For years I’ve kept a file I simply call “encouragement”.

Back in the day it used to be an old school filing cabinet file folder.  Now it’s a a gmail folder.  One day it will be something else.  It matters far less how it’s done than it does that I do it.

The rule is simple. Every time someone sends me something that encourages me (an email, a blog comment, a DM, a card, a note), I put it in that file.   Often it’s a thank you for something I said or did, a short message of encouragement, and sometimes it’s a life-change story (love those!).

Here’s why I keep it (hang on, my reasoning is complicated): I get discouraged.

That’s it.  I just get discouraged.

The one email of complaint out of 99 ordinary emails gets to me.  The one “that message didn’t really connect with me” deflates me faster than a bullet through a balloon.  The “he’s such a great speaker…oh, and we appreciate you too” gets to me.  So does the “why do you….[fill in the blank]?” and the “I can’t believe you….“.  Sometimes it doesn’t even take a comment from anyone.  I can discourage myself in no time flat.

Now just to put this in perspective, I get at least a 10:1 positive stream coming my way.  Actually it’s probably something more like 100:1 or even 1000:1.  I know my skin should be thicker.  I know I shouldn’t be so sensitive. And I’m getting better at it, but that stuff still gets me.

As I’m sure, it does you.

I keep the file because I want it to be there fore me on the days I get discouraged and even think about throwing in the towel.

I only end up going into the encouragement file once or twice a year at the most.  Sometimes I just look at it and realize there are 20 new notes from the last month, and that alone is enough.

I just need to be reminded that God has a reason for me doing this, and that the good outweighs the bad. I am convinced that one of the leading factors in the lackluster state of the church and in many areas of life is that people quit long before they break through because the discouragement got to them.

So I keep an encouragement file.

What do you do to get you through your bad days?

I did something this morning I haven’t done before in my life:  I went on a five km winter run.  I’ve run before, but never outside in winter with the temperature below zero.

It’s not that I couldn’t do it before, it’s just that I didn’t.

And that reveals a tension: the tension between can’t and don’t.  There are actually very few things you can’t do.  It’s mostly just that you don’t do them.

Be honest: how many things in your life are there (really) that you can’t do?  Exactly.  Very few.  It’s not that you can’t.  It’s just that you don’t.

And if you admit that, you might begin to do far more.

Once you do that, your dreams might be far more attainable than you think.

Earlier this week we looked at five signs that show you lack integrity. It’s one thing to know you might lack it in certain areas, but the question is how do you build integrity? How do you develop it?

Integrity is about more than just doing the right thing, It’s about buidling the kind of character that can survive a crisis intact. In the same way a building that has integrity can survive a storm, a life that has integrity can do the same.

So how do you build integrity?

1. Be ruthlessly honest with yourself. Of all the lies we tell, the ones we tell ourselves are the most deadly. Question your motives. Stop justifying what you know to be wrong. Stop excusing yourself.

2. Seek wise counsel. We all have blind spots. It’s one thing to be honest with yourself, but sometimes you and I are just blind to faults others can see. Find three or four people who believe in you and ask them for feedback on your life.

3. Decide to honour God, not please people. Doing the right thing is almost never the easy thing, and sometimes it’s not the popular thing. Honouring God is not the same as believing you are always right and everyone else is wrong – it simply means you are going to live with a long view of what to do, informed by scripture. It means enduring short term pain for longer term gain. To avoid becoming arrogant or deluded, make sure you test what obedience looks like for you not only against scripture and prayer, but also with your circle of wise counsel (see above). They will see things you can’t see.

4. Be appropriately transparent. We’d all like to be something we’re not. Admit your shortcomings. You don’t have to tell everyone what you’re struggling with, but you need to tell someone. Part of being honest with yourself is being honest with others. And as much as you might be afraid that everyone will think less of you, living transparently and not pretending to be someone you aren’t actually makes people think more of you. It’s counter-intuitive. It’s also transformative.

5. Put yourself first when it comes to personal growth. I know that sounds selfish, even unbibilical, but I’m not sure it is. Jesus prepared for thirty years before ministering for three. And during those three years he often disappeared to pray. You can only give what you’ve got. And he spent whole seasons of his life receiving from God what he needed to give to the world. Cancel some appointments. Tell the kids to wait. You need to build a solid spiritual, emotional and relational foundation for your life. Pray. Open the Bible (for you – not for anyone else pastors). Go for a run. Eat something healthy. Go for dinner with a friend who gives you life. If your cup is empty, how are you going to fill anyone else’s?

