PP84 : The Three Best Things I’ve Learned This Year
Don’t stop learning. Whatever you do.
Let me share with you the 3 best things I’ve learned this year and how I am integrating them more into life as a bi-vocational pastor.
Learning is complex. For some folks, it means hard work. At other times it might mean admitting we struggled with some level of competency we had to admit that we didn’t have. But for others, learning means realizing there is space for new growth, increased experiences, and a better future.
In short, we need to always be learning.
Here are the best three things I learned this year.
The power of iteration
Do things more than once. Adjust them each time you do them.
Your gut might be right about the hopeful outcome, but it is your skillset that brings you there. And sometimes that skillset needs a bit of help.
I’ve also learned that the more important something is, the more times you probably need to work through it. So I’m currently thinking about what it means to scale iteration and do big things as small things.
Create time for what has you at your best
Pastor. It’s OK for you to be at your best. And to do that, you need to know what exactly that is.
One of the initial roadmaps is the CliftonStrengths assessment. It helps us understand “those vibes” that we might feel and why/how some work has a way of just absolutely and utterly draining us.
Other ways can simply be thinking through “best morning” routines.
No matter how you get at it, figuring out if a handful of practices help you be at your best is something that matters signficantly.
Back to the basics
My life is busy. I juggle 4 primary ministry responsibilities that are decently outside of the scope of each other (part-time pastor, denominational staff member, coach, and Productive Pastor).
I love my job.
But it is a lot. This year as every single part of it ramped up, I had to wrestle the productivity bear again. What I found out wasn’t some cool new app. It was the simple paper templates I’ve been making for years and sticking to a review process. All of that and my Weekly Trello Dashboard pretty much keep me focused an on track.