What Race Are You Running?

Preface: 

What is the purpose of life? I believe there is no answer as uplifting, encouraging, and fulfilling than knowing who you are and why you were born into this earth. As I reflect on my earlier days in high school and university, I recall periods in life singularly marked by peace and confidence -- whereas some of my peers were uncertain of their life's future. This lack of understanding and confidence in who I am generated an unsettling effect on every aspect in their lives. All these unanswered baggage of questions begin to boil inside you, such as "Why do I need to study?...Is this to merely earn a good living and live a happy life?...What is a happy life anyways?  What is a successful life and why do I need to part of it? These are some of the difficult questions my friends were struggling with. 

As I consider the numerous blessings God has bestowed in my life, one of them is the confidence in life. Growing in my faith through reading and studying the lives of prominent Christian thinkers and writers such as C.S Lewis, Ravi Zacharias, William Wilberforce, and Tim Keller became instrumental in forming a biblically sound worldview. 

A new beginning and a new chapter in life... I'm at a crossroads in life. Past 20 years of formal schooling is over. I began to realize different competencies or skill sets are required in different stages of life. I spent the last decade or so being focused on few things: success as a student, cultivating skill sets for future career, and building relationships. Now I think I need to readjust my priorities and begin to unlearn and relearn many of the new skill sets required as a professional. Embracing change is always difficult especially when you see what it is required of you in the future.

Nonetheless, one thing should never change. Our relationship with Jesus Christ. I will be honest. As I've been preoccupied with all my efforts acclimating to the new environment, people, and job, I seem to have neglected the most important thing in life. I felt a sense of shame and embarrassment after reading an article which I'd like to share with all of you. It helped to realign my priorities and rediscover what race I am running. I hope you enjoy it. 

In our book, Lead like Jesus – Lessons from the Greatest Leadership Role Model of All Time, Ken Blanchard describes an early morning scenario -- the daily conflict between the task oriented "Human Doing" and the reflective "Human Being" side of our nature. "We all have, in a sense, two selves. We have a task-oriented self that is used to getting the job done and a more reflective side that is very thoughtful. Which of the two selves wakes up quicker in the morning: our external, task-oriented self or our internal and reflective self? Of course, it's our external, task-oriented self. 

What happens in the morning?  The alarm goes off! Have you ever thought about that phrase – alarm clock? What an awful concept! Why isn't it the "Opportunity clock?” Or the "It's going to be a great day clock?” The "alarm" immediately ignites your task- oriented self and you jump out of bed. Pretty soon you're trying to eat breakfast while you washing. You race to the car and immediately pick up the cell phone and rush off to meetings all morning, followed by lunch meetings, and a dinner meeting. Finally you get home at 9:00 or 10:00 p.m. and fall into bed exhausted, without any energy to say goodnight to your spouse. What happens the next day? The "alarm "goes off and you’re at it again. Pretty soon your life becomes a rat race. As Lily Tomlin once said, “The problem with a rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat.”

Not only does life on the run turn into a rat race, but it also turns into an act of just trying to survive the day no matter how noble and worthy the activities may be. When short term survival become the long term pattern of your life and ministry, it is easy to fall into the joy killing mindsets of victim and martyr.  Considering an over busy schedule as a badge of honor or a legitimate rationalization for not taking time to care for your own spiritual health or the mundane needs of  those relationships that make up your private world, is a dangerous act of self deception.

A striking aspect of the life of Jesus was His continuous habit of engaging in times of solitude. Time alone with the Father was an antidote to the ever present pressures of a life filled with people and situations that laid claim to all He had to offer in mind, body, and spirit. As you read Matthew 4:1-11 (a time of temptation), Luke 6:12-13 (a time of decision), Matthew 14:13 (a time of receiving bad news), Matthew 14:23 (a time of success and popularity), and Mark 1-32-38 (a time of choosing the best use of His time), one thing becomes clear -- Jesus always came away from times of solitude with renewed, purpose, energy and perspective to maximize the moment not just survive it. May this be so with you!

Phil Hodges
Phil Hodges, a lifelong friend of Ken Blanchard, served as a human resource and industrial relations manager in corporate America for 36 years with Xerox Corporation and U.S. Steel. In 1997, he served as a Consulting Partner with The Ken Blanchard Companies where he had responsibilities in leadership and customer service programs. In addition to helping leaders of faith walk their talk in the marketplace, Phil developed a passion for bringing effective leadership principles into the church  when he served as member and chairman of his local church elder council for over ten years. Phil finds his great joy in his life-role relationships as husband, father and grandpa. In 1999, Ken and Phil co-founded Lead Like Jesus where he serves as Chief Content Officer. He is the co-author of five books: Lead Like Jesus: Lessons from the Greatest Leadership Role Model of All Time, The Most Loving Place in Town: A Modern Day Parable for the Church, Leadership Development for Every Day of the Year and The Servant Leader with Ken Blanchard and Leadership by the Book with Ken Blanchard and Bill Hybels. Phil and his wife, Jane Kinnaird Hodges, live in southern California

Are you Emotionally Intelligent?

