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The Danger of the Distraction
None of us are immune to the growing cacophony of distractions all around us.
Are there more or fewer distractions in our world today than there were ten years ago? The answer is a resounding, “More!” We all feel it. And we are drowning in them everywhere we go.
Two thousand hiring and HR managers were asked to identify the top culprits of workplace distractions. The most common answers aren’t surprising:
- Smartphones (55 percent)
- The internet (41 percent)
- Gossip (37 percent)
- Social Media (37 percent)
- Co-workers dropping by (27 percent)
- Smoking or snack breaks (27 percent)
- E-mail (26 percent)
- Meetings (24 percent)
- Noisy coworkers (20 percent)
Three in four employers say two or more hours a day are lost in productivity because employees are distracted. Forty-three percent say at least three hours a day are lost.
Despite the increase of face time between children and parents, the quality of our engagement with one another is decreasing. As The Atlantic notes, the effects are problematic for both children and parents. For all the talk about children’s screen time, surprisingly little attention is paid to screen use by parents themselves, who now suffer from what the technology expert Linda Stone more than 20 years ago called “continuous partial attention.”
By one estimate, one-third of divorces in recent years were the result of people addicted to or wrongly interacting with Facebook.
Before we blame the Millennials for another problem, this is not a generational thing, or a gender thing, or a temperament thing. Distraction—whether due to technology or simply the changing pace of life in our world—has affected all of us.
The actual phone or device is not the root of our problem. It’s only the conduit to other things.
As comedian Gary Gulman jokes, “The phone is just a seldom-used app on my phone.”
Problems caused by distractions are narrowed down to three price tags you’ll need to pay, if not now, then at some point in the future:
1. The opportunity cost of the unknown.
2. The lack of traction caused by the distraction.
3. The failure to live your best life.
That time, that energy, that moment where you are present—it’s sacrificed and lost. An opportunity is lost with every distraction we feed. Your distractions are pulling you away from other things, important things, things and people you love and goals you want to achieve. Your distractions are keeping you from gaining momentum in your life. They are keeping you from gaining traction in your life. Look closely at the word again. Dis-traction. A lack of traction in life will eventually lead to disaster.
Countless people are busy and fill their days with loads of activities, only to collapse in bed at night exhausted. And they wonder, “Did I accomplish anything meaningful today?” Distraction-filled days lead to traction-less lives.
It’s no wonder our society is perhaps the most stressed, depressed, and anxious group of humans ever to walk the planet. A life of distractions is a shallow life, a life lived without self-awareness. It’s a life lived in constant anticipation of the next thing that will keep you from slowing down to listen to what’s happening within.
White Noise
You can bank on the fact that distractions will always be there, doing exactly what they say they will do. The promise behind many of the distractions in our lives is simple: If you pay attention to me, I promise you’ll stop thinking about whatever you were thinking about.
They’re quick fixes, short-term solutions for momentary escapes from this life.
The simple definition of a distraction is “something that prevents someone from giving full attention to something else.” Anything can be a distraction if it keeps us from the things we most need in order to be healthy and purposeful in every dimension of life.
Distractions keep us from focusing on what’s really driving us: the desires, emotions, motives, and needs that lie beneath the surface.
Here are three things that are almost always true about the white noise in our lives:
1. It’s masking something.
2. It’s constant.
3. It’s imperceptible.
Turn it down too low and you’ll start plucking out your eyebrows as every other distracting noise is amplified. But never turn it down and you might miss something that really needs your attention. White noise is constant—it’s always there. And it’s imperceptible—if you don’t stop to pay attention to it, you’ll never notice it.
You have your fingers on the knob of that white noise machine in your life. When something we don’t like is screaming inside us, we always find something outside—an external distraction—and turn it up. And it works. That outside noise distracts us for a time.
As one mentor said to Scroggins, “Your system is perfectly designed for the results you’re getting.”
Even words of affirmation can be a masking tool, keeping us from facing the truth about ourselves. If affirmation is not both loving and honest, it can leave us feeling worse on the inside. With all the positive messages we’ve given our children, you would think our world would be filled with secure, confident, and healthy adults. Not quite. Instead, our world is filled with adults brimming with confidence and crippled by insecurity.
When you don’t want to deal with what’s inside you, you’ll turn up the volume knob so the noise around you is louder and louder. Either you’ll learn to handle your emotions or your emotions will end up handling you.