These are five practices I’ve found helpful in my life. What have you discovered helps you build integrity?

Integrity is something we all desire, but how do you know if you have it?  And what exactly is it anyway?

Sometimes it’s easiest to think about something out of its immediate context.  When something is well built, we say it has structural integrity.  So in an earthquake, the building with excellent structural integrity survives.  When something physically collapses, we say it didn’t have the integrity to withstand the impact.

All of this springs from the original latin root of integrity, which means ‘intact’.  Can you withstand the crisis intact?

Many  people aren’t withstanding crises well these days. The storm buffets and they collapse along with their family or their organization.

The tension is that no one sees the problem until the storm hits. ‘Normal’ doesn’t really test your integrity.   Crises do.  But when a crisis comes, it’s often too late to fix what’s wrong.  The damage is happening in real time.

While there are many things that compromise our integrity, here are five signs that show your integrity is in question:

1.  It’s all about you. You can say it’s about God.  You can say it’s about others.  But only you and God know your heart.  Selfish people harm their organizations, families and friends.  If it’s all about you, you won’t go the distance.  Or you will,  but you’ll hurt a lot of people in the process and you’ll never know what could have happened if you made it about God and others.

2. Your self esteem rises and falls with the opinion of others. A secure leader can see the right way and lead people there through tough conditions.  An insecure leader will bend with every change in public opinion. Which means you’re not actually leading anyone, not even yourself.

3. You’re hiding things. You shouldn’t be telling everyone everything (that’s not healthy) - but someone needs to know everything.  If you’re keeping secrets, you’re heading for a fall.  Between my wife, elders, close friends and counselor, I have an inner circle that knows everything about me.  (By the way, if you’re afraid to give your password on your computer or phone to anyone in that circle, you’re hiding things.)

4.  You fail to do what you said you were going to do. This isn’t just about keeping promises; it’s about keeping your word in everything.  Better to say nothing and surprise someone by delivering than blurt out an intention you can’t fulfil.   Ultimately, people lose confidence in you when you fail to deliver.  It’s a trust issue.   A fairly easy way to address this is to say less and deliver more.  A great follow up system also helps (sometimes a lack of integrity isn’t even a moral issue – just an awareness and organization issue).

5.  You make too many compromises. Leadership is not about getting everyone to like you or about finding the easiest path.  It’s about discerning the best way forward.  It’s about getting people to go where they wouldn’t go if it wasn’t for leadership.  If you make too many decisional compromises or even a handful of personal compromises, your effectiveness will be–you guessed it– compromised.

Don’t just think of these things as character flaws, think of what’s at stake: when the crises hit (and they will), you won’t be left standing.  Simple as that.  When you attend to these things, you integrity grows, and so does your ability to live and lead through difficult times.

What insights have you gained on integrity?  What signs would you add to this list?

There are two potential teachers in your life: pain and wisdom.

Like many people, pain has been an incredibly instructive teacher for me.  In the same way that twisting your ankle while running on a cheap pair of shoes reminds you to buy better shoes next time, pain is immediate, memorable and disruptive.  Which makes it a teacher of sorts.

Pain makes us want to take back words we just spoke, redo projects we just blew, unhurt a friends, or wish we’d never tried that fiery hot sauce. Pain can incite change.

This shouldn’t be surprising, because for the most part, people change when the pain associated with the status quo is greater than the pain associated with change.

But there’s another teacher, in fact, a much better teacher than pain: wisdom.  Wisdom shows up earlier.  It seeks to teach before you take action, before there’s a pressing need or the searing pain of regret. Which is why wisdom is so much more difficult to obey than pain.

Pain is selfish, it demands you stop what you’re doing and pay attention.

Wisdom whispers.

Wisdom takes forethought, reflection, prayer and insight.  It often requires counsel – input before an event.

If you had a choice of teacher, I think we’d all pick wisdom.  Which begs the deeper question: why don’t we?

I was at Elephant Room this week, a forum hosted by Harvest Bible Chapel for pastors and church leaders.

The best part for me was the honesty, candour and wisdom shared by the panel:  James MacDonald, Mark Driscoll, Steven Furtick, Jack Graham, T.D. Jakes,  Wayne Cordeiro and Crawford Lorritz.

Here are a few insights that really impacted me (in no particular order):

“It’s easier to be a critic than to be a pastor.”  Mark Driscoll

“The devil can’t steal my ministry.  He has no authority.  So he’ll just steal the joy of my ministry.”  Wayne Cordeiro

“Write the cheque.  Go back to sleep.”  James MacDonald on the limits of cheque-book evangelism.