I cannot conceal the growing fascination on the subject of leadership. Leadership, at its core, is inherently ambiguous. The beauty of leadership, in fact, originates from ambiguity. The leadership guru Warren Bennis is right when he remarked "Leadership is a lot like beauty; it's hard to define but you know it when you see it." 

For the past few years, I've declared myself as a student of leadership -- one who continuously thinks, learns and applies key leadership principles in my daily life. One of the most positive realizations through this exercise has been a heightened sense of self-awareness - knowing, analyzing, evaluating, and appreciating my God-given talents, strengths and weaknesses. Most importantly, I have cultivated a coherent worldview of who I am, what I stand for, and what I live for.

I'd like share a book on Emotional Intelligence that I read last year with a good friend of mine, Bob Wang.  In essence, this book served as an ice-axe that has broken the frozen sea within me. A leading psychologist Daniel Goleman - author of his masterpiece "Primal Leadership." provides a ground-breaking perspective on the subject of leadership. He argues that the fundamental task of leaders is to prime good feelings in those they lead. That is, leaders create resonance - a reservoir of positivity that frees the best in people. Great leaders are more than strategy, vision or powerful ideas. The reality is that much more primal; they work through the emotions. 

Goleman proposes that the four dimensions of EI - self-awareness, self-management, social awareness and relationship management are the vehicle of primal leadership. Here, I'd like to share a list of EI dimensions and competencies that I found rather intriguing. I hope you this will be a food for thought and provide useful take aways. 

A good exercise on developing Emotional Intelligence is to identify the top two dimensions to which your capability is the highest. Also, write down the top five competencies you consider your strengths. Also, select the top five competencies you'd like to develop throughout the course of your life. Lastly, think of some specific, practical ways to harness and cultivate these competencies. 

EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE DOMAINS AND ASSOCIATED COMPETENCIES

PERSONAL COMPETENCE:
SELF-AWARENESS

• Emotional self-awareness:

o Leaders are attuned to their inner signals, recognizing how their feelings affect them and their job performance

o Attuned to their guiding values and can often intuition the best course of action
o Candid and authentic, and speak openly about their emotions or with conviction about vision

• Accurate self-assessment:
o Know their limitations and strengths and exhibit a sense of humor about themselves.
o Exhibit a gracefulness in learning where they need to improve
o Welcome constructive criticism and feedback
o Enables leaders to know when to ask for help and where to focus in cultivating new leadership strengths

• Self-confidence
o Know their abilities with accuracy and allow leaders to play their strengths
o Welcome difficult assignment
o Such leaders often have a sense of presence, a self-assurance that lets them stand out in a group

SELF-MANAGEMENT
• Self-control:
o Find ways to manage their disturbing emotions and impulses and even to channel them in useful ways
o Stay clam and clear-headed under high stress or during a crisis

• Transparency:
o Live their values
o Allow integrity through authentic openness to others about feelings, beliefs, and actions
o Openly admit mistakes or faults, and confront unethical behavior in others rather turn blind eye

• Adaptability:
o Juggle multiple demands without losing their focus or energy
o Comfortable with the inevitable ambiguities of organizational life
o Flexible in adapting to new challenges, nimble in adjusting to fluid change

• Achievement:
o Higher personal standards that drive them to constantly seek performance improvements
o Pragmatic, setting measureable but challenging goals
o Continual learning and teaching ways to do better

• Initiative:
o Seize opportunities or create them rather than simply waiting
o Does not hesitate to cut through red tape, or even bend the rules when necessary to create better possibilities for the future

• Optimism:
o See others positively, expecting the best of them
o Their “glass half-full” outlook leads them to expect that changes in the future will be for the better

SOCIAL COMPETENCE:
SOCIAL AWARENESS

• Empathy:
o Attune to wide range of emotional signals, letting them sense the felt, but unspoken, emotions in a person or group
o Listen attentively and can grasp the other person’s perspective.
o Makes a leader able to get along well with people of diverse backgrounds or from other cultures

• Organizational awareness:
o Politically astute, able to detect crucial social networks and read key power relationships
o Understand the political forces at work in an organization, as well as the guiding values and unspoken rules that operate among people there

• Service:
o Foster an emotional climate so that people directly in touch customer will keep the relationship on the right track
o Monitor customer or client satisfaction carefully to ensure they are getting what they need.
o Make themselves available as needed

RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT

• Inspiration:
o Create resonance and move people with a compelling vision or shared mission
o Embody what they ask of others, and are able to articulate a shared mission in a way that inspires others to follow
o Offer a sense of common purpose beyond the day-to-day tasks, making work exciting

• Influence:
o Finding just the right appeal for a given listener to knowing how to build buy-in from key people and a network of support for an initiative.
o Persuasive and engaging when they address a group

• Developing others:
o Show a genuine interest in those they are helping along, understanding their goals, strengths, and weaknesses
o Give timely and constructive feedback and are natural mentors or coaches

• Change catalyst:
o Able to recognize the need for the change, challenge the status quo, and champion the new order.
o Strong advocates for the change eve in the face of opposition, making the argument for it compellingly
o Find practical ways to overcome barriers to change

• Conflict management:
o Able to draw out all parties, understand the differing perspectives,
o Find a common ideal that everyone can endorse
o Surface the conflict acknowledge the feelings and views of all sides, and then redirect the energy toward a shared ideal

• Teamwork and collaboration:
o Generate an atmosphere of friendly collegiality and are themselves models of respective, helpfulness and cooperation
o Draw others into active, enthusiastic commitment to the collective effort, and build spirit and identity.
o Spend time forging and cementing close relationships beyond mere work obligations

P.S. Here's a 10-minute short clip on EI from Dr. Goleman. Enjoy!

Five Golden Rules of Effective Change Efforts: People

Ashley Harshak, Deanne Aguirre, and Anna Brown, leading organizational change experts at Booz & Company, offers five indispensable factors that make the greatest difference in fostering behaviors that are needed for successful transformations.

Underlying these five pointers is a heavy emphasis and importance of people in this equation of reaping the benefits of change efforts. Change is, at the heart of it, a people process, and people are creatures that are hardwired to defy resistance of status quo and adoption of new mind-sets and behaviors. Companies often overlook the people-oriented change process prior to rolling out a change management initiative. It is no wonder why two third of organizations grind to a half because of their failure to produce for hoped-for results. A successful business transformation efforts must capture the hearts and minds of people who need to operate differently to deliver the desired results.

What is Change Management? 
Harshak suggests that change management is both a capability and a set of interventions that deliver the people-oriented side of change effort. The main target of the change efforts are geared toward employees in all level of hierarchy. It helps embed desired behaviors to sustain the longevity  of the success of change efforts.

Five Golden Rules:
1. Understand and spell out the impact of the change on people. 
A clear-eyed assessment of the impact on its various employee groups is a pre-requisite to such a transformation efforts. This means identifying the type and scale of changes affecting each segment of employees. More importantly, this assessment allows team members to define what the change means to them personally.

A well-known global energy firm did exactly that when it produced a change impact analysis with a “heat map” illustrating the intensity of change for each group of employees, and a detailed description of the changes each role would need to deliver. As a result, the leadership team was able to focus and redirect the transformation program to address the challenges facing those in the roles most affected. Moreover, project teams identified areas of potential overlap and conflict in the impact of various initiatives. Finally, the analysis informed the plans and sequencing of the overall transformation program and became the basis for communications with managers. In cascade fashion, managers received the message from their supervisors and then delivered it to their teams.

2. Build an emotional and rational case for change. 

I often noticed already during my first day at work, making a rational case for change is done systematically and with great success. However, only few initiatives appeal to the people's emotional core. In actuality, it is the people's emotions where the strength of the real transformation lies. Therefore, the communication of such changes need to be targeted to each segment of the workforce and allow a two-way medium for interpreting the change. If you ask an employee to follow a creative way of doing work, you need to make a strong emotional case for the change so they become genuinely committed to the transformation. By providing every details of what will change - and what won't into the presentation allows leaders to paint a vivid picture for what the change means for the employees personally, not only why it benefits the business. 

3. Ensure that the entire leadership team is a role model for the change.

Senior leaders must be not only 'on top' of the change program, but also 'in front' of it by modelling the new behaviors they ask asking for their people to adopt and holding one another accountable for the initiative's success. Only by walking the talk, employees will take the new change seriously. 

An aligned and committed leadership team is the foundation for any major corporate undertaking. When executives lead by example, the impact can be profound. One senior director found that it was only after he introduced ongoing performance discussions with his direct reports that his team started to hold similar sessions with their own direct reports. This requires consistent attention, but that level of engagement will make the difference between success and failure.

