More of what I learned at the Willow Creek Association Global Leadership Summit.

My notes from Jeff Manion’s talk – The Land Between

You spend 4 years of college getting to say what you are studying and what you plan on becoming.

Then graduation comes and you reach the land between because you don’t land a job that has anything to do with what you have been doing for the last 4 years.

Many of us find ourselves in the land beetween. It is discouragement or depression. Prayer isn’t working and you hope it ends soon.

You are in the Sinai Desert.

Exodus 3 –  I will take them out of Egypt into the land of promise.  We are going from HERE to THERE.

HERE – They were a slave people in a fertile land.

THERE – The promised land flowed with milk in honey. Fertile

They are in the Land between in the desert.

God provided food substance called manna for them to eat while they were in the desert.

Numbers 11:4 -6 Read with a whiny voice.

The land between is fertile soil for complaints.

They weren’t complaining about their condition. They were complaining against God.

How is God gonna meet his servant Moses?

Numbers 11:11-14 Moses’ prayer – I can’t carry this anymore. It is too heavy for me.

The land between is fertile ground for meltdown. Moses says, “ Just kill me now.”

Everybody who serves in a leadership position in any capacity understands the emotion of not being able to carry it anymore. When you reach the end of your ability to handle.

V16-17 God makes arrangements so that Moses doesn’t have to carry the burden by himself.

The land between is fertile ground for God’s provision.

Sometimes God provides employment or better employment. Or sometimes contentment to do without other things. Pulling you out of depression or daily strength to endure the depression. God loves to provide.

Elijah also had a meltdown. He asks to die and lays down and falls asleep. An angel wakes him and he sees food. He is expecting to get a lecture and God makes him lunch.

V18-20 God gives them meat…..so much meat that you will be sick of it. Be careful what you ask for.

11:23a Is the Lord’s arm too short? It is fertile ground for God’s discipline.

Discipline is pain for rescue.

WE are naive to think that we are immune to God’s corrective hand.

What do we do with this.

The land between is fertile ground for transformational growth.

Time does not heal all things.

When you travel through the land between, your heart is in danger

The wilderness is best place for transformational growth, but also the best place where faith goes to die.

Complaint resists eviction from your heart.

Invite trust into your heart to keep complaint out. No room for complaint. Trust evicts complaint.

The space in your life you most resent is the place where God wants to plant and produce.

My Thoughts

I am most definitely in the land between right now in many aspects of my life.  The big obvious is my career.  Being unemployed, I am between jobs and maybe even careers.  I know what THERE looks like and what I want that to be.  But it is a difficult time trying to get there.  I live with preschoolers.  I am looking forward to a time when they are more mature so that I can do more things with them that I like to do.  I am trying to lose weight and lately I have been losing that battle.  If I can approach even these parts of my life with the perspective of what Jeff Manion showed me, it will help me to respond much better to my individual situations.

Jim Collins is the author of ‘Good to Great’, a book that I desperately want to read.

Here are some notes that I took from his session called, ‘Never, Ever, Give Up’.

God is the enemy of Great.
Greatness is not a matter of circumstance, but of conscious choice and discipline.
No company, organization, or person is immune to falling.  The mighty fall through a series of stages that are largely self-inflicted.
You can be sick on the inside, but still look strong on the outside.

Stage 1 – Outrageous Arrogance
Bad decisions taken with good intentions are still bad decisions.
Stage 2 – Undisciplined Pursuit of More.
If you allow growth to edxceed your ability to have fantastic people in all of the important seats, you will fall.
Get the right people on the bus and then figure out where to go.
Stage 3 – Denial of risk and peril.
You must never ever confuse faith and facts.
Stage 4 – Grasping for Salvation.
Greatness is never a simple event or a silver bullet.  It is a cumulative process.
Stage 5 – Capitulation
Its over.  No turning back.

18 companies that were strong in 1989 and are still strong today.  Why?
They have a reason to endure.
They will not compromise their core values.
Purpose must be rooted in core values.

