Leadership IS influence … and influence is everything. Mine and your ability to impact the world around us is directly proportional to the effectiveness of our leadership.

Leadership, however, is not a linear thing. There are angles and insights and yes, BLIND SPOTS! What we need is a 360° Leadership Approach.

That’s what we are talking about in this session; “The 4 Pillars of Personal Leadership”.

When you’re driving your car, you’ve got side mirrors and a rearview mirror. I don’t care what kind of vehicle you’re driving. It’s got a blind spot somewhere.

If you’re like me, you’ve probably entered into the lane before over here and had somebody lay on their horn or possibly almost have a wreck or an accident because you weren’t paying close enough attention, and somewhere over here you just couldn’t see one angle. This is because in vehicles you don’t have a 360-degree view. You’ve just got too much metal and too many obstacles and things that are there and angles that don’t work.

Life is like that … Leadership is like that.

If we’re going to have a successful life and really make a massive difference; if we’re going to have a strategic type of an influence in our culture; then our leadership has to be approached from a 360-degree perspective.

We’ve talked in the past about your circle of influence and having the right people around you, and why that’s so important. In this series, I want to talk about what I’m going to call the 360-degree leadership matrix. It looks like this.

• Personal leadership
• Family leadership
• Community and civic leadership
• Vocational leadership (or your purpose leadership)

Over the course of the next few weeks, we will talk about all four of these, but in this session, I want to deal with personal and family leadership because it really does begin there.

PERSONAL LEADERSHIP

Here’s the deal. You cannot lead anyone — not your wife, your husband, your kids, your friends, your Sunday school class, on the job – you can’t lead anybody if your life is a red hot mess, or if you don’t have your own stuff together. There is this tendency we all have to fake it until we make it, to throw up the mask, smoke and mirrors, and that sort of thing, but I’m telling you right now that only lasts so long. There’s a point at which you can no longer fake it.

When I talk about personal leadership, I’m talking about your internal health, your external health, and really your leadership mindset. It begins, first of all, with personal healing. You know that everything I do begins with personal healing. I cannot lead someone where I have not myself been. If I’m broken, if it’s going to be very difficult for me to help someone who is broken. If I don’t have the right perspective or belief systems in place, I might lead somebody in the wrong direction.

Personal leadership begins with a deep evaluation of what’s going on on the inside. It’s painful to start digging out old wounds. It’s painful to go looking in those dark closets where we’ve stuffed things away. It’s not always easy to go back and revisit tragic events or difficult times. But it’s necessary.

If I’m going to lead those around me, I have to first begin with me. Personal leadership begins with personal healing. Personal leadership then asks these and other questions:

• Am I growing, or have I plateaued?
• Am I growing my mind?
• Am I reading books?
• Am I learning things?
• Am I taking courses?
• Am I being educated?
• Am I learning from my experiences?
• Am I surrounding myself with wise people so I’m gleaning from their wisdom?
• Am I in a constant state of personal growth?”

If I’m not growing personally, I’m going to reach a ceiling at which point my level of influence or the potential of my influence stops. I simply cannot lead someone else where I haven’t been.

Personal leadership is all about personal healing, personal development, and then, of course, really having a grasp on who you are and why you’re here. How many people do you know — I’m not talking about you; I’m talking about somebody else you know — how many people do you know that are just doing life, but they haven’t really gotten a hold of, “Who am I? Why am I here? What is my purpose in this world? What has God uniquely designed and created me to do? What is my contribution to mankind?” These are questions we just don’t get asked much, and we don’t ask ourselves.

Personal leadership begins with taking care of you. Yes, you. You cannot pour from an empty vessel. You cannot give from an empty tank. You can’t be fueled up and geared up and ready to go anywhere and your car be broken down. You’ve got to deal with you first.

I can’t love my wife beyond my own capacity to be loved. I can’t pour into my children’s lives beyond my own capacity to grow and to be developed and nurtured. I have to deal with me before I can deal with the real world.

