Whether you say you can or you can’t, your’re right.

You get the idea here: your attitude determines your action.

But the deeper thought for me is, how do you help these people start believing that they can?

We asked some questions last week, along the lines of “How do I lead myself well? How do I not lead myself well?”, and I of course came prepared already with my answers which was a very good excercise and made me think that I’d like to get to know you all better by asking a tough question today: what is your weakness?

My Weakness

I’m a strong person with a strong sense of direction and structure and the ability to obsessively become expert in an area very quickly. The weakness, however, is that I am not consistent. I can lead others well, but I tend to go through stages where I’m great, and stages where I’m not, and this is detrimental not only to myself, but to the teams I lead across the areas of my life.

I’m strategising ways to minimise this – accountability with mentors and friends, finding simpler ways to organise myself, having more thinking time and not being as busy, etc.

But perhaps the biggest way I’m minimizing it is through the conversations I’m having with all of you. The wisdom I gain from here is exceptionally insightful. I mean comments like this one from Robin Dickinson are like years of mentoring in one boast.

Your Leading Thoughts

• What is your weakness?
• How can we help you minimize it?

Photo courtesy of bitzcelt

In this, John quotes his favourite leadership parable – “if someone believes they are a leader but no one is following them, then they are simply taking a walk.”

I know that many people will want to disagree with this. It’s uncomfortable to boil the essence of leadership down to influence because it says that if we aren’t good leaders then we aren’t influential – but then that is essentially the point – if I lead people, it’s because I influence them. This isn’t arrogance, it is understanding that because of who I am, or the position I hold, or what I’ve done, I have earned and wield influence.

For many years I had people’s respect, but I didn’t necessarily influence them. I had to take a long hard look at myself and realise that whilst people did look up to me, they didn’t look to me for leadership. I think this is probably a common trait – we know that people respect us, but leading them is a different thing.

Your Leading Thoughts

• How have you come to find this is true in your life? What are some of your wins and failures to help us learn lessons from your life?
• If you disagree – then why? What are your experiences (not just logic) that say different?

I love this guy already. I want to get him to our church and to Like Minds without a shadow of a doubt.

What resonates with me the most? “I may not be able to hold my wife’s hand, but I can hold her heart.”

Your Leading Thoughts

• What resonates with you most about this video.

I think one of the greatest gifts you can give someone is exposure to new things. Exposure opens the mind, giving it new possibilities and fresh perspective on it’s current place in the world.

My favourite thing to do is to take kids who have closed mindsets and show them around places they’ve never been before, like Like Minds Conference. It makes them realise what is possible.

Your Leading Thoughts

• How do you pursue exposure? If you’re a parent, how do you foster exposure without fostering a sense of entitlement to new experiences in your child?
• With our travelling, googling society, what does exposure really mean anymore?

Photo by Ashley Rose

If you can’t see the above video, click here, or watch it directly on YouTube.

I caught this video earlier this year and all I can say is that it has changed how I run projects and decide what to do. It’s by Simon Sinek on the subject of “Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Action”, after his book on the same thing (affiliate link.)

Simon basically says that great leaders don’t start with WHAT they start with WHY. I can identify with this on so many levels, the most pertinent being the work I do at The River Church in Exeter.

At our church, there are 101 things that we could do – ‘the whats’ – and most times, we’ve done things in the past because others were doing them and they seemed like good ideas. It’s not to say that we just did whatever came into our mind, but when you are running a church you are always looking for new ways to reach and help people, often on a tight budget, and when you see another church have success with a certain activity, you naturally want to emulate it. It’s not a surprise that many of things over the years have failed, probably the most memorable being when we went on TV for a year, which exhausted us and brought little gain in return.

Also, both in church and in my other ventures, there’s always the times when you’ve having a leadership discussion and you focus the whole meeting on a small part of ‘the whats’ while totally ignoring ‘the whys’. I guess the reason is that it’s easier to talk about a ‘what’ because it’s easier to change and more immediate to change.

What this video has helped me do is focus on ‘the whys’ first, and if there isn’t a satisfactory ‘why’, then to by no means look at ‘the whats’. Have you ever worked on a project without really knowing why? Have you found a task keeps changing because you don’t know the why? Have you found you do things without real purpose and direction? This video will help you as much as it’s helped me!

Your Leading Thoughts

1. Be honest – where are you on this scale at the moment? What are your struggles and victories?
2. What are you thoughts on the power of WHY? Are there times when you have harnessed it?
3. If you have already seen this, how has it changed you?

It seems everywhere I go, people are describing the same thing – that they are just going from work to home to the bar / pub / coffee shop, and that’s it.

And I’ll go out a limb here – it seems these people are squandering their life and living at a bass level with little fulfillment or working out of the talents and giftings that they have for our common good as people.

The reason why this gets me down? Because I believe no one should live a life that isn’t giving to others. And I believe that no one should live a life where they aren’t actually fulfilling their potential. When I see people like person I met the other night, I just can’t help but feel they are living like a chicken when they were meant to soar like an eagle.

I want to make clear that I’m not saying this is about wealth. Some of the poorest people I know are the most giving, but then also so are some of the richest I know. This isn’t about how financially rich you are, but how purposefully rich you are.

Nor am I saying that this is exclusive to our western mindset. People leaving in areas of extreme depravity still practice this idea of purpose and the common good – in fact, it seems our over-materialistic western world is the place that struggles with it.

The question I’m asking myself at the moment everyday at the moment, to test myself? What have I done that matters?

Your Leading Thoughts

• Do you live for others? I think we should, so if you don’t, tell me why.
• Why is there an epidemic of chicken living?
• What are you doing that matters?

Innovation means breaking things. Nothing that you currently do can be holy. If it isn’t moving forward and moving the bottom line, you’ve got to break it.

Right now we’re working on Like Minds Conference, Autumn 2010. We’re breaking a lot of stuff. We’ve taken everyone of our assumptions about what traditionally makes a great event, and we’ve broken a lot of stuff.

One instance is panels. I’ve never been happy with how they work, and I’m so thankful for Dave Lutz who shared this post with me, the comments of which encouraged me to go ahead and break what I didn’t think worked in the first place.

Lesson? We need that nod from our peers to say – “yeah, break it.”

Breaking things means we find out what works. Consider good ideas that aren’t just profitable ideas. I remember telling one person this ‘incredible idea’ I had, but was so glad that he could help break it and instead move me onto an idea that was breaking and making new things.

I guess I’ve found that the best ideas of mine are those that break the norms.

Your Leading Thoughts

1. What isn’t moving the bottom line? Why haven’t you broken it?
2. What norms are you currently breaking?

Photo courtesy of lasszio

• You can buy a house, but you make a home
• You can buy a car, but you learn to drive
• You can pay for a good wedding, but that doesn’t make you a good husband
• You can buy a ball, but it doesn’t make you a player

Even going to the gym and paying for a personal trainer doesn’t make you fit – you have to do the work and build up your body.

Here’s what I’m seeing a lot of: people buying and selling, but few building.

I think this is what separates just any old event from a community driven event, or separates any old product from a lifestyle product.

What I’m seeing even fewer of is people who don’t just buy an education and theory, but build learning and reality.

Your Leading Thoughts

1. Take a moment and tell us – what are you building?
2. What is the market for building?