4. Mobilize your people to 'own' and accelerate the change. 

The fact of the matter is most change efforts are done "to" employees, not implemented "with" them or "by" them. Although a formal structure and system is in place to pushing behavior change from the top, an informal culture left isolated may dig in its heels. Jon Katzenbach, calls the informal organization - the network of peer-to-peer interactions - vital for encouraging and motivating such desired change in behaviors. A delicate balance between the formal organization and informal organization must be in order. 

5. Embed the change in the fabric of the organization. 

Most change initiatives' sponsors declare victory prematurely, diverting leadership, commitment, and focus from the ongoing effort. To embed the changes, there should moments of discussion acknowledging the lessons learned. Also by investigating into how to engage and involve employees over the long term and how to institutionalize best practices to capture the full benefit of this change .


For full article, please click here.

Think on These Things

The following article is one that I've referred back to many times over the last several years, especially when I embark on a new year. I assure you that it's worth 3 minutes you will invest in reading this-- I can promise you that. 

One of the tragic casualties of our age has been that of the contemplative life--a life that thinks, a life thinks things through, and more particularly, thinks God’s thoughts after Him. A person sitting at his or her desk staring out the window would never be assumed to be working. No! Thinking is not equated with work. Yet, had Newton under his tree, or Archimedes in his bathtub, bought into that prejudice, some natural laws would still be up in the air or buried under an immovable rock. Pascal’s Pensees, or “Thoughts,” a work that has inspired millions, would have never been penned.

What is even more destructive is the assumption that silence is inimical to life. The radio in the car, Muzak in the elevator, and the symphony entertaining callers "on hold" all add up as grave impediments to personal reflection. In effect, the mind is denied the privilege of living with itself even briefly and is crowded with outside impulses to cope with aloneness. Aldous Huxley’s indictment, “Most of one’s life... is one prolonged effort to prevent thinking,” seems frightfully true. Moreover, the price paid for this scenario has been devastating. As T.S. Eliot questioned:

Where is the life we have lost in the living?

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

The cycles of heaven in twenty centuries

bring us farther from God and nearer to dust.

Is there a remedy? May I make some suggestions for personal and corporate benefit? Nothing ranks higher for mental discipline than a planned and systematic study of God’s Word, from whence life’s parameters and values are planted in the mind. Paul, who loved his books and parchments, affirmed the priority of Scripture: “Do not go beyond what is written” (1 Corinthians 4:6). And Psalm 119 promises that God’s statutes keep us from being double-minded.

The church as a whole and the pulpit in particular must challenge the mind of this generation. The average young person today actually surrenders the intellect to the world, presuming Christianity to be bereft of intelligence. Many a pulpit has succumbed to the lie that anything intellectual cannot be spiritual or exciting.

Thankfully there are exceptions. When living in England, our family attended a church where preaching was taken quite seriously and one-hour sermons to packed auditoriums were the norm. Cambridge, being rife with skepticism, demanded a meticulous defense of each sermon text. I mention this to say one thing. When we were leaving Cambridge, our youngest child, who was nine years old, declared the preaching of this church to be one of his fondest memories. Even as a little boy he had learned that when the mind is rightly approached, it filters down to the heart. The matter I share here has far-reaching implications. We do a disservice to our youth by not crediting them with the capacity to think. We cannot leave this uncorrected.

The Bible places supreme value on the thought-life as that which shapes all of life. “As a man thinks in his heart, so is he,” Solomon wrote. Jesus asserted that sin’s gravity lay at the level of the idea itself, not just the act. Paul admonished the church at Philippi to have the mind of Christ, and to the same people he wrote: “[W]hatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think on these things” (Philippians 4:8). The follower of Christ must demonstrate to the world what it means not just to think, but to think justly. That is, in the words of aging David to his son Solomon, to “acknowledge the God of your father, and serve him with wholehearted devotion and with a willing mind, for the LORD searches every heart and understands every motive behind the thoughts. If you seek him, he will be found by you; but if you forsake him, he will reject you forever" (1 Chronicles 28:9).

Let us serve the God of creation with both hearts and minds. After all, it is not that I think, therefore, I am, but rather, the great I Am has asked us to think, and therefore, we must.

Ravi Zacharias is founder and president of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries. He has arguably best followed the footsteps of C.S.Lewis. He is a spiritual role-model in the 21st century. Unlike most theologians, his rare talent of capturing the essence of the Bible through interweaving the various disciplines (philosophy, science, and history) and speaking with such eloquence and genuineness lends not intellectual credibility as an ambassador for Christ. 


I often visit his website(RZIM) to listen to the free podcasts. Listening to his sermons are like finding an oasis in the lost desert. I assure you that you'll find it likewise.


Please do check out the following lecture. It'll be worth it -- trust me. It's one of my favorite ones:

• Apologetics and Worldviews (Part 1 of 2)
• Apologetics and Worldviews (Part 2 of 2)