Tag Archives: engagement

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2018 Leadership Summit – 26 Leadership Quotes from Carla Harris

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Every year, my team and I attend the leadership summit. This year, there is a shadow hanging over the summit as I outlined here, but I’m still trusting that it will have some incredibly helpful content, just like in past years. To capture what I’m learning and to help you grow as a leader, I always share my notes from each session, so be sure to check back after each session and bookmark them for future use.

The third session featured a talk from Carla Harris, who is the Vice Chairman, Managing Director and Senior Client Advisor at Morgan Stanley. She talked about how to achieve your potential and become the leader you were created to be. She used the word leader (Leverage, Efficiency, Authenticity, Decisive, Engagement, Risk taker) to show what makes an impactful leader.

The following are some takeaways:

  1. Leverage: powerful, impactful leaders know there is not a monopoly on intelligence.
  2. Someone on your team has the access or experience that you need.
  3. If people think there will be retribution for making a mistake, no one will give you an out of the box idea.
  4. A leaders job is to create an environment where people want to contribute.
  5. Leadership is a journey from execution to empowerment.
  6. Efficiency: If you are an influential, impactful leader, you must be clear about what success looks like.
  7. If you aren’t clear about what success looks like, you will create a tremendous amount of frustration.
  8. Productivity goes down when things aren’t clear.
  9. If you aren’t clear on what’s next, you must be clear on what success looks like.
  10. If it doesn’t work this time, it informs your next success.
  11. Authenticity: this is the heart of your power and the heart of influential leadership.
  12. No one else can be you.
  13. Most people are not comfortable in their own skin, so when they see someone who is, they gravitate towards you.
  14. The easiest way to penetrate a relationship is to bring your authentic self to the table.
  15. Your authenticity is your distinct competitive advantage.
  16. To be authentic, you have to know who you are and what you bring to the table.
  17. Decisiveness and diversity: the price of inaction is greater than the cost of making a mistake.
  18. At the end of the day, your team is depending on you as the leader to make a decision.
  19. Part of your task as a leader is to make a decision, even in the face of incomplete information.
  20. If you need a lot of ideas (and you do to succeed), you need a lot of perspectives and experiences in the room.
  21. Engagement: you must be engaged with your people and understand what makes people motivated to win. What engages your staff?
  22. Everyone on your team wants to be seen and heard.
  23. Risk taker: leaders must be comfortable taking risks.
  24. The way you differentiate yourself is by taking risks.
  25. Fear has no place in your success equation.
  26. The thing that makes a leader stand out is courage. This is what holds all these words together.
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When You Feel Hopeless as a Leader

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leader

At some point as a leader, you will feel hopeless. As a pastor it will more than likely happen after the weekend. It is hard to keep hope alive all the time as a leader. I often read people on Twitter who are overly positive, and I wonder, “Are they really like that? Is life really that exciting for them all the time?” Then I feel like I’m doing something wrong as a leader because that isn’t me.

Should a leader be hope filled? Yes. A leader should carry the banner of hope and excitement. You are the main vision carrier of your church.

Will you always feel like doing that? Probably not. At some point you will feel like you have no hope and like you don’t want to go on.

So, what do you do then?

Here are some things I do when I feel hopeless:

5 things to do when you feel hopeless.

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  1. Pray. While this seems like the expected answer, it isn’t the easiest thing to do. Often as a leader, our last thought is to pray. We want to think, strategize, vent, read a book, figure out how to get out of this funk. Spend some quiet time with Jesus.
  2. Talk to trusted friends. A leader needs people to vent to, people who can help to shoulder the weight, people who know the weight a leader carries.
  3. Sleep. Much of the hopelessness we feel as leaders comes from the fact that we are tired and need rest.
  4. Do something active or fun. This helps to balance out the chemicals in your body. Take a hike, workout, have sex with your spouse, play with your kids. Do something fun, something recharging.
  5. Know that this won’t last forever. Hopelessness feels like the end of the world. That’s why we call it hopelessness. This won’t last forever. Tomorrow will come, another sermon will happen. This is a season that might last a day, a week or a month, but it is a season.
5 ways to deal with hopelessness as a leader.

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When You Manipulate Your Husband, You Lose Him

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Manipulate your Husband

Over time in a relationship, couples fall into typical roles. They learn how to push each other’s buttons. They learn how to control the other, how to manipulate situations to get what they want and ultimately, how to win. This might be through force, silent treatment, being on edge, yelling, withholding sex, controlling the money or the schedule.