Since 2014, the chart-topping song “Turn Down for What” could be heard in every club, every locker room, every dorm, and in my car on repeat. DJ Snake and Lil John confront us with an existential question of the highest order, asking if anything should cause us to not turn up.
It’s not enough to crank up the noise in your life. We aren’t looking for more enthusiasm or people who are going to try harder. We don’t want to mask what’s going on inside. So the answer isn’t turning things up. Before we can lead with passion, we need to turn the noise down. We need to find space and quiet to learn how to listen—to hear what’s being said inside us, where there is pain, where there are fears, where there are dreams and hopes that we’ve never said out loud. Being a better version of you demands that you turn down the noise.
Here are three steps to turning down the noise in your life:
1. Name your noise.
2. Experiment with your noise.
3. Listen to what’s there.
Whether the crowd is a group of business leaders, church leaders, parents of teenagers, or even college students, the most common answers are the same:
• Work
• Television
• Radio
• News
• Podcasts
• Exercise
• Alcohol
• Eating
• Shopping
Self-leadership demands that you know more about yourself than anyone else.
- What feels like it has become a habit for you?
- What would others say has become a distraction for you?
- When you’re stressed, anxious, fearful, or apathetic, where do you go—what do you do—to escape those feelings?
Your greatest sources of noise pollution are found near the answers to those questions.
While an unexamined life might still be worth living, if we don’t examine our lives, we’ll never experience anything better than what we have now. Dr. Howard Hendricks said, “Experience alone isn’t helpful. Evaluated experience is what’s helpful.”
Here’s a sad statistic. At least 55 percent of the population of the UK cannot see the Milky Way when they look up at the night sky. Their lovely British cities create so much light that the gorgeous collection of stars is virtually invisible to more than half the people living there.
When you remove the distortion other light creates, the stars seem to shine brighter. Remove the distortion to see more clearly. Quiet the noise to gain clarity.
The Three Villains of Leadership
Leadership can easily turn into a constant battle with external factors. Budgets. Calendar. Employees. Bosses. Market forces and trends. Technological change. Family. Bills. Public opinion.
Great leaders learn to focus intently on the internal factors only they can control. Leaders who stand out from the rest have learned to tune out the distraction of external factors, not by using white noise, but in a way that enables them to focus better on what’s going on inside.
Andy Stanley describes vision as “your preferred future.” When you constantly live in present mind, you’ll continue to operate in present mode, and the next few years won’t look much different than the last few—regardless of your level of output.
Painting a picture of your preferred future is worth every minute you spend on it.
In 1937 Napoleon Hill published the bestselling book Think and Grow Rich (see my summary here). What he found was that people who experienced extreme personal growth and improvement maintained fervid expectations for their future. In other words, when people had an outrageously positive vision for their preferred future self, they tended to become what they envisioned.
Three distractions have the strongest gravitational pull on leaders’ attention, which Scroggins calls the Axis of Distraction.
1. The Appearance of Success
Sometimes, underneath the appearance of success you’ll find someone stumbling toward mediocrity or even on a path toward failure. But our hunger for the appearance of success has earned fortunes for people with large social media platforms.
If you’re not careful, you’ll let the external noise of success distract you from focusing on the internal work that will lead you to growth.
Here’s a question we all need to wrestle to the ground: If the game isn’t ultimately about appearing successful, am I willing to lose all that in order to win?
Your leadership and personal influence are among the greatest things you’ll invest in during your lifetime. Don’t give up the learning, growth, and development to spend your time on the distraction of appearing successful. Or as Alexander Hamilton would say, “Don’t throw away your shot!”
2. The Allure of Progress
We all know progress is addictive. It’s hardwired into us. We like to see things passing by, some movement, to know that something—anything—is happening. So we stack our calendars with meetings. We require that every minor decision get our approval. We gamble on risky ventures to feel like we’re doing something. Do you know what that’s called? It’s the allure of progress. And it’s a dangerous distraction.
Progress is great. But lasting progress is something achieved over time, and it includes seasons of rest, practice, and preparation.
Some of the most successful people schedule dedicated “thinking time” into their calendars.
Something great leaders learn is that process can be more important than progress.
3. The Attraction of Certainty
The attraction of certainty is a dangerous distraction to our leadership because it leads us to compromise our integrity. In our longing to appear confident and certain, we become liars.
A 2002 study by the University of Massachusetts found that 60 percent of adults are unable to conduct a conversation of longer than ten minutes without telling a lie. Of those who lied, researchers found they told an average of three lies per conversation.
