Self Leadership

Leadership Straight from Bill Hybels Self Leadership The most difficult person you will ever, ever lead is who? It is you. This is you. You are so difficult to lead. I am so difficult to lead. My worst elder....I am tougher to lead than they are, trust me. Why is this so? Why are you so hard to lead? Because some of you are way too hard on yourself. You beat yourself up if you make any leadership mistakes. You hold yourself to such an exceedingly high standard that you are frustrated 3/4 of the time. You walk around with your shoulders heavy because you think, "I am not as good a leader as "so and so" is. I need to do more of this." You are so hard on yourself. Equal numbers of you are difficult to lead because you are way too easy on yourself. Way too easy. You fumble a leadership call and you say, "That did not matter anyway." You make a bad personnel decision and you say, "Well, you win some, you lose some." You do not challenge yourself. You are easy on yourself. You are not growing as a leader. But you do not hold yourself to high expectations as a leader, so you are only the half the leader you could be, only half the leader God wants you to be. Sometimes you are hard to lead because you lack self-awareness. You do not self-correct, so you do the same mistakes again and again. So you are hard to lead. I am very hard to lead. About 15 years ago when I really started to understand that if I do not lead myself well, everyone bears the consequences. If I lead myself really well, everyone wins. Everyone around me - my staff, my church, my community. I got serious about it and said, "I am going to start trying to lead myself really, really well." But I did not know how to do it and I had never read any books on it. So what I resorted to was an empty journal and a series of questions that I would ask myself about every 30 days. I would go through a self-evaluation exercise on how am I doing leading myself about once a month. Then I would be very honest. Here is what I am going to do for a few moments. I am going to give you some of the questions, not all of them because of them are too personal. I am going to give you some of the questions that I ask and answer every 30 days and you will get an idea of these kinds of self-leadership analysis questions. And you can come up with your own after you hear some of mine.