Men do this. Women do this.

I’ll post another time about how men do this, but for today, I want to focus on how many wives manipulate their husband and the consequences of that manipulation.

I remember preaching a series through the life of Samson at Revolution Church and while the series is geared towards men, there is a ton in it for women. Like this:

And in three days they could not solve the riddle. On the fourth day they said to Samson’s wife, “Entice your husband to tell us what the riddle is, lest we burn you and your father’s house with fire. Have you invited us here to impoverish us?” And Samson’s wife wept over him and said, “You only hate me; you do not love me. You have put a riddle to my people, and you have not told me what it is.” And he said to her, “Behold, I have not told my father nor my mother, and shall I tell you?” She wept before him the seven days that their feast lasted, and on the seventh day he told her, because she pressed him hard. Then she told the riddle to her people. -Judges 14:14b – 17

Samson tells a riddle to the Philistines, who are ruling over the nation of Israel. He makes a bet that they can’t figure it out.

They can’t.

So, the Philistines go to Samson’s Philistine fiance and tell her to find out the answer, so they don’t look foolish.

This passage shows a few things about men and women and their default sins under stress. Samson wants to win at all costs. Samson wants to avoid looking foolish at all costs.

His fiance makes the go to move that every woman uses, and uses a lot in marriage, manipulation. 

She wept before Samson for 7 days. She nagged, complained, gave him the silent treatment.

And in the end, she won.

But she lost Samson.

Every time you manipulate your husband, you lose him. 

Every time you manipulate your husband, you lose a little piece of him.

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You may not lose him to divorce, but you lose a piece of him. Trust is damaged. He begins to wonder if you are just using him. He begins to wonder if you have his best interest at heart or if you are out for yourself, your kids or someone else (maybe your mother, his mother-in-law). He wonders if you will fight for your marriage. He wonders what will happen the next time you don’t get your way.

It might be you stop talking to him, stop responding to him sexually, withhold information, give him cold stares, talk in passive aggressive tones, make snide remarks towards him.

Men will acquiesce all kinds of things for peace and the path of less resistance.

So, while many women “win” and get their way through manipulation, much like Samson’s fiance. They lose their husband and a piece of their marriage every time.

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11 Ways to Know You’ve Settled for a Mediocre Marriage

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Mediocre marriage

It is so sad when I meet a couple that is unhappy. Whether it is stress, finances, kids, in-laws or sin, too many couples simply settle for a mediocre marriage. They carry around this look that says, “I’m not happy, but this is as good as it will get.”

I’m sorry, but if I’m going to be in a relationship for the rest of my life, I want it to be better than a sigh followed by, “this is as good as it will get.”

11 ways to fix a mediocre marriage.

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So, how do you know if you are in a mediocre marriage?

Here are 11 ways to know if you have a mediocre marriage or are on your way to one:

  1. Your marriage and life revolve around your kids. I’ve written before about how to know if your kids are more important than your marriage, but if you can answer any of these, you are in trouble.
  2. It’s been over a year since you read a book on marriage. The best way to grow in your marriage is to get around a couple who has a better marriage or read a book on it. You should read at least one book on marriage a year. It’s a great way to create conversation and push issues to the surface in your marriage.
  3. Roles in marriage feel like a trap instead of freedom. Headship and submission are tricky things and controversial. They are meant to bring us freedom, not to be a trap. When they feel like a trap, there is sin under it. Whether in how it is playing out or how our heart feels about it.
  4. You can’t remember the last date night you had. I can’t tell you how important date night is. It doesn’t have to be grand or expensive, but as a couple, you need to have at least one time a week where it is just the two of you (no phone, no tv, no computer, no kids) to talk about build into your relationship.
  5. You have sex less than 2 times a week. I realize this isn’t a hard and fast rule. Pregnancy, health, age, travel, deployment, etc. all can get in the way of this. That being said, sex is a great barometer of your marriage. In every situation when I talk to a couple struggling in their marriage, sex is the first thing to go. It reveals past hurts, addictions, abuses, etc. Every study also says the same thing, a healthy marriage has a healthy sex life.
  6. You nit pick at your spouse. I talked in more detail about this here, but disrespecting your spouse, making fun of them, being sarcastic is one of the fastest ways to move from a good marriage to mediocre to miserable or divorced.
  7. You consistently talk about how much you love your spouse on Facebook. I’m sure you’ll disagree, but every time I read something incredibly awesome on Facebook, my first thought is, “That’s probably the exact opposite of the truth.” I can’t tell you how many times I have counseled a couple who seemed on the verge of divorce and the next day posted on Facebook, “I love my wife.” Or, “My husband is incredible.” The charade of Facebook reveals a lot.
  8. When you are alone with your spouse, you have nothing to talk about. Whenever Katie and I go out to eat and see a couple just sitting there, our hearts break. That’s so sad. It means a couple has stopped growing. Yes silence is great sometimes and needed, but when it is a consistent pattern, that’s a mediocre marriage. You know if this is you.
  9. There are things in your past your spouse does not know. Your spouse should know everything about you. That doesn’t mean you need to tell your spouse how many sexual partners you’ve had or how much porn you saw as a teenager. That isn’t helpful. They should know about addictions, hurts, abuse against you. No one on the planet should know more about you than your spouse.
  10. You fantasize about being married to someone else. Our imaginations are powerful, our memories are powerful. Often, we will think back to high school or college and wonder where someone is or what life would have been like if we married someone else. When that happens, we disengage from our marriage.
  11. A friend knows more about your marriage than your spouse does. Are you honest with your spouse? Do you talk about what bothers you or do you sweep it under the rug? Do you know how to fight well in your marriage? Do you talk more to a friend more than you do to your spouse about your marriage or kids? If so, well you get it by now.
How to know you’ve settled for a mediocre marriage.

