There is a sense, if you are an achiever and hard working,  that to achieve the mission you can’t afford to have much personal margin.  You need to keep pushing evening and weekends and even plow through vacation.

The last couple of months have been intense.  With a full plate at Connexus where I serve as lead pastor, a potential building campaign and capital campaign, special projects, and even writing a book, there haven’t been a ton of free hours.

My mistake this time around in writing my latest book, Leading Change Without Losing It, (due out next month) was that I tried to work on it almost every weekend and evening that was free.  So I was never really “off” and also less effective on most things.  While I’m really thrilled how the book turned out, I’m not as thrilled with how I turned out.  I didn’t ‘lose it”, but man, I got tired.

Fortunately, this is just a season, a season I can learn from.

The problem, of course, is if you consistently fail to build margin into your life, you kill the mission.

Over time, leaders who constantly sacrifice margin discover this: There is no mission without margin.

I mean you can try to keep pushing ahead relentlessly (and some of you are tempted to do that), but eventually, you’ll end up both exhausted and ineffective.  The more tired you get, the less productive you become.  The more exhausted you become, the more likely it is that you will stop working – even for a season – like a laptop that drained its battery completely.

Sometimes those of us driven types see margin as an enemy. But margin is not an enemy:  it is our friend.  Without margin, there is no mission.

Laziness is resting when you’re not tired.  Sabbath is resting because you have laboured six days.  God opposes laziness, but he loves well-deserved rest.

Next time I run through a busy season, I’m going to better block out time:  one night a week and one day a week (one of my weekend days)  for ‘extra’ work and a greater time window for completion.  I think it will result in greater balance and ensure both the book and the writer come out the other side better.

What are you learning about margin and mission these days?  What helps you?

Now that you’re home and back into settling back into a routine after the Orange Conference, it’s tempting to rush into implementing the ideas you garnered.  We’ll have more on engineering the change you want to see next week. But before we get to that, a question.

What did God do in you at Orange (or Exponential…or any other conference you recently attended) that you haven’t felt in a long time?

Usually at a conference God does something in you.  Maybe:

You worshipped like you haven’t worshipped in a long time.

You dreamed again.

Scripture seemed alive.

You felt God’s presence.

You realized you were more tired than you thought you were and sensed God telling you to rest.

You felt things you haven’t felt in a long time.

A simple piece of advice:  pursue that.

Spend some time over the next seven days talking to God about what He did in you or what you felt that you’d missed for a long time.

If you can somehow make that part of your every day reality, you will have recaptured something that is so easily lost in ministry.

If you felt your heart beat again, get all over that.  If you can make moments like that part of your rhythm, it will once again be part of your reality.

I love conferences. But like any good thing, if you’re not careful, you can still fall into some traps:

Here are five I see, most of which I have had some personal experience with:

1. Accepting inspiration as a subsitute for execution. Sometimes you really do need a new idea or insight. And inspiration is amazing! Conferences provide that. But what you absolutely must do is execute. So many great ideas fail for lack of execution. A great conference is not about how inspired you feel, what you did with what you learned (and experienced).

2. Assuming the speakers have it all together. As Steven Furtick has somewhat famously said, all of us compare our B roll with everyone else’s highlight reel. What you are getting from conference speakers is their very best material. They go home to problems just like you do – just different problems. When we forget that – even for a moment – we start to feel badly about our own ministries and begin to imagine how awesome it would be if we worked for another church. Guess what? Once in a while even the best speaker feels the same way. They see all the cracks in their organization too – just like you do. Ironically, good leaders always see the problems. You just see yours more clearly.

3. Poking holes in other people’s success stories. This is the flip side of trap #2. You can believe that some leaders live in a land of bliss, or you can become the cynic who discounts every other success story and comes up with a thousand reasons why they have met with more success than you have. Quite frankly, that’s just envy. And insecurity. And not from God. Just don’t go there. That kind of conversation doesn’t help anybody, not even you.

4. Skipping out. Somewhere on day two, we all get overwhelmed. It’s easy to skip out on sessions and you are on full overload and go for a coffee instead. I suppose if you paid for the conference fully out of your own pocket, you are free to do that. But if you didn’t, you kind of have a responsibility, don’t you? And althought it might be two or three days of intense learning, if you take good notes, you can really benefit from what you learned over a few days for years down the road.

5. Not thinking systems. Sure, we all get dozens of ideas at a conference. But they tend to come from a variety of sources and contexts. Most leaders operate within a consistent ‘model’ or ‘system’. When you hear multiple speakers, you are actually hearing mutiple models and multiple systems. While they are all ‘successful’, they are not all compatible. It’s work, but it’s a great idea to think through the assumptions and systems underneath each idea and then figure out how they integrate together and how they might integrate in your system. Otherwise it’s a bit like taking your MacBook in for repair and fixing it with parts from an iPad, an Android smart phone and a gaming system. They all work within their context, but put them together randomly in your computer and nothing might work.