Other studies have shown that people will follow the person who appears most confident and certain, even if the slightest application of common sense would indicate that person has absolutely no idea what they’re talking about. People will follow you while you wing it—for a while. But when your duplicity becomes known, you will lose credibility and sacrifice your integrity.
The alternative is simple, but it is not easy: authenticity. Authentic leaders are comfortable letting others know they don’t have all the answers. You are okay with saying, “I don’t know. Let’s figure this out together.” Admitting there are times when you’re uncertain is a mark of humility, and this willingness to be open and honest is what gives you the opportunity to lead.
Being authentic, honest, and humble is not easy. It requires you to embrace vulnerability and self-awareness, qualities some of us are not comfortable showing to others. But vulnerable leaders will earn trust and increase their influence.
The Me of Leadership
We’re all guilty of sacrificing the big picture, the long-term gain, for what’s right in front of us.
Jesus warned the religious leaders of his day, the Pharisees, of the dangers of focusing too much on the outside, of counting the external signs of success, while forsaking the health of their interior lives.
Without self-awareness—an understanding of who you are, what you feel, and why you do the things you do—you will not be emotionally healthy. And the last thing the world needs is more leaders who are emotionally constipated, sick with an inner disease they don’t even realize they have.
Do you know the phrase “What you don’t know can’t hurt you”? That’s one of the dumbest sayings in the English language. What you don’t know can hurt you. It can destroy your life and take you out as a leader. The number one reason leaders crash and burn is that they’re unaware of something about themselves—or at the very least are unwilling to face it and admit it.
The old cliché is still true: the secret of leadership is knowing yourself. (Check out my January 2016 post on “Leading Yourself.”)
A leader who doesn’t know themself is a dangerous guide.
One of the skills we must learn to cultivate is emotional curiosity. Justin, one of Scroggins’ coworkers, remarked to him, “Noise and distraction kill our curiosity.”
Dr. Brené Brown offered many insights in her incredibly popular TED Talk “Listening to Shame” (the one that’s been viewed several million times), Dr. Brown says, “Shame is a focus on self, guilt is a focus on behavior. Shame is, ‘I am bad.’ Guilt is, ‘I did something bad.’ How many of you, if you did something that was hurtful to me, would be willing to say, ‘I’m sorry. I made a mistake’? How many of you would be willing to say that? Guilt: I’m sorry. I made a mistake. Shame: I’m sorry. I am a mistake.”
This is where faith intersects with the way you relate to your emotions. While you listen to them, name them, and question them, ultimately you have to discipline yourself to see your emotions through the lens of how God sees you and what He has said about you.
We are not infallible. We are often wrong. We make mistakes. We don’t always understand the big picture. So we need guides to help us in separating what is right from wrong, true from false. That’s where we can rely on God to guide us.
Don’t believe what your emotions say to you. Test and evaluate. Becoming an emotional detective requires three things: listening to your emotions, naming them, and questioning them.
Internal and invisible decisions to develop emotional health will determine your leadership lid. Those invisible decisions are what will develop visible results in leadership.
Noise-Canceling Habits
You are already an emotional being and don’t need to become more emotional; rather, you need to become more emotionally aware. You need to find space to tune in to the emotions that are already inside you.
The only way to combat the old habits of distraction is to develop new habits to create space for emotional curiosity. These new habits provide the framework for the next four chapters—finding the why, speaking to yourself, getting quiet, and pressing pause. Great leaders practice these habits intentionally and consistently to create and maintain emotional health.
If you’re in a new leadership role or feel like you are in over your head right now, the book of Proverbs is a great place to ground yourself in common but crucial wisdom for all areas of life. Solomon uses a wonderful word picture to show what it looks like to lack emotional awareness and health in Proverbs 25:28, “Like a city that is broken into and without walls is a man who has no control over his spirit.”
As you get started on the road to emotional health and greater self-awareness, everything in you is going to want to focus on the visible results. But it’s the invisible habits of self-reflection, self-inspection, and self-discovery that will allow you to develop into the leader you want to be.
Scroggins now introduces the four key habits you need to integrate into your life.
Habit One: Finding Simplicity
We have something that drives us. It can be a set of values or a way of seeing the world. It can be a goal we want to reach or a person we want to appease. Deep within all of us, something pushes us to do the things we do and to behave the way we behave.
When you can clarify your why—the answer to every “why do you do what you do” question—you can start to live and lead effectively.
