This past Thursday-Friday was the Global Leadership Summit—a two-day simulcast event designed to equip and empower leaders from every arena … the marketplace, academia, the military, government, and the non-profit sector. From the person who carries tremendous responsibility in a Fortune 500 company to the man or woman who leads a small group at their church, it had something to offer of value and worth. Featuring more than a dozen speakers from different settings and different places around the world, it attracted more than 80,000 registrants at approximately 500 satellite locations across the country.
I’ve been to the Global Leadership Summit seven or eight times over the years. It is one of those events you can count on always being exceptionally practical, wonderfully informational, and extraordinarily inspirational. This year’s event was no exception. But this year’s event was different from any other I’ve been a part of in years past in that our church served as a host site. I was the point person of the team that handled all the logistics associated with pulling off an event of this magnitude.
Obviously, when you do anything for the first time, there are points along the way where you’re feeling your way forward. You don’t know what you don’t know until you realize you don’t know it! And, as is the case with any event, there are unforeseen things that happen that you can’t plan or prepare for (like getting to church on Friday morning to find that the internet that was going to carry the livestream was down). Dealing with the unexpected without coming apart at the seams is part and parcel of leadership. And after spending about thirty minutes troubleshooting and realizing that the router needed to be rebooted, we got the internet back up and running about thirty minutes before the first session began.
At every GLS, there are memorable statements made that echo in my heart and will linger in my head. Here are some of them from this year’s event.
—As a leader, you can have control or you can have growth, but you can’t have both. To create an atmosphere of growth, you must endure some significant chaos.
—The best leaders don’t obsess about controlling outcomes; they obsess about empowering the people around them.
—Uncertainty is not an indication of poor leadership—rather, it underscores the need for leadership.
—There is a difference between being fearless and being brave. The brave person is the person who takes action in spite of his or her fears.
—The enemy of success is not failure but, rather, comfort. When we are comfortable, we often won’t push through and tackle the thing we need to tackle in order to be successful.
—The things that we think of as our biggest setbacks are often God’s biggest set-ups.
—He gave me a no, but God gave me a knowing. Which one do we listen to, the no or the knowing? At the end of the day, we each have a knowing if we get still and listen. We must learn to turn down the volume on all those No’s and listen to the knowing.
—There are two types of people in this world: those who make you feel good when they walk into the room and those that make you feel good when they walk out of the room. The difference is civility. We are defined by how we treat each other.
—In every encounter, you either give life or you drain it. There is no neutral exchange.
—The difference between where you are and where you could be is the amount of pain you are willing to endure.
—Most of us are born looking like our daddy, but we die looking like our decisions.
—Commitment is doing what you said you’d do long after the mood you said it in has left you.
—So many leaders are not lost in some epic battle; they are lost in the monotony. How we steward the mundane moments will create the great moments.
—There are two kinds of leaders: (1) Leadership of a Pharaoh (someone who takes everyone captive to build everything in their image) and (2) Leadership of the Deliverer (they come into your life to help you become all you were meant to be).
—Change is the only constant in life. At the same time, truth is the only agent that effects true change. And truth, by its very nature, is confrontational—it confronts our attitudes, choices. Knowing what to change and what to continue is critical. If you change what you should continue, you lose your identity. If you continue what you should change, you become irrelevant.
—Legacy is a story about you yet to be written, a tale with which you hold the pen.
—Each of us has an “inner saboteur”—the voices in our heads that say, “You don’t belong here” or “You’re in over your head.” They key to overcoming it is to realize we were chosen for a reason.
—The opposite of unqualified isn’t qualified. The opposite of unqualified is chosen.
—Many of us talk about this past season of Covid as a test. But what if it wasn’t the test but the lesson and now, that we’re beginning to come out of it, is the test?