Leadership

This past weekend at Mountainview was a "tithing challenge" weekend.  Depending on their situation, we challenged people to begin giving, to give ten percent, or to give more than ten percent. When it was time for communion, Mark Scott made this comment: "What if Jesus had only given ten percent?"  In other words, what if he had only healed ten percent of the people who came to him for help?  What if he had only taught one-tenth of what we have in the Gospels?  What if he had only shed ten percent of his blood? Thankfully, Jesus gave one hundred percent.  He gave it all.  He held back nothing. Which brings me to the number one. You have one life.  What will you do with it? You have one today.  How will you spend it? You have one opportunity to leave a legacy.  What will it be? In a casual round…

I love how the Internet has taken the six degrees of separation and shrunk them to one or two clicks.  This morning I was ready my daily intake of Michael Hyatt's blog and it featured a guest post by Jeremy Statton.  One more click and I'm at a blog I've never heard of but immediately enjoy. One post, in particular, caught my attention: Is Your Story Weird Enough?  Here's just a small piece: Normal is Boring.  Fitting in makes sense, if you want to tell a boring story. When you go to the movie theater, you aren’t hoping to watch something completely normal happen. When you open a book, you want anything but the usual day to day events to take place. The world needs you to live an incredibly weird story. We need for you to contribute through your own unique personality and set of gifts. We need you to…

Tim Milburn has a nice book on leadership entitled, "Leadership Starts with You."  In it he suggests that the fundamental test of leadership is self-leadership: The real secret to developing strong, lasting leadership starts with YOU learning how to lead YOU. Because the people whom you’ll eventually lead are wondering: If I can’t trust you to lead YOU, how can I trust you to lead ME? One of the insights he shares in the book is what he calls your growth P.L.A.N.  Here's how it works ... Purpose -- What do you need to know and why? Learning -- Where do you want to learn it from?  Why? Assessment -- How will you know you learned it? Next Action -- What will you do with what you learned? His premise is simple: personal growth just doesn't happen on its own.  To read more about P.L.A.N., click here.

This is from the Wall Street Journal Blog.  It's about how the advertising industry understands habit formation.  Implications for your ministry or job? ********* "Ninety-nine hundredths of our activity is purely automatic," the psychologist and philosopher William James famously wrote. "All of our life is nothing but a mass of habits." James was pointing out that, though we give habits little thought, they define our lives: how much we eat, save or spend, how often we trek to the gym and what we say to our kids each night. But these compulsions aren't inscribed in our genes or hard-wired into the brain at birth. Scientists are discovering that habits are simply an extreme form of learning, a behavior that's so familiar we no longer need to think about it. The malleability of habits isn't news to Madison Avenue: Effective commercials show how people can be quickly trained to do something…