Michael Jordan—the best basketball player ever to play the game (sorry, LeBron)—was cut from his high school basketball team as a sophomore. Later on, he said that whenever he was working out and felt tired or wanted to stop, he would close his eyes and think about the list of varsity basketball players hanging in the school locker room without his name on it. And that was what got him going again
God has not wired you for one single, repetitive task. He is molding you for something, but you are not a robot following a computer code. You are a work of art, a malleable being created to change and be changed.
Good leaders know three things: where they’re coming from, where they’re going, and how they’re going to get there. The discipline of simplicity takes a look at the first of those things: where you’re coming from.
What is your driving sentence? Simplicity brings clarity.
Answer some questions. What are the things you no longer need? What can you afford to get rid of? What are the things keeping you from what matters most? What are your essentials? And remember, the answers to these questions will stem from your answer to the earlier question: What is your why?
The distinction between important and urgent comes from something known as Dwight D. Eisenhower’s decision matrix. Eisenhower is famously known to have said, “What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important.”
Scroggins notes, “I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve chosen to answer emails, texts, and phone calls instead of working on a sermon I was supposed to give in a few days. Now, there’s nothing inherently wrong with answering emails and texts. The problem occurs when we consistently choose those things over the big, overarching tasks we’ve been given. When we clarify what’s important, we can simplify our lives.”
When you know your why, your what becomes more impactful because you’re walking in your purpose. Your life will always hold some tension between accomplishing what’s important (but not urgent) and being tempted to focus on doing what’s immediate and urgent.
Here’s your challenge: Simplify what’s important to you in each aspect of your life. Try to make your main goal one sentence. Simplicity boils down to knowing why you do what you do.
The why becomes your filter for making the tough decisions of what to do and what to drop, what to keep and what to give away.
Instead of letting little tasks take you away from your big goals, save all your little tasks for one day and turn that batch of tasks into one big goal.
Habit Two: Speaking to Yourself
If simplicity is about finding your why, then self-talk is about finding your way.
The distractions in your life will constantly fight to keep you from both your why and your way. The destination you desire will determine the direction you choose.
That voice inside your head has power. It can control your day by discouraging and demotivating, or it can encourage and empower. The great news is, it’s up to you. You are able to control that little voice. Really, you can.
Psalm 42:5 says, “Why, my soul, are you downcast? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God.” David was hyper-aware of his inner self. He knew the voice inside his head, and he wasn’t afraid to talk back to it. In Psalm 42, we see that he was downcast. Something was wrong or something had upset him. And not only did David know himself well enough to recognize this, but he took the time for some introspection.
But David didn’t stop there. He acknowledged the negative self-talk and did something to change it. He reminded himself of truth, and he reminded himself of what was good. David gives us the key to positive self-talk—reminding ourselves of truth.
The main way to regulate your inner voice is to filter out the noises that aren’t adding value. Odds are, too much information is coming into your head for you to continuously self-regulate.
Self-talk is happening inside your head whether you like it or not. But you want to make sure your desired self is included in your self-talk. You know the kind of leader you want to be. Self-talk can be the way you remind yourself of your goals, while helping you reach them at the same time.
It’s important to give yourself the time and the space to be alone. Here are two good questions to ask as you set up your calendar:
1. What is motivating me to say yes to this?
2. Is there someone else who can do this?
Here are two other self-regulating questions you can ask yourself:
1. What would a great leader do here?
2. What advice would I give someone else who was in this situation?
Now, these questions have less to do with our calendars, but asking them of ourselves is a healthy habit to get into. Great leaders are always thinking and always asking questions.
Self-talk will help your days be not only more productive but more positive.
Give yourself the freedom today to do something that might be a little strange: Talk to yourself. Listen. Slow down and ask self-regulating questions.
Habit Three: Getting Quiet
Would you try something before we move on? Silence your phone, turn off the music, and set a timer for two minutes. Sit silently until the alarm goes off. How was that?
We are not comfortable with silence, but silence is so powerful.
Emotionally healthy leaders turn down the noise low enough and long enough to allow space for curiosity. Silence is scarce. Honestly, it might even be nonexistent.
Many of us are missing out on two crucial habits that can change our lives for the better: silence and solitude.
In only a handful of verses, Mark shows us how crucial silence and solitude were in the life of Jesus. If God incarnate needed silence and solitude, we should pay attention to our own need for these things as well.
