Live Intentionally

I was blown away once again by this year’s Willow Creek Association Leadership Summit!  From the thought provoking words from the speakers to the inspiring interviews to the inspirational music I’m returning home with my heart and my head overflowing.

But now comes the most important part of the entire Summit.  As I re-enter the “real world” if all I take away from the Summit is inspiration I may do life a little more inspired for a little while, but within a week or two that inspiration will fade and I’ll be back at the same place I was before the Summit.  As John Maxwell once said, “If within 3 days of a conference you do not have an acion plan in place that you follow, one year later nothing will have changed.”

Here’s what I’m going do to process what I’ve heard and put it into action…

1. Pray and ask God to make it clear what he would have me do.
2. Review my notes from each session.
3. From each session highlight a) what I need to think on some more, b) any new goals or action steps I may want to take.
4. Think and pray over those items I need to ponder.  Then be quiet and listen for God’s still small voice.  If I sense God is working on me on something and it’s not clear if or what I should do, I’ll continue pray and listen some each day and probably journal and talk with a close friend or two until it becomes clear. 
5. Take all the possible goals and prioritize them.
6. Consider those goals in the context of my existing life.  Are these possible new goals more important than what I’m already doing?
7. Create a 6 x 6 plan.  What 6 things am I going to accomplish in the next 6 weeks?  Set a specific date for each goal to be accomplished.  (BTW, I’m not going to get hung up on the number 6.  If its 5 things or 8 things, then that’s what it is.)
8. Write out the specific action steps it will take to reach each of those 6 goals with completion dates for each step.
9. Create a “stop doing” list.  Unless God intervenes, my days are still going to be 24 hour long.  I can’t add more things to my schedule without removing other things.  What am I willing to give up in order to accomplish these 6 things?
10. As soon as it’s complete, share my 6 x 6 plan with at least one other person who participated in the Summit.

If you participated in the Summit what are you doing to process what you heard?  What questions and issues do you have to sort through in order to know what action steps to take?  And finally, what’s your plan - what goals are you setting and what action steps are you taking as a result?

I’ll leave you with one parting thought…

“Ideas without action are worthless.” — Helen Keller

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 11th, 2007 at 10:13 pm and is filed under Self-improvement, Leadership. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.