The Difference Between Your Day Job and Your Real Job
By: Pastor Gabe Turner

 The hardest person you will ever lead is yourself. – John Maxwell

To lead yourself well means you must:  Embrace a shift

When I look back over the course of my adulthood, the greatest seasons of growth have come out of seasons when I felt stuck or stalled out. Not stuck in terms of a physical location, but in terms of my mindset. And when you feel stuck, there’s always an inclination to keep thinking on the same level. I love what Albert Einstein said, “You can’t solve your current problems with the same level of thinking you used to create them.”

Maybe you don’t need a change in job? Or a change of scenery? Maybe you need a change in mindset.

What I’ve grown to realize is that the way out of “stuck” is a change of my mindset. This is called a paradigm shift – a necessary change in my thinking.

Here’s an example. If you own a business, maybe you feel like rather than you owning the business, the business owns you. You need a change in mindset. You can’t just work in the business, you have to work on the business. A paradigm shift.

Or, a big one for me that I constantly have to return to regarding eating more healthy: Am I living to eat, or eating to live? A paradigm shift.

Here’s the biggest shift that I’ve ever experienced. There’s so much that’s been written on the value of emotional intelligence in leadership. Emotional intelligence is a term that was popularized by Daniel Goldman 25 years ago with his book Emotional Intelligence. In it, he identified four domains of emotional intelligence that fall into the two categories of managing your emotions internally and then managing your emotions externally.

As I studied this and then led out of what I learned, I felt like I was on a great trajectory of leadership growth until we hit a season as a church and personally that challenged everything I had been learning in a significant way. We had several young people pass away, infant through teenager, in a span of a month and a half. Soon after, I lost one of my best friends to cancer. Soon after that we had a trampoline accident – a bad broken ankle and surgery - and dad guilt. Then I turned 40… just felt like I was in a tailspin emotionally.

I knew I was missing something but didn’t know what. I cleared my schedule, got alone with God, and through a lot of prayer and reading came upon a shift that changed everything for me:

We are not primarily human beings learning to navigate the spiritual life. We are primarily spiritual beings learning to navigate human life.

There’s a deeper intelligence than emotional intelligence, and it’s what I call soul intelligence.

Emotional Intelligence to Social Intelligence

When we talk about soul intelligence, you have to first understand the soul’s importance -

Deuteronomy 4:9 (ESV)

“Only take care, and keep your soul diligently, lest you forget the things that your eyes have seen, and lest they depart from your heart all the days of your life. Make them known to your children and your children's children—

Two very general observations. One, your soul is of utmost importance, and second, what we’re talking about related to your soul has ramifications for your children and your grandchildren, and for those we lead. And if you’re not motivated by this discussion for your sake, if you don’t take it seriously for your sake, be motivated for the sake of those under your leadership.

Your soul is your true self, the changes you know you need to make will always be stunted. You’re thinking outside in, but the changes have to work themselves from the inside out. Maybe you struggle with your language, or your body language when you get bad news, you struggle with a temper or lashing out when things don’t go as planned, you struggle with lying when your back is against the wall, you struggle with overeating, or some type of addiction… you know you need to change, but you don’t know how. You have to embrace this shift in how you see yourself. It begins by acknowledging your true self, a soul – a spiritual being learning to navigate human life.