“Remember your leaders... consider the outcome of their way of life and imitate their faith”.
(Hebrews 13:7)
“A primary task of leadership is to direct attention. To do so, leaders must learn to focus their own attention... a failure to focus inward leaves you rudderless.”
Daniel Goleman,
Co-Director of the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations at Rutgers University.
“Leadership truly grows from the inside out.” CTI – Co-Active.
Transform.
Leadership in the church, in your family, in the community, in the world begins with us – our inside game!! Are we self-aware? If we are not confident where God is leading us, what our gifts are, and what our growing areas, our shadows and our triggers are, I hope we will make it our top priority and stop and focus on ourselves. Are we self-aware of what is going on within us, what our gut-instincts, and our somatic markers (what is going on in our bodies) are? Daniel Goleman shared the following:
“Consider, for example, the implications of an analysis of interviews conducted by a group of British researchers with 118 professional traders and 10 senior managers at four City of London investment banks. The most successful traders (whose annual income averaged £500,000) were neither the ones who relied entirely on analytics nor the ones who just went with their guts. They focused on a full range of emotions, which they used to judge the value of their intuition. When they suffered losses, they acknowledged their anxiety, became more cautions, and took fewer risks. The least successful traders (whose income averaged only £100,000) tended to ignore their anxiety and keep going with their guts. Because they failed to heed a wider array of internal signals, they were misled.
“Zeroing in on sensory impressions of ourselves in the moment is one major element of self-awareness. But another is critical to leadership: combining our experiences across time into a coherent view of our authentic selves.”
Are we self-aware?
Next, are we self-controlled? When distractions divert our attention, when a provocative person irritates us, are we able to stay focused and centered in God’s presence? When a person complains about something we or the leadership team are saying or doing, are we able to step back, not react, and engage – listen to the person and really hear the dream behind the complaint?
Self-awareness and Self-control are vital and significant for spiritual leadership! Who we are is far more important than what we know and what we do!
Cultivating Transformational Leaders,
Steve
