RLL 27--Attitude Shapes All: Perception is Reality, So Change Your Perception

Real Life Leading #27

Attitude Shapes All: Your perception is your reality, so change your perception

Just yesterday afternoon I was sitting in my recliner at home, reading a book on the Templar knights. My wife was in the den with me, doing a couple of sewing projects. At the same time, my daughters were in the room as well, with one playing a game and the other reading a book. Taken together, it should have been a great moment, a scene of domestic tranquility fit for a storybook.

My family's annual Easter picture!

There was only one issue: it was so loud! I was trying to read, and the kids kept talking, my wife kept playing music and singing along with the lyrics, and it was making it so difficult to concentrate on what I was reading. The longer this went on, the more frustrated I became. In fact, twice I had already started to form some sort of snide, biting comment about how much easier it is to read when everyone is silent or not in the room. And that’s when it hit me…

How often does this happen to us? We’re in the middle of something that should be great, whether in scope or in enjoyment, and it’s spoiled because we’re focused on what isn’t to our liking instead of on what is great. I live in the south, and so this happens a lot in the fall: if you’re an Alabama football fan, any season that doesn’t end in a national title is often viewed as a disappointment. If you’re an Auburn fan, even if you beat Alabama in the Iron Bowl, if they win the national title, it’s a bit of a disappointment.

I also see this in my classroom when students who are used to making great grades often struggle on the first test or two (my class is typically one of the more difficult ones they’ve come across in their young academic careers). Kids are upset at making a low ‘A’ or even a ‘B’ instead of the perfect scores they are used to, never mind that I tell them that almost everyone struggles on the first couple tests in my classroom. I also see this sometimes on my soccer team when a player had a great game, helped the team, worked hard, but is still upset because they missed a scoring opportunity.

We as humans have a tendency to get so focused on what didn’t go well that we miss out on enjoying and properly appreciating what did go well. When we do this, it is most often because we have become unconsciously self-centered within that moment. Take my example from yesterday: I was focused on my reading, my own experience in the recliner, my own convenience and desires. Because I was so focused on what I wanted, my own perspective, my own perception, I was missing out on a beautiful family moment.

We have a great time when we do photo adventures!

And that was what hit me yesterday in my recliner: I needed to change my perspective. I needed to focus on the bigger picture: all of my family was in one room enjoying a pleasant weekend afternoon. There was play, there was music, there was singing, there was conversation, and I was the only one who was even remotely bothered by those things. The issue, in fact, was me.

I don’t remember where my wife got the idea for this, but I’m glad she found it: we keep a memory jar in our den, and every year throughout the year we write down different moments, memories, or experiences that we want to recall. Then, sometime on or after New Year’s, we get out the jar and read through them, often chuckling and smiling at the ‘forgotten’ great moments we experienced during the year. Then we file them away and keep them so they can be gotten out again in the future. Yesterday was most certainly a memory jar moment, but I was in danger of missing it simply because I was being so self-focused. I’m very grateful that in that moment, God revealed to me what I was missing out on. He changed my perspective, changed my perception, and thus changed the reality that I was experiencing in that moment.

Today, I want to challenge you to do the same: when you’re frustrated with a situation, try to consciously take a step back and look at the bigger picture. Focus on the blessings of the moment, rather than the temporary (or even long-running) frustrations. Focus on the positives, reorient your perception based on the good things, and then watch your experience of the moment change along with it. As a bonus, you’ll find out that this positive attitude shift can be catching!

Action Step: Today, take a few minutes to consciously re-examine a recent frustration in light of the positives surrounding the situation to see how your perception clouded that moment. Then share what you discovered with someone you love; trust me, they’ll be glad you did!

RLL 26: The Power of Partnerships--Two C's to Working Better Together

RLL 26

The Power of Partnerships: Two C’s of Working Better Together

I’m very excited to be working on the final editing and revisions for my book that’s due out this summer! Since I’m planning to self-publish, I’ve been learning as much about that process as I can, and this week I stumbled across a hidden jewel that applies not just in book writing but in all of leadership. Here it is (paraphrased from Chandler Bolt, best-selling author of six books, including Publish and Book Launch): ‘When writing a book, the purpose of working with an editor is to produce something that is better than you would have been able to create on your own.’

As my wife and I were walking our dogs yesterday, I told her about how I came across that piece of wisdom and how much it struck a chord with me. She agreed, and we discussed it at further length as we continued to walk, and the more we discussed it, the more examples I came across in my world. I want to share with you two key insights today that I gathered from Chandler’s wisdom: collaboration and compromise are necessary to the creation of great things, and that requires the humility to engage in both.