After a long day, Jesus did not sleep in. Instead, we read, “And rising very early in the morning, while it was still dark, he departed and went out to a desolate place, and there he prayed” (Mark 1:35). If Jesus knew and acted on the importance of getting away, getting alone, and getting quiet, shouldn’t we?
Thomas Merton, the famous monk, writer, and theologian, said about silence and solitude, “Not all men are called to be hermits, but all men need enough silence and solitude in their lives to enable the deep inner voice of their own true self to be heard at least occasionally.”
Find your place, find your time, and find your practice.
Scoggins notes, “Something about starting the day in slow silence allows me to pray and prepare for what’s ahead. It allows me to clear my mind of any clutter and get ready for whatever the day will bring.”
Research says we’re all headed toward becoming morning larks. Researchers have found that only 7 percent of young adults are morning larks. But by age 60, only 7 percent of people are still night owls. Also, morning larks tended to say they felt happier than night owls.
Whether you practice silence and solitude in the morning, throughout the day, or at night, you can’t do it without intentionality. As Russell Westbrook says in that Mountain Dew commercial, “Don’t do they. Do you.”
Theologian, professor, and author Donald Whitney writes: “Culture conditions us to be comfortable with noise and crowds, not with silence and solitude, and to feel more at home in a mall than at a park.”
C. H. Spurgeon made this exact same observation over one hundred years ago: “Few men truly know themselves as they really are.” If you want to be a good leader, knowing who you are and what you’re about is crucial.
One of the great benefits of solitude is that it helps us slow down. That’s why it’s an important way to start the day. Once the day gets going, it can be difficult to stop. The rhythms of life move quickly, and we can easily find ourselves falling behind.
If you enter into a place of solitude with an agenda, you won’t find rest or peace. So resist the desire to do something or to get something done. Sit with your thoughts and slow down.
There’s nothing to achieve—no accomplishment to show at the end of five minutes alone. The benefits are entirely internal and often unfelt. Stick with it. The practice of solitude takes time, but it’s worth the consistency.
Once you learn to get away and get alone, all that’s left is to get quiet. You can do three things to make this step easier and more rewarding.
1. Shut Up
It’s easy to “practice” silence and solitude when, in reality, all you’re doing is talking to yourself or thinking out loud. Truly getting silent means shutting up the critical thinking part of your brain. This is the challenge: listen to the silence.
2. Shut Off
Getting quiet means shutting off the things that make noise. Technology is a great thing. It has done wonders for our society and our culture—moving us forward in ways we never could have imagined. But it has virtually eliminated silence and solitude from our regular daily habits.
3. Shut Down
Don’t shut down in a negative sense—by withdrawing or avoiding conversation when you’re hurting or upset. The type of shutting down Scroggins encourages is simply a way of unwinding from the day. It’s putting the noise behind you and letting yourself lean into silence.
Great leaders turn down the noise low enough and long enough to be ruthlessly curious about their emotions. Shutting up, shutting off, and shutting down are going to work wonders for your mental, physical, and emotional health.
In John Ortberg’s book The Life You’ve Always Wanted, he gives helpful advice for change, which he attributes it to Dallas Willard’s book The Spirit of the Disciplines. Ortberg summarizes the advice so clearly: “There’s an immense difference between training to do something and trying to do something.”
Habit Four: Pressing Pause
One of the strongest examples of pressing pause is found in the concept of the Sabbath. For thousands of years, cultures have instituted and instilled the value of taking breaks from work for the sake of rest and reflection.
Sabbath is a churchy word. Sabbath isn’t only about Sunday and it isn’t only a spiritual practice. It’s a personal discipline for the sake of becoming a healthier person, which will make you a better leader.
After God made everything, he took a day of rest. What his day of rest did was set a precedent for people to follow. Remembering the Sabbath is number four in the Ten Commandments. (Check out my previous posts on Sabbath Rest and the book Keeping the Sabbath Wholly.)
God instructed his people to rest on the seventh day, and here is what he gave as his reasoning: “For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy” (Exodus 20:11).
The weekend has turned from a time of relaxation into a time to catch up on extra work from the week and get ahead on what’s to come. Our exhausting efforts have become their own form of noise. For many of us, work has turned from a means to an end to the actual end itself. Work-life balance has turned into work-work balance.
It’s clear that from the beginning of time, God designed life to look different.
