I'm so excited to introduce the new tool I’ve created, The Christian Leader Blueprint! This resource is something that I've been working on for years. It's not so much the guide that I'm excited about but the model, the concept, the big picture that this tool creates. It has taken me years of personal experience, education, self-study, and trial and error (what most people refer to as blood, sweat, and tears) to put this concept together. I’ve received coaching from an executive coach, gone through counseling, coached and counseled others, and worked through many mistakes to create this tool.
The Christian Leader Blueprint concept is now available in the form of a short guide on my website christianleadermadesimple.com. At almost thirty pages, the document is loaded with phenomenal information, and I’m giving it to you for FREE. Visit christianleadermadesimple.com to get this free guide. Through this blog post, I'll share more about how this blueprint can change your life.
A few years ago, my life felt stagnant. I had no definite vision. I was on the edge of burnout. I had no intentional rhythm of life, my work-life balance was out of sync, and I was struggling to embrace my calling and tap into my giftings. To add fuel to the fire, I was in a tremendous leadership role, but there were aspects of my leadership that were abrasive and caustic. I was eroding the key relationships in my life, the relationships that I really needed to be successful in life and ministry. My family would sometimes cringe when I would get home from work because they didn’t know what type of mood I would be in when I walked through the door. I blamed it on the fact that ministry is hard. I felt that I had to tough it out and do what was necessary to “do the work of the Lord.”
Yet, there was a little scripture that spoke of something called "abundant life" in John 10:10. I had definitely tasted of it, but I hadn’t learned to live in it. I went through a great deal of counseling to help overcome some deep-rooted issues in my life, which had helped tremendously. I don’t think I could have embraced the next phase of my journey without having that foundation. In fact, even to this day, I visit with a counselor as needed to help with grief and other character and personal growth issues.
I was still searching for something, however. I didn’t know exactly what it was at the time, but I was searching for forward-looking direction. I wanted to live in that abundant life as I fulfilled my calling in the Kingdom of God. If you know me, you know that I jumped head first into analyzing and studying to try to find answers. I read scripture and books or whatever I could get my hands on looking for the abundant life I sought. I talked to whomever I could find that would give me some insight. I was hungry for more, but I couldn’t find what I was looking for.
As I read my Bible, scripture spoke of this abundant life. As I went through my daily devotions, I found breadcrumbs throughout the Bible that referenced emotional health, clarity, purposeful living, and healthy relationships. One year at Because of the Times, a conference our church hosts, I ran into an old friend. He told me about a leadership coach that was changing his world. Of course, he had my attention. A few months later, I had my first appointment with an executive leadership coach. It was a very hard decision to make that appointment because it was crazy expensive, and I had never heard of this type of coach. Even though I really didn’t know what I was getting myself into, I did it anyway.
A year later, after dozens of sessions with my new executive coach, Dr. Brian Epperson, I realized I had experienced one of the best years of growth of my entire life. I had made amazing progress and enormous improvement in my personal life. I knew that I had to learn how to do what he had done for me so that I could share my experience with others. Three years later, after a great deal of mentoring from Dr. Epperson as well as education and trial and error of doing executive leadership coaching for others, I began to see some significant results in the lives of the people I coached.
I also began to see a pattern. My clients were walking a path similar to my own, and many of the same issues I experienced were surfacing in their lives. Everyone was unique and had individual deficiencies in their journeys, but there was definitely a pattern. I started studying this pattern and realized that most of these concepts were found in scripture.
After many years of personal growth and now years of helping others in their own journeys, The Christian Leader Blueprint has finally emerged. It’s a solid growth model, giving the reader a blueprint for growth in his or her life. It also gives leaders and mentors an in-depth blueprint to help others with their personal growth. Within this guide, readers have the opportunity to learn how to establish a better rhythm of life, see themselves more clearly, leverage the great strengths within them, and ultimately build better and more productive relationships. The Christian Leader Blueprint clearly defines what is necessary to increase your capacity and become a deeper, healthier, and more effective leader. This resource will help you gain the clarity that you need to effectively lead your ministry or organization forward.
The Christian Leader Blueprint helps address this problem: Every leader needs a slightly different blueprint or map for their personal success. There’s really no book or guide that has a perfectly effective, 1-2-3 step process when it comes to personal leadership growth. In fact, your growth process is as unique to you as your fingerprints. Everyone is different, and that’s the problem with most leadership growth models available. The fact that everyone is unique actually creates a challenge for us because the leadership books or materials we read or the leadership conferences we attend that discuss these concepts are never going to perfectly apply to us individually.
In The Christian Leader Blueprint, I hope to have addressed this major, nagging frustration by creating a fluid process that you can work through from multiple angles. The goal of the blueprint is for you to find your personal area of greatest weakness, the thing that’s keeping you from growing, having a good rhythm of life, or finding vision for your life. Whatever is holding you back from creating the relationships that are necessary to develop your ministry or organization is where you will start your journey of growth and leadership development in The Christian Leader Blueprint.
Another aspect that makes this tool useful is that it helps open conversations with team members, the type of conversations that allow you to speak into the lives of your team members and create deep levels of growth and development. We live in a world where there are a million different books, ideas, and thoughts on how we should do things, and leadership feels so complicated; but it really doesn’t have to be that way. The Christian Leader Blueprint will help you clearly define the steps that you and your team members need to take in order to become great, effective leaders in moving your ministry or organization forward.
The primary need of any organization today is leadership, and I challenge you to take a humble approach to these concepts because God’s strength is perfected in the midst of our weaknesses. The Lord desires a broken boldness, a transparency and authenticity through which He can perform His greatest work. I challenge you to visit my website christianleadermadesimple.com and download The Christian Leader Blueprint. It’s completely FREE. Together, let’s explore the concepts that will help us become more effective leaders.
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