'll have at living with the consequences.

The more art you make, the more experience you'll have at learning how to express yourself.

The more tv you watch the more experience you'll have at doing nothing.

Keep moving forward.

Experimentation into Expression

Re-reading Art and Fear last night I was reminded about development. When an artist is younger he/she experiments with lots of different technology and ideas but as time goes by and certain approaches, styles and tools emerge more prominently than others then experimentation turns into expression.

The art of leadership is no different. When I was younger I tried a variety of approaches, searching for the right combination of values to guide me. (i.e. relational, hierarchical, choleric, sanguine, etc...) Age and repetition increasingly remind what my style is, what my strengths are, the concepts I'm most comfortable with and what I'm most effective at. Experimenting turns into expressing.

From a biblical perspective wisdom has less to do with knowledge and more to do with application of knowledge. I think expressing is the application of knowledge. So, if you're a young leader (or young anything) and you want to get better at what you do, you really only have one option: keep doing it over and over and over.

Leadership

In the Exodus story, the Israelites were led away from Egypt and into the wilderness. They often grumbled and complained. As they were on the move they had to learn to live without jobs, without homes, without a way to find food (except for what God provided for them by way of the quail and manna) and without knowing where they would wind up. But there was one thing they couldn't do without... leadership. As Moses was up on the mountain meeting with God the people fell apart. Think about it, they could live without all the aforementioned things but they couldn't live without leadership.

In every leadership situation I've ever been in... as a pastor, coach, band leader, manager, anything... there have been dissenters. I used to think that I was the common denominator. Since all the people kept coming to me I assumed I was at the heart of the problems. While I'm sure my inability to lead has created issues from time to time, what I've learned is criticism goes with the territory. If you lead people, someone will grumble. Period. A part of the reason why leadership exists is to absorb the complaining. As a leader, your job is to recycle the negative into something positive. What can't be recycled needs to be discarded. Grumbling is not necessarily evidence that you're doing a poor job of leadership. Grumbling is evidence that God has placed you in a leadership position and He expects you to deal with it. He knows His people can manage just about anything... as long as they have a leader.

Morality

"How moral we choose to be at any given moment depends not only on our stable character traits but also on our recent behavioral history." From the Predictably Irrational website.

That's why our benchmark has to be something above and beyond our own own behavioral history. I think that's what Romans 8:5 is referring to. We can't live a moral life on our own.