Leadership Nugget

Recently i set a goal to read up to 26 books by the end of the year. It is a crazy target to achieve, with my crazy schedule and heavily demanded job. Yet, I know that I am responsible for my own life, and being an educator, I need to teach myself. To be true as an educator, to believe that the world will be better with wisdom shared, to upload the mission of a teacher, I must first be a student to develop a learning habit that will eventually lead me to the destination that I want to bring others along.

So, I decided to initiate the self-improvement training on myself, and see the result of it for myself.

So far, I have read 6 books, and starting my seventh book this week. Books that I read came from all sort of genre. I have to train my mind to understand knowledge of all genre, to see development in a more holistic way.

The seventh book that I am reading now is written by Dale Carnegie, and the title of the book is "How to Win Friends and Influence People."

The first chapter explain the first principle in relationship: Don't criticize, condemn or complain. It is human nature to protect themselves from physical and emotional harm. Therefore, when a person make a mistake, the person will put up his/her defensive barrier, and will try to justify his/her action. I call this as "Adam's nature". When Adam and Eve fall into sin in the garden of Eden, the first thing Adam did when God asked him was to justify his action by pointing the problem to Eve.

However, when we criticize or judge the person, it actually enforce the barrier. This cause the person not willing to accept his/her fault and turn away from any rebuke. Moreover, usually when we criticize, we allow our emotion to express freely without self-control, and we will end up pouring our anger, frustration, hurts and pain to the person who make the mistake. At the end of the day, not only the person did not learn the lesson, but the relationship became sour and broken.

However, this does not mean we should allow mistake to pass by and pretend nothing has happen. We need to correct the person in away that is not rude, but with love and understanding. This is where self-control is heavily required. To be able to confront the situation with a calm emotion is very difficult. It require us to put our emotion down, and think in rationally on what way can we help the person improve.

Frankly speaking, I don't think I have such capability to control my emotion when someone in my team make a mistake. Yet, I see that by continuously re-evaluate our respond in rebuking someone will help us to develop a new habit. This new habit of building another person will soon replace our bad habit of fault finding.

Lead in love and not with fear is the highest call of leadership.

Being relevant to the society

This few weeks, the word "Relevance" has been ringing in my ears. Every where I went, I found this word appear. Even in my small group, I began to share with my college members how the youth culture has developed and how far the church is away from engaging the culture.

I understand that being relevant does involve risks, and there is no fine border line between relevance and worldly. All I could see is that if we continue to reach out to the youth with our traditional method, we might eventually become another Europe, loosing the generation.

The whole cycle of postmodernism has already begun whether we like it or not. I see no point in defending the "methodology" of reaching youth, or pointing fingers on any party that does not support the idea.

As this age has begun, we have to admit the fact that youth today is different from youth 5 years ago. If we are not able to break from the traditional perspectives, we are in danger of not being relevant to the people we are trying reaching.

However, there are the group who try to be relevant till losing their own identity. They are well blend into the society, but at risk of losing the very call of being set apart for.

It is never an easy task to be spiritually set apart and culturally relevant. Yet, I see no excuse for not risking for God. I remember once my lecture in Bible school said, "if every one plays clean and don't want to get dirty, who will be the hand of God in the dark and dirty world?"

I will take the challenge to exploring further, how a Spirit-driven person should engage the society, and how God can lead us to be spiritually set apart yet culturally relevant. God please guide.