Personal leadership is the first PILLAR of the 360-degree leadership matrix, and I want you to consider: What are you doing to take care of you? • What do you need to do to take care your personal care to the next level?

FAMILY LEADERSHIP

The first corporate entity ever created was the FAMILY God said, “It is not good for man to be alone”. Then, He commanded the man and woman to reproduce and multiply. There is an implied mandate here for what I call generational expansion and proliferation. Each succeeding generation should be stronger, wiser, wealthier, and have more influence than the previous one.

We’ve established that our ability to impact the world around us is directly proportional to the effectiveness of our leadership. That leadership begins with YOU … but then extends to those closest to you. Personal leadership is vitally important. We must take care of ourselves, deal with our own internal struggles and issues, be constantly in a state of growing and developing our own capacity. As we grow, it increases our capacity and our leadership potential with other people in our world.

We live in a time where there are a lot of broken homes, divorced families, absentee fathers, and various abusive and dysfunctional situations going on. It’s so unfortunate because if you have a broken leader in a home, you are going to have a broken child. That brokenness may not show up in their childhood, or even in their teenage years. It may show up later in their adult life.

I promise you this … my leadership in the home is paramount to my children’s and my grandchildren’s success and wellbeing. I take leadership in the home very seriously.

Just because you are able to procreate doesn’t make you a father. Just because you are a contributor to the idea that someone can become pregnant and have a baby doesn’t mean you’re a great mother. It simply means that you have the biological capacity to procreate.

The title “dad” doesn’t make you a good father. The title “mom” doesn’t make you a great mom. That’s why I go back to personal leadership. A family is only as strong as the individuals that make up the family. That’s why it’s so important that mom and dad are always working on themselves … their own personal development … their own personal growth … their personal leadership; because the quality and the health and the wholeness that they’re experiencing in their own lives comes together in this beautiful thing called a marriage and a union.

Then the health and the vitality and the strength and the blessing and the beauty of what that is then bleeds over into those precious children, and they get to see what a real marriage looks like, what a real relationship looks like. They get to benefit from love and care and encouragement and honor and dignity and all the things that a family should have as a part of its matrix.

Family leadership is so important, and it is missing in so many parts of our culture. I’m going to dive in here for a second and say that what we are seeing portrayed on television, the line we’re being fed by Hollywood as it relates to what family looks like is a pile of crock. I can make it more colorful, but I shouldn’t because I might get incriminated here. The point is this. We have to take back family. We have to take back the sanctity and the joy that is what the family unit should look like.

It begins, sir, it begins, ma’am, with leadership in the home. Dad, listen to me. Please listen to me. Just because you go to work and you provide and you come home with a paycheck, a pocket full of money doesn’t mean that your family is right. You can’t just go lay back on the couch, hit the remote, get a TV dinner, and do the deal. You can’t be present AND be absent. You can’t be there geographically and theoretically but not be engaged at a heart level with those that you are called to lead in your home.

Mom, the same thing goes for you. You can’t get caught up in Facebook and Twitter and all this stuff and do the deal and have all these pseudo relationships and then not be fulfilling your God given responsibility to lead, to nurture, to give in the home, to your husband, and to your children.

Family leadership. It’s a big deal.

I’m calling on you guys to re-evaluate, to consider, “Am I engaged in my home? Am I giving life to my wife? Am I giving life to my husband? Am I giving life to my children? Am I teaching them the ways in which they should walk? Am I teaching them character and morality? Am I teaching them principles that will follow them the rest of their life that will do them justice and do them well? Or am I giving them an example of just being present but not present?”

Family leadership. I’m really challenging you to think about your level of engagement and your level of commitment to those that really matter the most.

NEXT WEEK:

Next week, I will be sharing the power of community and vocational leadership!

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Until next time, remember … You were made in His image, designed for a purpose, and are destined for greatness. The world is waiting for the REAL YOU to show up.  God Bless!

The post #379: How Personal and Family Leadership Determines Your Legacy appeared first on Brian Holmes.