“None of our books will be on sale in heaven.”  T.D. Jakes, on the limits of human theology.

“You can’t integrate the church until you integrate your life.”  T.D. Jakes on racial integration.

“You are ready for restoration in ministry when you are known more for your repentance than for your sin.” Spurgeon (via T.D. Jakes)

“You can teach what you know but you reproduce what you are.”  Wayne Cordeiro

“We use anger as a substitute for the anointing of God.” T.D. Jakes on how some preachers over-rely on anger in preaching.

“Just because someone doesn’t want you in their circle anymore doesn’t mean that they can’t be in yours.”  James Macdonald quoting Craig Groeschel

“There is a difference between leadership development and developing leaders.” (missed the source)

And finally, this raw confession:

“I always knew God loved me, but I thought it was because he had to. Now I realize he wants to.”  Steven Furtick

Loved the Elephant Room.

What other insights have you gleaned lately, at the ER or elsewhere that have helped you?

Had a great conversation last week with some leaders who lobbed a fresh thought my way.  We were talking about preachers, and being one, that always gets my interest up.

As we talked about effective communication,  one of the people said that the best ways to evaluate a preacher is to watch with the sound turned off.  Most preachers, he observed, look angry.

That was a huge insight.

How I say something is as important as what I say.  I had already noticed that most of us need to smile more; most of us look moderately unhappy much of the time.  But this observation really drove it home.

Now there are moments where we can rightfully be angry.  But all the time?  Every Sunday? Every day?  No. No wonder people are afraid of God.

Maybe this goes beyond preaching into life.  What if you simply decided to tell your face to match your mood every time you:

Walk into a meeting

Meet a friend

Arrive home at night

Greet your children

Picked up the phone

Start skyping

Pump gas

I don’t want my default to be a scowl.  In part because I don’t like people who are like that.  But also because I know a God who decided to make his final word “love”.

So…every time you move into a new situation today (if you don’t have something other than ‘the usual stuff” to communicate) try smiling.

It might communicate more than you think.

I finished the Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson a few months ago.  Not only is it one of the few books I actually wished was thousands of pages longer than it actually was (I LOVED it), it offered fascinating insight into Job’s character and management style.

Job’s style was everything they tell you in business school and leadership courses not to be. Impulsive, volatile, eccentric, extreme and driven are just a few of the words that would seem to describe Job’s style. He was, by most accounts, almost impossible to work with. He was deeply immature at times, even abusive.

In so many ways, he’s like a study in how not to manage and lead than anything.

Except that it worked. Except that he was also brilliant and exceptionally successful.

Had I worked with Jobs, my advice would likely have been for him to take the edges off his personality. Many tried that and failed.

But here’s the key question:  were his eccentricities a good thing in the end?  Was it in fact the edges of his personality that made Jobs the leader that he was and made Apple the company it became?

Please don’t get me wrong…I don’t think reading an account of Steve Job’s life is any justification to show up Monday morning to berate your staff and or create a 90 hour a week work culture (both of which were characteristic of Apple). Nor is it a licence to unleash the lesser elements of your character on the people closest to you.

Jobs was anything but a balanced leader. He was extreme in his personality.  And as I reflect on the great leaders I know and admire, I respect, I realize that only a few of them are actually what we call ‘balanced’ people.  Their personalities have edges. Edges that impact the people around them. They can be impulsive. They can work too much (or selectively). They stand out because they are different – often quite different – than most other people. It’s what makes them who they are.

Which leads me to a bigger question: Does greatness ever really involve balance?

Few great leaders we study were balanced.  From Lincoln, to John A. MacDonald, to Churchill to Kennedy to Edison to Billy Graham, few leaders lead a very balanced life.  Neither did Jesus. He was so extreme in his ethic and life that he alienated many who tried to follow him. Paul was hardly everybody’s best friend in the early church. Moses didn’t exactly clock out at four every day and settle down to watch TV with his family every Tuesday. I can’t think of a single biblical character who lives a balanced life.  In fact, most of them are strange enough that we might keep our distance.

So why think about this at all? Here’s why: just about everyone around you is going to try to take the edges off of your personality. And for sure, you should stop sinning.   You should never use a life story like Steve Jobs’ to justify outrageous behaviour.  You should listen to counsel and even cherish rebukes. But maybe you shouldn’t let it kill who you are.  Do you always have to ‘work on your weaknesses’ like every management review suggests you need to?