Key #1: The Necessity of COLLABORATION

All of us gathered together to celebrate our daughter's baptism at her grandfather's church.

The first key to understanding why partnerships are so powerful is in that sentence above, because (within reason) working with other people toward a common goal is going to produce better results than you would have achieved alone. We see this in education, where many classrooms today use the word collaboration to describe ways in which students work together on projects, in study groups, or to complete complex assignments. In these situations, students use their particular skill sets in combination with other students, and the results are of a higher quality than any individual student would have produced alone. Collaboration has become a bit of an education buzzword actually, both for students and for teachers, and the goal is always the same: raise the quality of work being done by combining the strengths (and thus also shoring up the weaknesses) of multiple people.

The same is true in family life, when both parents are working together for the good of the family. Now, please, don’t misunderstand me: I’m NOT bashing single parents. I know there are many, many single parents who do more and work harder and longer hours than they should have to, just for the sake of their children. I also know (and am thankful for) the many loving friends and family members who help single parents with logistical things, like picking kids up from school or running errands from time to time. And I believe all of these things further drive home my point: when there are two parents, a mother and father working together, that is when the family functions best. That’s why God designed it that way.

In the interest of full disclosure, let me give a little background into my own world: my parents divorced when I was in middle school, and we lived with my mom afterward. However, because of my parents’ love for us and their willingness to compromise, we also saw my father almost every day and we even still celebrated many holidays together. That is, my mom and dad continued to work together for the sake of their three children even though it was sometimes difficult and unusual. As an adult, I also am divorced and was a single parent for a time, as was my ex-wife. I am now remarried, as is my ex-wife, and the four adults involved all work together for the sake of our children. This is the type of collaboration that is necessary in our current divorce-heavy culture. And this leads to the second key here: having enough humility to compromise.

KEY #2: COMPROMISE requires humility

Butterscotch (on the left) and Bruiser (on the right) don't look too happy about being kept out of the garden!

Any time you work in close contact with another adult, there will have to be compromise. In working on the final revisions of my book, I’ve asked my wife and a few other people to go through and make editing suggestions. One of the people who did, a lady I call my second mom, emailed me with a list of over fifty different edits that needed to be made. And in her email, she made a joke about how I’ll probably never ask for her help again because of the number of mistakes. I was sure to email her back and let her know that I was actually very grateful to her for the suggestions that she made and that I took no offense at how many mistakes she found.

We saw this idea in my house again this weekend when my wife and I were rebuilding a garden in our backyard. We built a garden last weekend, but the quality was not very high, and it became obvious that we needed to rethink our plan. So she went and talked with her parents, and they came up with a much better design. As we built the garden beds, moved the dirt, and built a better fence, multiple small changes were necessary in order to accommodate the reality of our situation: our backyard was not as flat as we’d thought, and we have two large dogs who needed to be kept out of the beds. In the end, thanks to suggestions and hard work from my wife, her mom, and her dad, the final product is somewhat different and also much better than what we had originally done last week and what was intended to be done yesterday. This wouldn’t have been possible if we had stubbornly stuck to the plan drawn up on paper, instead of being willing to make a few changes.

Conclusion: working together (within reason) always produces better results than we would be able to achieve on our own! So, let us have the humility to compromise and collaborate with others so that, together, we can produce things of better quality and lasting value.

Action Step: ask someone for help with a project you’re working on, and be willing to implement at least one of their suggestions even if they’re radically different than what you had originally intended.

Don’t forget to be looking out for my upcoming book on leadership! In the meantime, I hope you’ve enjoyed the first chapter that I emailed out to everyone last week. If you’d like to partner with me in sharing buzz about the book ahead of time, please let me know. Thanks, and God bless!

RLL 25: Leadership IS Action

Real Life Leading #25: Leadership IS Action

Better leadership means more doing.

“We’re thankful to be alive, and it’s been so encouraging to see so many people from all different backgrounds come together to help each other.” These words were from one of my former soccer coaches, regarding how his family’s home was destroyed during the recent tornado that swept through Jacksonville, Alabama. My wife and I went out to see if we could lend a hand, and we spent a few minutes also just chatting with Darren and his wife. While we were there I was struck by the implication of what he said and the powerful truth hidden inside: To lead is to act. It is to do. It is to serve. If you want to start being a better leader right now, this day, then the key is to stop thinking about it and start doing it. Go. Lead. Serve.

