At Church, Sunday we met the pastor who had just returned from a seven week sabbatical. You see he had felt “burned out” from years of servant leadership. It’s both a love a calling and a heavy responsibility.
He said something that really caught my attention. He said:
“What do you do when you no longer like what you love?”
He had many words of wisdom that apply to all of us in our daily work whatever we do.
We all need to reawaken and rekindle the spirit that brought us to our calling.
I thought wow! That’s incredibly touching and I bet many of us feel like that from time to time.
He said, all too often people don’t know what I do but are quick to tell me what I have done wrong! But then I know I need to understand why. Sound familiar?
Sometimes we need to step away from being the Pastor or Business Leader and become one of the followers and parishioners’ and go among them to hear their voices.
We need to walk in their shoes and really listen and feel what they feel. We need to understand that not everything is what we believe or want it to be.
Different lenses see different pictures and we need to understand and weave them into our tapestry in the work we do.
He said “I can’t remember a time when I got a call in the middle of the night from someone saying they had had a great day? It was often something more pressing.”
We all need to give appreciation.
There are often times in the work we do in each of our businesses that means being a leader is all consuming. Who listens in your world, and who cares?
Everyone needs a “trusted someone” to speak to. We also need to remember that a business is a community and is more than a building.
The pastor said that he “needed time to contemplate the sacred relationship he had with his Church”.
He did not question his faith, what he needed to understand was how he could be the best pastor he could ever be and to use his talents in the best way he could:
To serve those who had entrusted their faith in him.
Does your leader reflect on his/her impact and focus on you?
The work of a Pastor is 24-7 there is little time for self and who does a Pastor go to, here on earth, when that lonely moment comes for self reflection and self doubt?
We all get to a point that we get weary and down and need the courage to see it and then do something to re-energize:
So that once again we like the work we love.
He posed the question: “How do you prepare good people to become the best versions of themselves?”
Leadership is not about self. It’s about creating leaders out of every single follower.
He posed the observation:
That the discontented people in this world are those who are not happy with what they have. Those that are really happy are those who have given of themselves for others.
The power to serve comes from within the faith that you have.
The pastor had taken ownership of who he is and recognized the need to do something!
He recognized that to take care of others he needed to be whole himself.
During his time of contemplation he visited seven different churches on seven different Sundays. He had attended as a parishioner and he had found that being a follower teaches us many lessons, like:
We all need to walk among our followers, as often as we can and really listen and people are not very different wherever you go.
A church like our own business is not a building. It’s the people within that are the church and the congregation and the employees and are the ones we serve.
So our Pastor visited other churches and found that they all have issues, the solutions are within each one of us. Other churches are not better they are simply different.
The grass is only greener when you nurture it to be so. That’s what Leadership is all about.
Picture courtesy Prerna231 Group
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