Written in Heaven

I recently saw a movie where one of the characters was a high profile business man in charge of hundreds of people. He had a huge salary, a beautiful home, and drove a BMW. He was a leader. In the movie, he decides that he’s tired of leading so he quits his job and gets hired on as a cashier at a local fast food restaurant. When he’s interviewing he says, “I want the least amount of responsibility possible. I especially don’t want anyone reporting to me.”

If you’re in leadership, it’s inevitable that you’ll have days where you feel like doing exactly what he did. I had a friend who’s a staff pastor. Recently the senior pastor called in all the staff to let him know that he was leaving – out of the blue. He was exhausted and simply burned out. Those stories are sad, but unfortunately happen often.

So what do we do as leaders to avoid exhaustion? Here are some tips I know work (even if I don’t stick to them the best myself from time to time):

· Take good spiritual care of yourself. You have to lead yourself before you can lead others. This is especially true spiritually. Spend time daily communing with God through the Bible and through prayer.

· Take good physical care of yourself. Eat right, sleep right, and exercise right.

· Create margin in your schedule. If you feel like you’re stuck in the rat race, stop doing so much. Write down all of the roles and responsibilities you have in order of importance on a sheet of paper and stop doing the last 4 or 5. Shameless BridgeWay plug: check out ‘How to be Rich’ – Creating Margin message for good stuff here - great message (series) by Dale.

· Have fun and don’t take yourself so seriously.

There are about 500 other things you can do, but this will help you on your journey to being an excellent leader.