These are some traps I’ve seen (and sometimes fallen into). What traps have you discovered?

This week we’re talking about conferences and how to get the most out of them.  Along with about 5000 others, I’m in Atlanta for the Orange Conference, an amazing gathering of world class leaders to talk leadership, family and church.

In addition to figuring out how to apply what you’ve learned (we talked about this yesterday), conference provide another challenge and opportunity: the other 5000 people in the room with you.  If you are like me, you instinctively duck crowds, and you intuitively gravitate to the people you know best.  I love investing in our team and connecting with leaders I know, but in the midst of this it’s easy to miss one of the best opportunities a conference like Orange provides: meeting other great leaders.

Here are five lessons about networking that have helped me:

1. Be willing to learn from everyone. Let’s face it, the ‘food chain’ shows up everywhere in life. And well known, influential people show up at conferences. Don’t just try to meet people further up the career/status ladder than you are. I have learned a ton over the years from people in smaller churches who are not ‘famous’. And there was a day when the people giving keynotes on the mainstage were young leaders no one had heard of sitting in a back row like the rest of us. I have learned a ton of great lessons from ‘ordinary’ conversations over the years. Treasure those.

2. Don’t lead with your numbers. Why is it we feel we need to disclose our attendance and budget in the first five minutes of a conversation? Maybe we feel we have something to prove. Maybe we feel superior or inadequate. This is something God is beating out of me. But when I try to show how ‘big’ my church is (it’s not that huge, actually) or how much money we’ve raised, I build a wall between me and the person I’m talking to. It turns your first few minutes of conversation into a comparison game where someone wins and someone loses. Sometimes it is good to talk numbers, but usually only after a relationship has been established, and with a view to gaining insight, not gaining advantage. Humility doesn’t seek to impress.

3. Be fully present. This is such a learned behaviour for me. When I start a conversation, I’m rarely thinking only about that conversation. My mind is racing. Even if I’m not thinking about something else, I’m thinking about how not to mess up this conversation or what I’ll say next. That’s never good. Increasingly, I’m focusing on looking the person in the eye, really hearing their story and asking questions. Guess what? The more I do this, the more meaningful these connections become.

4. Follow them and friend them. While you can’t follow everyone you meet, there are a few for sure you’ll want to track. Take your phone out and follow them on twitter or friend them on Facebook…either during or after the conversation (if during, tell them you’re looking for them!). One of the reasons I love social networking is it allows me to track with hundreds of people I couldn’t track with otherwise. I’ve developed some great friendships with people I rarely get a chance to see.

5. Ask yourself some good questions. Increasingly when I’m in conversations with new people (pretty much every day), I walk into those encounters with two questions:
a. What can I learn?
b. How can I serve?
It doesn’t matter who I’m talking to, I can always learn something. Also, I decided a while back that I would try to serve everyone I meet. I know it sounds a bit cheesey, but we are servants after all. Sometimes it’s a word of encouragement. Sometimes it’s a piece of information they are looking for. Sometimes it’s something tangible. It’s not that I have anything to offer nearly as much as it is that Jesus commands us to serve others.

These are five things that help me become a better networker. I can honestly say I’ve loved the connections God has allowed me to make over the years.

What have you learned about networking?
 

If you’re a leader, you’re the lid.

The group and organization you lead, over time, will rarely grow past where you’ve grown. If you stop growing in an area, people who want to grow past that point will simply find another leader to follow.

When I think about it, it makes me nervous.  I realize that, as a leader, I set limits that impact others.  It challenges me to get better every time I realize I might set the lid on our organization’s:

Spiritual maturity

Emotional health

Relational depth

Financial balance

Cultural vibrancy

And so much more.

So what do you do about it?

1. Get healthy.  Spend time with Christ.  Go see a counselor.  Get the help you need.

2. Become more self-aware.  Seeing your limits is one of the best ways to begin to address them.  Self-deception is one of the worst kinds of deception around.  Healthy leaders don’t gravitate toward people who lack self-awareness.

3.  Recruit people who are better than you. One of the keys to creating a better organization is to recruit around your weaknesses.  You will never be the best at everything.  Focusing on what you do best but finding people who are far better than you are at most things can help you create a community that excels at far more than you do.

Knowing I’m the lid challenges me to get better in every area, even while realizing that others will be better than I am.  One of the things I’ve done to help with this is to get feedback on my strengths and weaknesses.  Other people see you far more clearly than you do…and if you’re willing to come to terms with what they see, it will really accelerate your growth.  Not to mention the health and growth of your community.

What are you doing about your lid today?