The signature of mediocrity is chronic inconsistency.
There must be a balance of preserving the core values and stimulating progress.
Hold the core values constant and make way for change.

To Do List

• Do your diagnostics at jimcollins.com
• Count your blessings literally in a spreadsheet.
• What is your questions to statements ratio and can you double it in the next year?
• How many key seats do you have on your bus?
• Do your leadership team diagnostics.
• With that team – in your next meeting create an inventory of the brutal facts.
• Make a stop doing list.
• Define results and show clicks on the flywheel milestones.
• Double your reach to young people by changing practices and keeping core goals.
• Take time to set Big Hairy Audacious Goals.

To be truly useful, you can never, ever give up.

This session may have stuck with me more than any other from the Summit.  That is hard to judge though because there was so much good stuff.  As I apply these principles to how I lead my family, I realize that because it is my family, I already have a great reason to endure.  I don’t see failure as an option because your family will always be your family.  The flywheel principle he discussed is what has really been sticking in my brain.  I should be more about making small steps of progress towards our family goals instead of trying to get there all in one shot.  The flywheel gets pushed a little bit at a time.  If you are consistently making progress, the flywheel continues to spin.  If you are inconsistent then the wheel stops periodically and you lose momentum.  I so often fail at being consistent.  This is something that I need to do better at.  It will help me to celebrate the small steps and focus on taking little bites.

This is part 1 of a series of blog posts that I plan on doing on what I learned at the Global Leadership Summit last week.  I will be sharing the highlights from my notes and some personal thoughts on what I took away from the two day conference.

Bill Hybels opened on Day 1.  Here are some key points from my notes.

1. Leaders move people from here to there.  Your job as a leader is to convince people that you cannot and will not stay here.
2. It takes Fantastic people.  It is your job to develop a team of fantastic people.  Character, Competence, Chemistry, and Culture.
3. Celebrate the Mile Markers.  You must inspire people to stay on the journey because when you are between here and there, the vision is most vulnerable.
4. Whispers from God.  You don’t ever get from here to there in a straight line or without hearing from God.

I went to this leadership conference because I find myself leading in many aspects of my life.  I lead my family, I lead small groups at church, and I try to lead anyone I can to Jesus.  Because I have found myself without employment, I am not leading a team of people professionally right now.  So as I have reflected on what I have learned at this conference, I am mostly applying it to how I lead my family.  This may be a little different than most people who attended this conference, but there are some major take aways here if you are involved in leading any type of community.

I find that I often want to change situations that my family is in.  One of our goals right now is to get debt free.  It took some time for me to convince my wife of the steps that were necessary to get free from debt.  We have had a lot of success in paying things down for the last couple of years and we find ourselves in the middle of the journey facing obstacles such as my unemployment.  This is the tough part of the journey and we need to keep celebrating the small victories to keep us on the path.

My family is a team although I only got to pick 1 member of that team.  I have 2 children who I have the opportunity to build up and develop into fantastic people.  I also need to continue to encourage and help to further develop my wife as a part of our team.  My kids are my primary disciples and I need to do my best to show them who Jesus is and encourage them to follow Him as I have chosen to.  I need to keep celebrating with them as we encounter mile markers along the way.  Time with them is very important.  More important than spending time away from them to make a lot of money.

I have learned that I need to act on the promptings that I receive from God.  Often I think that I should do something and I test it for so long that I miss the opportunity.  John 10:27 says, “My sheep hear my voice and they heed it.”  So I am learning to take more risks and it has been fun so far.

I think that so often people forget that they are leaders in their household.  I want to be a better leader to my wife and my children than I am anywhere else.  Their lives and direction are more precious to me than anything else.  So I will primarily be applying these types of principles to how I lead at home.  It is harder I think because you can’t really hide from your family unless you are hiding at work and are never at home.  In that case you are already failing miserably.