Safety and Pride

Whether you are new to leadership or have been serving others for decades, a valuable exercise is to take the time to ponder what you actually control in your career. It can be a scary thought and the results may surprise you.

Upon completing that experiment for myself, I began to consider that I want to control my environment because that brings a sense of safety to my life, because at the core of our being we all have a desire to feel safe. Reflecting on that further I had the thought that this could be a limiting mindset and that perhaps, my idea of safety and control were limiting my perception of different possibilities because of my own unwillingness to get uncomfortable.

One of the main reasons I, and perhaps others as well, struggled with relinquishing control boils down to pride. Proverbs gives us a clear warning of the dangers of pride in our lives and at the end of the day this is the limiting factor that contributes to many leaders' demise. Pride manifests itself with thoughts of “I got this” and “we’ve always done it this way”.

Those phrases can be red flags for the Christian leader and when pride is extracted from our life several new strengths are developed such as perception and experience. In this light, our desire to control outcomes to operate in a margin of safety actually prohibits us from experiencing what God could have planned because of disobedience to follow His will. Time to get used to getting uncomfortable.

Questions to Consider

1. How do you typically respond when presented with a new way to consider doing a task?
2. When has becoming uncomfortable and out of control helped you achieve more than imagined?