Here are some interesting points regarding the concepts of nature and nurture.

Enjoy.

#1.  Your nature is basic to success

Your nature refers to your basic design.
You can’t function contrary to your basic natural design.

I know you’ll try to; you’ll make every effort to, particularly during those stupid moments that you succumb to the error of comparing yourself to others.

But you just can’t become anything other than what is determined by your nature.

You can only become whom and what you are.

Of course, humans have metamorphic capabilities. But that only goes to further establish the fact, because metamorphosis is essentially a process by which entities become what they’ve already been designed to be. The larva is able to metamorphose into a beautiful butterfly only because it has always been a butterfly by nature.

#2:  Your nature decides what environments would be favorable to your success

For instance, the nature of a fish is such that water is favorable to it, whereas the same environment would be absolutely destructive for a lion. The lion, on the other hand, thrives in the jungle – a terrain that would be very ‘poisonous’ to a fish.

One reason I challenge people to discover themselves is because understanding your own uniqueness enables you to consciously choose your environments on the basis of what would be favorable to your basic design..

#3: Your nature decides the relevance of your nurture

The relevance – or benefit – of what you feed on depends on your nature.

For instance, food that is good for a goat, might be poisonous to a human being.

As a result of the uniqueness of your design, not all information, company, or resources would be relevant to you. What’s good for the goose, might not be good for the gander!

#4:  You can’t nurture what’s not there in the first place

A natural quality must first exist before it can be nurtured. Training is essentially every effort to nurture and refine an ability or quality that one already possesses. To train as a footballer, you must possess the talent. To train as a musician, you must have the music ability already within.

Rather than trying to learn to do something you don’t naturally possess, discover something you already possess naturally. Then nurture it. That’s smarter.

Nurture can never create what nature has not given.

#5:  Your nature decides your potential – what you can ultimately become

A sheep can never become a shepherd. Both are of different natures. No matter how much you feed and train a sheep, it would never rise to the stature of a shepherd. This is because they are of different natures.

A fool is essentially different from a wise man. They are of different natures. No matter how much you teach a fool, he can never be wise. Wisdom is too high for a fool.

The saying ‘good followers make good leaders’ is flawed. Followership is a different nature from leadership.
A good follower doesn’t necessarily make a great leader except, of course, he has the nature of a leader.

Think about these 5 points again:

1. Your nature is basic to your success
2. Your nature decides what environments would be favorable to your success.
3. Your nature decides the relevance of your nurture.
4. You can’t nurture what’s not there in the first place.
5. Your nature decides your potential – what you can ultimately become.

Think and grow rich –

You must have read that famous book by Napoleon Hill, who, by the way, happens to be my favorite author.

So, are you really thinking, or are you merely wishing and day-dreaming?

Most folks wish and day-dream in the name of thinking, which is even better than those who would rather prefer to worry and be anxious about everything.

Some love to think. Others hate it. And for that reason, there will always be masters, and there will always be servants. Those who really think will always rule over those who are too lazy to think, or who substitute wishing for thinking.

Thinking is very hard. So, I don’t blame those who avoid it. But if you want to be rich and successful, you must think.

Do you really want to think?

Well,  you’ll need accurate data, rather than silly and ignorant opinions and assumptions.

Then you’ll need to ask the right questions, and this from the right sources.

You’ll also need to put your answers into the right context in order to separate wisdom from mere facts.

And if you think this is all to much, then go and join the brainless masses, because real thinking is simply not for the lazy and faint-hearted; it’s a very serious business.

We cannot just live our lives anyhow and expect to be successful at the end. Success and wealth are for disciplined and spiritual men, as such we must be ready to embrace the challenges of personal discipline; this is how royalties and champions emerge.

To be champions in all areas of our lives, we must be disciplined. This will in turn enhance our physical and spiritual productivity.

As we proceed towards our forth coming ‘Celebration of Talents’, here at the Citizens Family Church, Nigeria, our resolve at the Royalty Home Church is to go back to our Source and what we stand for, in order to dominate our world.

Our inspiration for this discussion on the power of personal discipline came  from the Exodus 13:17. How far we travel in life is dependent on how we accept challenges,  and on the chances we are willing to take to discipline ourselves,  rather than, for instance, using God as an excuse for reckless spending.

During our Home Church bible discussion, I pointed out that genuine royalty is for those who know how to value little things. Maximising the little you have, is the key to multiplication; it’s the key to plug financial leakages.

This discussion was so personalised that each one of was really touched. Consequently, we extended it to go on for the next two weeks, in order to work on ourselves.  Feedbacks on individual experiences will be discussed, as we fellowship each week.

Fill me Jesus till I want no more,
Touch me where I need to be touched,
Hold me close to you and fill me with your love,
Prepare me, so, the fibres and deep recess of my soul may know you and love you more.

