Tender skin?

“You don't have tender skin!” The guy mumbled under his breath as I walked away … after decking him hard on a cold Sunday afternoon football game many years ago. He had been giving me a hard time because I was wearing forearm guards. When he asked me why, I had told him that I had tender skin. It's important in football, and it's important in life, to have skin in the game. Nike has a slogan these days similar to this.

Are you invested enough in your work, your life, your family, your passion, your calling to have skinned knees and elbows? Have you wrestled to the point where you have left skin behind? Have you competed, struggled, stretched, reached, discovered, thought, inspired, mobilized, empowered, and settled for nothing less than your best in your fields of responsibilities? In your areas of opportunities? In building your core competences or products? Have you sweated and toiled and been diligent? Do you have skinned knees and elbows to show your commitment, your resolution, to produce something beautiful and unique and of high quality?

Most people think following your passion is simply about doing what you want, or what comes easy, or what requires the least from you. I believe it means quite the opposite. It means caring enough about the outcome that you leave skin behind. Everyone considers my wife a great linguist, and it's true that she actually enjoys language learning (shudder!). But what no one but me sees, day after day, year after year, and now decade after decade, is how hard and diligently she works at it. She has got skin in the game. What about you?

The alone times

Most people find they don't get enough alone time. And when one of these moments comes along, they find they don't know what to do with it. I hear this over and over, and sometimes even experience it myself.

It is especially difficult when you find yourself alone while, or because of, trying to do the right thing! Alone can be down right lonely when you find yourself standing alone or all alone because you are doing the right thing for the right reasons.

The challenge is to find enough internal discipline to stay the course. To stay in the right, no matter how painful or alone or difficult you find the moment. Tomorrow will be a new day and you want to be able to look yourself in the eye and not be ashamed of anything.

The other side of this, is choosing to be alone. To think, to pray, to create, to accomplish the difficult work of building something beautiful or valuable. These types of important activities demand alone time. They can't be produced in the middle of constant interruption and distraction.

All too often though we find the discomfort overpowering our golden opportunities.

The asphalt is really hard

Asphalt is hard. I mean really really hard! I met with said asphalt in a very unfriendly meeting last night. Very unexpected and very very quickly. I went down so fast, I don't even have any defensive wounds … just lots of sore sore muscles and a bent bicycle frame.

It is nothing short of amazing how quickly and smoothly one can get around the city on a bicycle. In my opinion, it is the ultimate transportation. Nimble, maneuverable, light, green and faster than a car by a great distance in heavy traffic in the city, because you can navigate to the front of the huge backups at each and every traffic signal. Literally I can cross the city twice as fast as a car during afternoon rush hour. But all of that is predicated on keeping the two wheels on the tarmac. All of those advantages only come into play when you keep it upright!

When the unexpected, the totally unforeseen is forcibly interjected into the mix, I went down like a sack of cement! I am most thankful that there was no car right behind me at that moment (and beyond thankful for my helmet seeing how my head bounce more than once off the pavement) or there could have easily been an obituary rather than a blog coming out of the experience. But life is very much like this unexpected fall, you are just motoring along and then boom! Down you go!

Now the question for life and for biking is the same - how do you respond to the unexpected, painful though it may be? At least this time, I got up this morning (albeit very slowly and gingerly), climbed back on the bike and started up the hill.

Leadership has consequences

Leadership always has consequences. In my conversations with clients yesterday, this was never more evident. The current authority they find themselves under is mostly just bad management, under the guise of leadership. I have been there, drank the water, have the t-shirt, and never want to see that place ever again in my whole life! But what advice do you give folks locked into such a situation? When you are the one doing the advising, THAT type leadership also has consequences, big consequences!

All leadership must take into consideration the impact, scope and scale that said leadership inflicts on the lives of the people living and operating under it. In vocational leadership, it involves compensation, decades of preparation, high emotional involvement, and a persons livelihood and existence. These are high stakes indeed. It is infuriating to see how little thought and care are given to the people caught in these leadershipless actions, how little consideration is given to the sacrifice and service given to an organization, how quickly organizations can move to remove any one of us, when our perceived value is compromised. Life is way more complicated than a simple balance sheet.

“Christian” organizations are the worse, because of Whom we serve. It is demanded of us, a much higher standard of diligence and care and mercy and understanding and commitment to one another. But alas, Christian organizations seem to be the most ruthless, the quickest to pull the trigger in pulling the rug out from under people, the least Christ-like of all in the end. Cynical? Not really, because in my leadership development business, all my clients are Christ-followers, and most of them work for Christian parent organizations, and I see this happen over and over and over again.

When will anyone stand up and say, “enough” and live and build and continue a different organization!? I guess I have.

Laying our souls bare

Everyone eventually has a soul-baring event, moment, situation, crisis, need or end. There inevitably occurs a space in life, where someone is hurt and may die, is terminal, has Alzheimer's, cancer, lost a job, broken a law, facing consequences of bad decisions, financial disaster, a bad car accident, or maybe you are facing your own mortality. Some of us even PRACTICE soul-baring because we believe it to be good for the soul! Hopefully you have people in your life with which you can bare your soul.

I did this today … just talked to a missionary who works for another organization about the double loss of a parent with Alzheimer's, about betrayal in my parent organization, about my brother who is destroying himself with alcohol, about my wife who is in constant pain, about the way some of my clients are being trashed by their mission, about the lost people surrounding me, about my hopes and wishes for my children and grandchildren.

Granted, not all of this soul-baring is equal, but many of them are excruciatingly painfully emotional, and the rest can cause quite a bit of stress, angst and turmoil. These are matters of the soul. Left inside they soon start to smell like the meat in my in-laws deep freezer after the compressor burned out and it sat in there rotting for weeks. It is a smell you can never get out of the freezer! You have to throw away the freezer too! Don't let matters get that old and moldy, much less to the point of rotting. Let it out, bare your heart your soul …to someone. Let the refreshing cleansing begin.

And occasionally all of us should wear the other suit as well. We need to be the one that listens to others bare their souls. It can be very therapeutic and helpful for all involved. Most often my internal response is simply thankfulness, that I only have what I have to bear, and not what this poor soul who is sobbing has to bear. It is finally great practice at listening, which not only helps the one baring their soul to you, but helps you appreciate it when someone else does it for you. Everyone eventually gets here. Be ready.