If you polished all the strange edges off your personality, do you kill what God created?  Maybe the things that drive you and some of the very people around you nuts are the things that God will use to help accomplish his purposes.

What do you think? Does greatness arise from balance? Or sometimes does it also legitimately arise from the edges of our personality that sometimes we wish weren’t there?

The problem with most of us is not that we don’t dream big enough, it’s that our dreams and goals get lost in the shuffle each working day.

The biggest casualty of the daily grind, surprisingly, is not your inboxes (they eventually get emptied), your meeting schedule (you make your meetings) or the urgent things that have to get done.

The casualty is the important things.  The things that will drive your life and organization forward.  The thing that will fuel your mission, move you to another level and the thing that will inevitably give you the deepest satisfaction.

The problem is you never get to those things.

Last year, I tried something different.  I decided to spend a chunk of my time and energy every month working on one big thing.  Something so big it was literally a goal that would take a full year to implement.  It became the one big thing I was working on.

Last year it was a financial goal: to help hundreds of  families find financial margin in their lives, to help them live on mission financially and create a stronger future for us together as a church.  I did a few things to help me accomplish this goal. A few of the things I did include:

• setting time aside every week to work on this one big thing.
• engaging our whole team on this one big thing.
• enlisting  Casey Graham and Giving Rocket to help us (I’m not being paid to give this endorsement, but seriously, ministry leaders you should join Giving Rocket).
• deciding to make a full year commitment to the project, and an ongoing commitment to make it part of our DNA.
• being willing to measure results annually, not just weekly or monthly.

The results surprised even me.  We surpassed every target we set.  The only difference this year is this single subject had far more of my attention and the attention of our team.  Sure, we prayed and God was very gracious.  But God wasn’t any less gracious on the years we failed to meet our hopes and dreams.  He’s always been in favour of generosity.

It made me realize the difference the focus on the leader can have.  And with so many things competing for it, it’s our responsibility to choose our focus carefully and strategically.

This year, my focus is going to be on leadership development.  12 months of committed focus to helping raise up more leaders.  This has always been important.  It just hasn’t had my full attention.  But this year it will.

So what about you?  What’s your one big thing you need to get done but never find time for?  Here are some questions to help you discover it

• What would on things would most benefit the mission you’re trying to accomplish?
• What do you hope to accomplish more than anything else over the next twelve months?
• What would make the organization you help lead significantly better twelve months from now if you were to accomplish it?

We tend to overestimate what we can accomplish by focusing on something for a week, and underestimate what can be accomplished if we focus on something for a year.   Take it a step further:  after having focused on ten things over a decade, can you imagine how different your world could be?

What have you learned about setting one big goal?  How has it helped channel your energy and attention?

Leadership requires a certain amount of courage.  Actually a ton of courage.

A leader has to get people to go where they wouldn’t go if it wasn’t for the leader.   Did you catch that?   Great leadership calls people to do what they otherwise wouldn’t do.  That’s why it’s so hard. How many of us really like to do things we wouldn’t normally do?

Which is why a major battle every leader faces is fear.  I’m increasing convinced that what’s capping the potential of so much in the church and in life these days is just plain fear.

We’re afraid of:

• People who will leave
• The unknown
• Not being up to the task
• Blowing the success we’ve already experienced
• People who will stop giving
• Losing our popularity
• Having to suffer

You and I need to deal with our fears.  Because something happens to fear when you let it incubate.

When fear becomes a habit, it becomes really difficult to tell the difference between fear and laziness. The writer of Proverbs 26:13 understood that:

The lazy person claims, “There’s a lion on the road!

Yes, I’m sure there’s a lion out there!”

I hear people say it all the time, there are more than a few lazy leaders out there.  Some may always have been lazy.  But I wonder if the rest just let fear become a habit.  And after awhile, there’s very little difference between the fearful leader and the lazy leader.

They get the same results in the end.  And it really no longer matters how they started out; the end is the same.

How many dreams have died in your heart because you were afraid?  How many dreams died in the hearts of others because you were afraid?  Have you been afraid long enough that people on the outside looking in can’t tell the difference between you and a lazy leader?

Don’t get me wrong, you never set out to lead something because you were lazy.  But eventually, people can’t tell the difference.

Maybe it’s time to start dealing with your fears.  Maybe it’s time to find some courage.  Because nobody likes to be called lazy, even if,  in the end, it’s hard to remember how you got there.

Maybe one of the very best things you can do today is to do something to confront your fears.