When accused of breaking the Sabbath, Jesus replied, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27). The Sabbath isn’t about a specific day. It’s about intentionally pressing pause in order to rest in what we know to be true of God—that he designed us, that he knows our needs, and that he knows exactly how to meet those needs. J. D. Greear, author and pastor, describes the Sabbath this way, “The point is that Christ is Himself the Sabbath, and if we are resting and rejoicing in His resurrection, we have fulfilled this Commandment.”
Following Jesus makes life better and makes you better at life.
Here’s the secret of the Sabbath: rest can be found, not at the end of a to-do list, but in the midst of everything you do. The Sabbath is a recognition of the tension that we are called to work hard but to trust God with our work.
Scroggins points out, “The more I learn about the power of fasting, the more I realize it’s not only about food. If the original intent of the Sabbath was to turn down the distractions and noise for the sake of trusting God more, then fasting is simply a form of the Sabbath. Fasting from anything—whether food, social media, shopping, or work—is a practical way to implement the principles of the Sabbath in many areas of life.”
Entrepreneur and angel investor Timothy Ferriss fasts specifically from social media; he describes social media and the benefits of fasting like this: “It’s just a low-grade anxiety that follows [people] all day, so it’s become their new normal. When they take away the social media, even for 24 hours . . . it is incredible what a psychological relief it is and how much recovery it allows people to have.”
When you turn down the noise, you give yourself the gift of evaluation. What are the areas of your life where you need a break? What keeps you from finding rest?
Pick something to quit. Not because it’s bad, but simply to learn what you wouldn’t learn otherwise.
Finding space away from all the distractions can give you the chance to find your why.
Literally, the Sabbath is a time of rest. But the key here is to incorporate it into your weekly, if not daily, rhythm. Otherwise, it’s something you practice only once in a while—usually after burning out mentally or physically.
Sabbaticals are especially helpful for super-driven people. They remind us that work still happens with or without us. When we step back from our work, we’ll realize two things. One, that we are replaceable and the work will go on without us. Two, that the world is bigger than what we’re working on.
Pressing pause helps us see this bigger picture. Because the truth is, between the speed of the world and the noise of the world, we’re doing everything we can just to keep up.
The reason the weekend should be a weekly sabbatical is because that’s where you’ll most likely find the space you need. The key is finding the best time to slow down. Really slow. Down. Slowww. Dowwwn.
Master Control
One of the reasons leadership growth is so difficult for you and me is because so much in our lives resists growth. Growth requires change. Change requires giving up something today for something better tomorrow. Most people don’t like giving up that kind of control. Actually, growing as a leader has more to do with control than most realize.
The idea of self-control is that you actively and intentionally choose what controls you. You can willfully decide to be controlled by who you want to be, how you want to grow, and what habits you want to determine your future.
Being alert is about awareness, but it is also about self-control.
Think about it for a moment: If Paul is right (and he gave his life for this) that the power of the Almighty is actually available to lead you and control you, why would you not want to tap into his leadership and control?
If you never turn down the noise of the distractions around you, you will miss what’s most important for your own growth as a leader.
Here are the four areas of your life that you don’t want to miss out on.
1. Being the Best You
When you open yourself up to the idea of letting God have control of your life, you are on the pathway to developing into the best version of you. The best you is not a destination. Being the best you actually happens along the journey.
2. Having a Vision for Your Life
Ask God, “What do you want for my life?” It’s a question of surrender. It’s your way of saying, “I want what you want more than I want what I want.”
You can lead others better when you feel like you know where you’re going in your own life.
3. Caring Well for Others
You can’t care well for others until you’re caring well for yourself. To quote Lauryn Hill from her album, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, “How you gonna win when you ain’t right within?”
4. Hearing from God
Finally, you’ll never be able to hear from God until you turn down the noise. Hearing from God works in tandem with giving up control. The more you give him control, the more you can hear from him.
God doesn’t often force us to turn down the noise. But he also doesn’t want to have to shout over the noise. Eventually, though, when he wants to speak, he will. And if he has to turn down the noise to get our attention, he will. He loves us too much to not. Why make him wait? Why make him turn down the noise for us?
Leadership has an endgame. And it doesn’t have to do with you. Leadership is always best when it’s for the sake of others and for the good of others. Be clear on that.
Know this: you have a God who goes before you and who fights alongside you.
Scroggins concludes, “And when you can begin to habitually decrease the distractions and noise in your life and leadership, the world will be better for it! Let’s raise the volume of our influence by turning down the noise!”
Out of This World Leader, take time to Simplify your life today and practice these four simple habits for turning down the noise, so you can lead more effectively in this world of distraction!