I have been as guilty as any person ever when it comes to “paralysis by analysis” in different leadership roles. That is, I study, I read, I plan, I study some more, and at some point I either become afraid of making a wrong decision or simply worried about which decision is the right one. The result of this is that instead of making a decision and sticking with it, I procrastinate and stall instead. The end product of all of this is what you would expect: nothing. Nothing happens, nothing gets done.

As leaders, we cannot afford to do nothing.  Whether in the midst of tragedy like what happened in Jacksonville recently, or in the day-to-day lives in our homes, we cannot afford to do nothing. We must be willing to act and do, even if that means making mistakes. In fact, to DO means that we WILL make mistakes, and we as leaders must be willing to accept that as part of the price of leadership. As Dr. Goh Keng Swee of Singapore said, “The only way to avoid making mistakes is not to do anything. And that, in the final analysis, will be the ultimate mistake.” As leaders, we must be willing to act, even though it means we will inevitably make mistakes.

This seems to be a problem especially true of younger leaders and young people in general, that they are less willing to do and to act. The good news is that there is also hope, because this young generation has more access to knowledge than anyone before. If that knowledge can be turned into action, the world will never be the same. Last summer I was speaking with one of the lifeguards at our local swimming pool while he was on his break. He was reading a book in preparation for an upcoming college class, and the book was called, “Just Do Something” by Kevin DeYoung. The book is about exhorting young people and especially young Christians to seek out God’s will by DOING, not by sitting around and waiting for God to write a message on a wall or speak through a burning bush.

The idea behind that book also applies in terms of leadership: if you want to learn how you can best lead and where you can best serve, the key is to go and start leading and serving, rather than sitting around just researching and thinking all the time. I say this to myself as much as to anyone else: we must go and DO. There will always be a time and place for research and contemplation. But we must also get out of our comfort zone and go and ACT.

The amazing students at JSU's International House! We had a great time that night, and now my wife and I are glad to be able to help them out in the aftermath of the recent tornado.

90 years ago, Herbert Hoover was elected US President during a period of prosperity following the introduction of the Dawes Plan that encouraged US investment in Europe to help rebuild the wartorn countries still suffering the after effects of World War I. Around a year after Hoover began his presidency, the US stock market crashed and the Great Depression began to set in. Hoover, like most political leaders of his time, did not believe it was the government’s role (or economically wise) to take drastic steps to aid in the recovery. After all, the thinking went, America had been through economic depressions before, and we had always recovered.

But this was worse, and the world was changing, and as a result, in the next election President Franklin Roosevelt was elected in a landslide due to his promise to offer Americans a “New Deal” economically. The key: government involvement in economics and social aid. As a historian, I can tell you that many of the programs FDR’s New Deal came up with were unsound, and many of them were struck down by the Supreme Court. Much of FDR’s policies, in fact, were things that are of debatable merit. Having said that, he is also the only person in history to be elected president four straight times (and he is the reason why a Constitutional amendment was passed making that same feat impossible today), and I believe a major reason for Americans’ continued faith in him is because he acted when others were afraid to.

I’m actually not a huge FDR apologist, but I do believe that his life is instructive in terms of showing the power of action versus inaction, and thus worthy of studying on many levels. I say something similar to my Bible classes every semester: if what we study and read and memorize and discuss and write essays about doesn’t change who you are, how you think, and what you DO, then we have wasted our time. We must be willing to act, and we should start today.

What have you been putting off that needs to get done? What leadership role have you been considering for longer than you should have? How can you serve those around you? None of us has to go very far to see situations in our world that need correcting, whether it’s huge issues we see on the national news or simply trash on the side of a road near our homes. The key to solving both issues is the same: ACT. I’m very proud of my younger daughter and my wife who spent time last summer picking up trash in our neighborhood, cleaning up an area that is known as a “dump spot” for random bits of trash. Did it change the climate or rescue thousands of animals? No. But it made a difference in our little pocket of the world, and everything you do has the same potential.

A final thought: as we were driving home from Jacksonville yesterday, my wife said, “This is like our own little ‘Starfish story.’” I asked her to explain, and she said, “Well, we weren’t able to help every single person whose homes and lives were damaged by the tornadoes. But we were able to make a difference in the lives of a few people.” [If you’re not familiar with the ‘Starfish story’ that she referenced you can check it out here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Star_Thrower.]

The point is: even if we can’t change the whole world, we can make a difference where we are. Get started today, and you’ll be amazed at what you can accomplish!

Action plan: pick something that you’ve been putting off, and GO and ACT and SERVE! Then be sure to email me to let me know how it went!