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Sex Doesn’t Equal Intimacy

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Whenever I talk with couples that are dating or engaged, at some point sex and intimacy will come up. When Katie and I do premarital counseling, there are 5 things a couple must agree to for me to do their wedding. One of them is that they won’t have sex from that point forward until their wedding night. Regardless of their background, regardless if they live together, regardless of where they are on their journey with Jesus.

Depending on the situation, this brings with it an interesting follow-up conversation. Many couples don’t care, they’ve already chosen to wait and have stayed with that commitment. Some are excited because while they’ve wanted to wait, the lack of accountability has made it difficult and they’ve fallen back into patterns they wanted to move away from. Others are frustrated because they don’t see a problem with sex outside of marriage.

I remember once talking with a couple who lived together. They weren’t followers of Jesus and he asked me if this was simply a way for me to put my morals onto other people. It was a fair question. Pastors are often guilty of thinking of ways simply to make people behave more godly without changing their hearts.

I told him that was not the point of this. Here’s why we ask couples to do this and what I told him:

  1. The bible does tell us to save sex for marriage (Acts 15:20; 1 Corinthians 5:1; 6:13, 18; 10:8; 2 Corinthians 12:21;Galatians 5:19; Ephesians 5:3; Colossians 3:5; 1 Thessalonians 4:3; Jude 7). The Bible promotes complete abstinence before marriage. Sex between a husband and his wife is the only form of sexual relations of which God approves (Hebrews 13:4).
  2. Sex doesn’t equal intimacy. Many in our culture think they are being intimate simply by having sex. For men, when we think of intimacy, sex is what we think of. Intimacy is much bigger than that. It involves sex, but involves be open and honest with another person, trusting them completely, not hiding from them. Willing to share our lives, our dreams, our hopes, our failures, our hurts, and pain with that person. Far too many couples think we had sex, so we must be in love. As soon as sex enters a relationship, it changes drastically. By abstaining from sex before marriage, they are able to broaden intimacy in their relationship in other ways, ways that are non-sexual.
  3. There are seasons in marriage where sex is not an option. Whether that is traveling for a job, health, children, pregnancy, time or energy. Abstaining from sex before marriage helps a couple to prepare for these moments and for the couple to learn they can trust the other. Is a man or woman able to control themselves when they aren’t having as much sex or intimacy as they’d like.
  4. It builds trust. On some level, usually for women, having sex outside of marriage is a trust issue. For men, sex is mostly physical, but for women it is mostly emotional. It involves trusting the other person. Making a commitment to abstain from sex and keeping that commitment goes a long way of building trust for a couple.

There are other reasons, but these are the top ones. After doing weddings for 7 years for numerous couples who have made this commitment and kept it, I’ve yet to have a couple tell me it was a waste of time or be angry that they made it. In fact, I’ve had almost every couple tell me this was one of the most beneficial things for them in their premarital counseling.

Image by Cuentosdeunaimbecila (via Flickr)