Back when I was in college I was in a program called LEAD. I learned two very important things about myself.
1) I’m not a leader. All my life I’d been grouped in with the “leaders”…mostly because I was an over-acheiver who didn’t know how to say “no” to any kind of committment, and because I was such a “doer,” I was able to fool people into thinking I was a leader. But alas, I learned I’m not. There are certain skills that I lack that are key to good leaders. These are things like vision, and charisma, among others.
2) Most importantly, I learned to think. We would come to meetings where we would just sit in a dark room for awkwardly long periods of time. At first this was fairly painful to me, as I would spend the time worrying about the other things I could have been doing at that moment. But over the four years I was in school, I got really good at the whole “clearing my mind” and “thinking and observing” process. In fact, by the end of it, I would go to these things and make consistant, bold observations about myself, my life, and my future. Things like “I feel like I’m called to minister, but I know that I’m not called to preach.” Another pretty good one was “I need to leave the country and do short term mission work on some sort of a periodic basis so that I don’t forget what life outside of America is like.”
Nothing I ever wrote down was rocket science, but rather the culmination of time and ideas, with nothing more than a 5 to 10 minute pause to collect the thoughts and write them down.
One thing I’ve learned since graduating is that if I don’t take time from my “busy” life and do this periodically, I will observe my life going nowhere. Why? Because I’m not “realizing” anything and taking action based on it.
(By the way, I put “busy” in quotation marks because if there’s anything I’ve learned in observing my behavior between college and now, it’s that the things that keep me “busy” are far less important than the long term thinking and observing sessions…and that I still use “busy” as an excuse to not take my eyes off the short term…and that is still a completely lame excuse, just like it was then)
But I read an interesting article the other day about taking time to clear your head and think. It was actually more of a conversation between Barack Obama and David Cameron of British Parliment. Regardless of what you think of either of these two people’s political views, you have to admit that they’ve made something of themselves, and taken themselves to a place of power and importance that most people will NEVER get to. And you have to respect that.
Want some help on the “how”? Here’s an interesting video from a lecture given at Google on this topic:
Fair warning…this video is an hour long. And I’ve only made it through the first half. But after the first half I was so motivated I cut him off so I could go and sit and think.
And that is what I did tonight.
And it was wonderful.