A year ago, Sarah, who I have the privilege of working with at Connexus, decided to go on a personal spending fast.  For twelve months, she decided to buy nothing new for an entire year.  You can read about her journey here and her conclusions after a year of not buying anything new here.

I’ll just be completely honest.  As much as I admire Sarah (she works as my assistant and leads an incredible life as a Christ follower), when she first announced it there was something inside me that really resisted the idea of a spending fast.   I thought “good for her, but not applicable to me.”

But as her year drew to a close this week and I watched her reflect on what she’d learned, I got drawn in. We had a great conversation the other day about it, and over the last few days, I think I heard God speaking to me.  This is not something you have to do, but this would be so good for you.

So after thinking about it all week and discussing it with my wife, today marks the first day I’m buying nothing new for me personally for the next year.

Why?

1. I want to root out entitlement. There’s been a lot said about entitlement lately, but I want to root the idea that I deserve anything right out of my system.  I’m not entitled to anything. I don’t have a right to anything. No one owes me anything.
2. I want to be more grateful. I feel incredibly privileged and blessed most days.  But I realize that my gratitude could be higher.  Probably much higher.
3. I want to give more away. I’m not sure what this fast will do to our family budget, but I’d like to give more to others and more to the Kingdom with the money we save.
4. I have enough. I really do. Far more than enough.
5. Money impacts the heart. I’ve always taught that if there’s going to be an idol in our lives in Western culture, the number one candidate is money.  I have a premonition that this is going to be as much (or more) of a spiritual journey as a financial journey.  Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

Where will this hit me most?  Technology for sure.  It’s an addiction and passion for me.  I know the iPhone 5 is coming out.  I was going to buy one this fall.  I don’t have a 4S.  I only have a 4.  Did you hear how ridiculous that last statement was?  I only have a 4? That’s more than 99% of the planet.  It works wonderfully.  It’s amazing.  It’s an iPhone for crying out loud!  I don’t need a new one.  And I won’t get one for at least a year. Or maybe more.

Also…and this will be trickier, no new apps…unless they are free.  And no new music, unless it’s free (I don’t do pirated music, so it will probably mean a lot of listening online…).

It will also hit me on clothing and biking (I love biking).  But again…I’m not exactly lacking in these areas.

Here are some rules I’ve set for myself:

1. I won’t buy any new clothes, only second hand clothes, and even then, only if I absolutely need it.
2. Zero in technology, new or used, unless something breaks and I actually can’t work without it.
3. No new personal items at all (things you like to have but don’t need).
4. Because I’m married and have kids, I will buy for my family…whether that’s a vacation or dinner out or for home or car repair etc.  But not if it’s just for me.  Nothing personal in the mix that’s just for me.
5. I will buy one new suit.  My oldest son is getting married and that’s the exception.
6. Gift cards can be used for personal shopping, but any cash gifts (Christmas etc) can’t be. They will be used for experiences shared with others.  (That will teach me to appreciate how others contribute to my life more).

So there we go.  It’s a new year so to speak.  I’ll be excited to see what God does in my heart.  In fact, I can’t wait.

Have you ever done a spending fast?  What did you learn?

This past weekend at Connexus we told a story in our message about inviting friends that will likely stick with me the rest of my life.

In the video Jessie, a woman in her early twenties who attends one of our campuses, explains how she and her husband Russ invited a friend who didn’t go to church to come with them.  The story is worth watching and it’s near the end of the message called “Invite”.  You can watch it here on our website or get the video podcast on iTunes.

Jessie and Russ’ invitation led to their friends inviting some friends, who invited a friend, who in turn invited friends.  That single invitation just a year or two later has resulted in 12 formerly unchurched people now attending church, and the process, and some have surrendered their lives to Christ.  Powerful.

But the line that stuck out with me was when Jessie simply said “30 seconds of you being uncomfortable could change someone’s eternity.”

I think she nailed it.  One of the main reasons we don’t invite people into a something that can change their lives is our personal discomfort.  And we she named that, I realized I have to get so much more uncomfortable if I want to make a difference.

I’m going to get uncomfortable in the next few weeks and extend some invitations.

But I won’t stop there.

How much transformation have you put off because you fear a little bit of discomfort?

If you were to spend some time getting over 30 seconds of discomfort five times today, what would happen?

You might:

• pick up the phone and apologize, mending a friendship.
• talk through a tough issue, slaying the elephant in the room that’s been lingering for months.
• actually do the most important work you could do today, pushing past your procrastination.
• not spend the money you were going to, and pay down some debt instead.
• invite that friend you’ve been praying for to church
• go for a run…the one you’ve put off for a day/month/week/decade.
• read to the end of the chapter of the bible you’re in…and let God speak to you
• put away the ice cream and drop a pound in the next week.

30 seconds of you being uncomfortable could change someone’s eternity.  So so true!

It might even change much more.

Why don’t you spend some time being uncomfortable today?

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?

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?