Kenneth Olson.org

Bring Into Focus

I don't know if it's a factor of age or what, but I've been in a season lately of re-thinking and redefining my life. Not only the "what", but also the "how" of my life. 

It's important to me that I be blindingly clear regarding my mission, sharply focused and undeniably effective at living and fulfilling my God-ordained mission.

So I love the quote I came across a great quote today by motivational speaker Anthony Robbins who once said One reason so few of us achieve what we truly want is that we never direct our focus; we never concentrate our power. Most people dabble their way through life, never deciding to master anything in particular.

The more you focus your life, the clearer you'll be regarding God's will, the more you'll enjoy life's journey and the more effective/productive you'll be.

Like focusing your camera before every shot, what area of your life do you need to frame and bring into focus?

Relevance Church Conference

I consider myself a fully committed life-time learner, so every opportunity I get to read, listen to CD's, podcasts and attend conferences, I do. I especially love to listen and learn from people who are veterans of their respective business field, ministry, leadership or life. 

So, I'm there whenever I get a chance to hear someone like Bill Hybels. He is no doubt one of the most influential leaders in the church today and leads one of the most influential churches in America. He is a compelling voice of wisdom, experience and balance to the generation that follows him.

Here are a few take home nuggets from his talk today at the Relevance Conference:

• Never get to the place where you are dangerously depleted spirit, soul and body. Do everything with your power to stay at a replenished level; it will cause you to make good decisions. Bad decisions are made in a depleted state.
• Take personal responsibility for your own replenishment levels.  
• Possess a daily, weekly, monthly and yearly strategy to replenish and re-charge yourself. John 15 - strive to live in the "abiding state"
• Know your own tell-tale signs that you are sinking into depletion (irritability, lack of laughter, see life as a grind, lack of creativity, tired....).
• Identify what inordinately depletes you. 
• Leaders clarify expectations
• The greatest leaders call something out of people, they inspire people to go beyond what they ordinarily would do without your leadership. 
• Leadership is getting the job done - moving people toward Christ-centered lives. 
• Questions a leader must ask him or herself often:  is my calling clear? is my passion hot? am I replenished? am I reading? am I meeting with the right people?am I hearing from God everyday? - that's leadership!

Random Thoughts on Being Focused

I'm convinced that everyday distractions are the greatest obstacles to fulfilling a dream, accomplishing a God-given mission or living a remarkable life. 

I've said before, we live in an age of distraction, a time when everyone including our kids suffer from the relentless barrage of information, activities, technology and culture. Much of it is good, yet it relentlessly competes for our time, energy and attention. 

It helps me to be reminded what I intentionally need to do to stay focused. Here are a few random thoughts/quotes on that issue. 

• Any person who has reach their potential in life and/or in God, has lived a focused life.  
• Don't mistake activity with productivity or accomplishment 
• It will take focus to become what God wants you to be.  
• You must become selective to be effective 
• Nothing is more potent than a focused life 
• Clear focus increases energy 
• Focused Christ-followers put God and His purposes first 
• Focused people make commitments, not excuses 
• Focused people don't meditate on difficulty, but the rewards 
• Focused people consider their strengths, not their weaknesses  

What Are You Daily Doing?

I've always been interested in the subject of human behavior, especially the things we do day after day, automated patterns of behavior or habits we all engage in. Whether you realize it or not they persistently and powerfully shape who we become and what we'll experience tomorrow.

Seth Godin, author of Permission Marketing once wrote he believes business leaders frequently look for quick fixes for their companies. He said, we need to stop shopping for lightning bolts. You don't win an Olympic gold medal with a few weeks of intensive training. There's no such thing as an overnight opera sensation. Great law firms or design companies don't spring up overnight...Every great company, every great brand, and every great career has been built in exactly the same way: bit by bit, step by step, little by little.

In other words, there's no "silver bullet solution". Success is not an overnight phenomena, instead it's slowly realized by what we repetitively do day in and day out. By the habit of daily praying, believing, working diligently, thinking positively, treating people right, doing the honorable thing when no one is watching, striving for excellence, and so on.

Such an important understanding to stay grounded in. It's these habitual and often unconscious behaviors that play a key role in success or failure, they literally determine where we'll be tomorrow. Whether we change or stay the same, whether we're prepared for an open door of opportunity, or remain in mediocrity? It all comes back to what repetitive thoughts, actions and behaivors you invest with every day.

Just something I'm thinking about.

How To Create Goals

Really enjoyed sharing this weekend on the power of God inspired goals. Ephesians 5:15-16 says, Live purposefully and worthily and accurately.....making the very most of the time (buying up each opportunity) (AMP) 

Creating a list of prayer-inspired goals represents the ability to live in such a way. It's power to create our future in advance. In an increasingly busy and distracting world, they remind us what's important and focus our lives on God's plan.

Here are a few steps to establishing effective goals and objectives for your life:

1) Begin with prayer - praying is seeing

2) Create goal categories - relationships, finances, physical, etc.

3) Get Ideas from others - check out this link to be inspired http://www.tedstake.com/?p=8

4) Be Specific - attached a timeframe, dollar amount, detail

5) Write down your goals - Habakuk 2:2

6) Involve others - for experience sake and accountability

7) Think big - a goal should require faith, absolute dependence of God for its fulfillment

8) Celebrate your wins along the way - enjoy and leverage your wins to build greater momentum to achieve the next goal.

Andy Stanley: Gaining & Sustaining Momentum

Here's a great post from Dave Ferguson's blog He outlined a few highpoints from a recent talk by Andy Stanley.

When we ask churches that are experiencing momentum, “Why?” they will often respond, “God is just blessing.”  Now that is a good answer, but that is not a helpful answer.  The follow-up question needs to be, “what is God blessing?”

Momentum:  Forward motion fueled by a series of wins.

What if there is a formula and commonality for momentum that God created.

3 COMPONENTS OF SUSTAINED MOMENTUM:  NEW, IMPROVED & IMPROVING

1. NEW

• New triggers momentum

• Anything new by definition, generates some kind of momentum

• The momentum can be positive or negative.

• Organizational momentum is often triggered by one of three things:

  • new leadership 

  • new direction 

  • new product

• Momentum is never triggered by tweaking something old.  It is triggered by introducing something new!

2. IMPROVED

• The new must be a noticeable improvement over the old.

• Ask, "is this a significant improvement over what we had before?"

• If you are in a situation where there is not enough money to do something new and improved, you are doing too many things.

3. IMPROVING

• Momentum is sustained through continuous improvement.

• Continuous improvement requires systematic evaluation.

• Continuous improvement requires unfiltered evaluation.

  • Evaluation must be rigorous and on-going and done by the people who helped create it.

APPLYING NEW & IMPROVED & IMPROVING

• NEW:  personnel, programming, season, series, look, venues.

• Look for ways to upgrade your presentation

• Visit other organizations

• Attend other churches

MOMENTUM STOPPERS

• Disengaged leaders

• Overactive management

• Complacency

• Complexity

• A breach of trust

A Few Things Well

As the pastor of a relatively new church, I'm always listening for God's direction regarding our next ministry step. I'm Constantly considering how we can most effectively focus our efforts to do a few things well.

Like anyone, I love lots of possiblities and options, whether it's at the ice cream shop, or solutions for solving a problem. It's easy to get caught up in information overload, become diluted and end up not doing anything or doing many things marginally well.

This is true for ministry, business or your personal life. What's important is to decide, commit and execute or follow through. To take spirit prompted and peace confirmed steps of faith that lead to a fuller experience of God's plan.

It's ok not to do everything everybody else is doing, however we should dial-in on what God is leading us to do. Few, but specific goals, objectives and dreams that can be done with passion, excellence and staying power, causing you to stand out in the marketplace, as an individual or ministry. Someone once said, If you're not remarkable, you're not memorable. 

So here are a few things we'll be focusing on at Authentic Life church in 2009: 

• Determine future development plans for existing or new facility  
• Develop and involve core leadership team
• Identify opportunities to become a more missional church
• Complete transition to our new brand and identity
• Create ways to communicate and execute our church mission
• Continue to raise our standard of ministry excellence
• Initiate small groups and youth ministry

• Implement church membership plan - help people connect and commit

Changing Culture

Recently, I was reading a blog by Phil Cooke and was inspired or maybe challenged is a better way to describe it, to think with a broader cultural context. I believe, as God's representatives, part of our mission is to present or communicate the Gospel in clear, credible, authentic ways that influence the culture and society around us. If Starbucks can completely change culture with a simple idea for a coffee shop, why can't we, with the greatest message the world will ever know?   

Here's what Phil wrote:

Brand expert Simon Williams says "Brands that influence culture sell more; culture is the new catalyst for growth."  The concept of changing culture is hot.  Look at Google - it's revolutionizing the way we work online - both personally and corporately.  There's also a rush for brands to be green and help the environment.  Those brands are getting a lot of buzz right now.  Right or wrong, the perception of impacting culture adds an important layer to your credibility.  The perception is that PC's are for bland business people, while Apple is for culture shapers and creators.  What are you doing to impact culture?  Whatever it is, you need to be talking about it.

Obama/McCain Interview

If you didn't get a chance to watch the Saddleback live civil forum live on FoxNews on Saturday night, you can still view it here online. Rick Warren, Pastor of Saddleback Church in Lake Forest California interviewed both John McCain and Barack Obama and asked them questions about leadership, faith and other questions pertaining to Christians. I'm going to check it out tonight.

Interesting, Sara and I visited and toured Saddleback Church back in April while we were on vacation, it's really an amazing church exercising much Godly influence in our nation and world.

Prayer - Prioritization - Focus

The individual who wants to reach the top in business must appreciate the might of the force of habit - and must understand that practices are what create habits. He must be quick to break those habits that can break him - and hasten to adopt those practices that will become the habits that help him achieve the success he desires. - J. Paul Getty

In my present season of life, there are three things that stand out to me as indispensable habits that have enabled me to steadily make progress and balance every part of my life.   

1) Prayer - for me, everything in life is born out of time spent quietly before the Lord. To listen, think, write and just be re-created spiritually and emotionally. According to scripture (John 16:13), the Holy Spirit is a guide, and from the Greek this literally means, one who leads another safely and precisely through a dangerous and unknown territory.

2) Prioritization - I find myself daily defining and prioritizing what tasks, opportunities, invitations, etc. are important to me. Deciding what's worth my time, energy and resources. I think in terms of what will move me toward God's goals and objectives for my life, what will yield the fruit I desire in my relationships, ministry, finances, etc..

3) Focus- the first two mean nothing without focus. I'm always reminding myself of my priorities and probably the greatest challenge, fighting off or saying NO to things that according to my priorities don't matter or minimally should be addressed at another time. Too many people major on minors in there lives and consequently never arrive at the destination they see in their heart.