Giving is a demand God places on those who call Him Lord, on us, from time to time, to test us and make our hearts right towards Him. This, in turn, creates a strong spiritual foundation for wealth that lasts way beyond eternity.

To live is to give. And for enduring wealth, we need to give, to keep giving, and never stop giving.

By the way, the impact and legacy we leave behind for posterity and all humanity is dependent solely on what we give.

However, the giving we studied is not limited to physical cash but rather includes our talents, ideas, and of course, God’s infinite dimensions resident in us, which are desperately awaiting expression.

In all,  the most important form of giving still remains what Jesus did – laying down His life for all humanity. This takes precedence over all other forms of giving, because God can do more with your life in His hands than He can do with your money alone.

So, after this illuminating and seasoned session with the concept of giving at the fore, we demonstrated more love by presenting our well packaged offerings to Him.

We then reviewed the execution of some of our plans and strategies towards the upcoming Festival of Home Churches 2010, which you wouldn’t want to miss.

We had crispy brown sandwiches which tantalized our taste buds.

We are having fun in God’s presence.

Have a joyful weekend.

Pastoring the Excellence Home church for me is such a privilege and enormous responsibility. It is like being a Mother. Jesus enjoined Apostle Peter in John 21:15-17 to ‘feed my lambs’. Our lord Jesus did such a good job of it when He was on earth and He now says to us, ‘as the father has sent me so I send you’. I hope to do a great job of it.  Hearing the words “well done good and faithful servant” from God at the end of time is my lifelong dream.

In this week’s meeting at Excellence Home church, we were enveloped by God’s presence as we made the most of music in worshipping the Lord. It was awe-inspiring.

We looked at a thought provoking topic during our bible discussion on love and giving.

One of us pointed out that achieving our goals and making a difference in our world, is made easier by wealth. The rest of us concurred that wealth should be a mere tool to enable us make a difference in people’s lives and not for self aggrandizement. Apostle Peter warned that those who use the things of this world should not be unduly attached to them.

Sometimes, love is denied full expression by lack.

A man’s highest happiness is found in the bestowal of benefits on those he loves. Love finds its most natural and spontaneous expression in giving. It is in the use of material things that a man finds full life for his body, develops his mind, and unfolds his soul.

We reminisced over our past personal experiences where we would have given much more if we’d had ‘more’. Yes, sometimes, love is denied full expression by lack.

Almost immediately, one of us chipped in that it should not be an excuse to wait for perfect conditions. The value of giving, even in the sight of God is hinged on the personal cost and sacrifice to the giver. This is exemplified in Jesus’ praise of the widow who gave her mite. It said that a tree cannot make a forest but as Pastor WD Favour says ‘a tree with time can make a forest’.

I’ll draw the curtain here in this week’s edition. Next week, we will examine an intriguing statement by our Lord Jesus: “if you have not been trustworthy in handling worldly wealth, who will trust you with true riches?” (Luke16:11).

God bless you!

Because we are created in God’s image and and likeness, we possess unique abilities, skills, and talents. These gifts definitely need to be developed to the point that they glow undeniably to remarkable intensities.

Most importantly, these gifts, as intended by God, are instruments to be harnessed for the good for the edification of mankind, and ultimately for the glory of God.

We fully intend to acknowledge and demonstrate God’s gifts and talents at our forthcoming Festival of Home Churches 2010 . No lone tree can make a forest; hence everyone needs someone to attain to efficiency and optimum functionality. In order to utilize our God-given talents, it is necessary to interact with one another.

Furthermore, we foster inspiration in others as our talents rob off on them.

During this week’s meeting of the Royalty Home Church, we defined the objectives of our performance in the coming Festival as not just to entertain, but also to educate, encourage, as well as inspire every one that attends.

 ‘Though we are many, we are one body in Christ’

The above, part of the lyrics of a popular Christian song, readily came to my mind during home church this week as we all gathered to have fellowship with God and with one other. Coordinating the Excellence Home Church fills me with such a great sense of purpose that I wouldn’t want to trade for anything.

We worshiped God with soul-stirring music and reviewed last Sunday’s presentation, before continuing our leadership series tagged tips on multiplying your resources part 2.

We revisited the subject of astute leadership and concurred that it is all about optimization and strategic thinking. It’s being able to align your activities and resources seamlessly with your objectives. It is mentally tasking, that is, unless you want forfeit the multiplication of your results, and consequently also forfeit getting to your El Dorado faster. In essence, as one of us said, “No sweat no sweet.”

Optimization, as we realized,  is not necessarily about changing what you are doing; it’s rather more about upgrading, evolving, taking your most effective efforts to ever increasing levels of productivity and impact. Its about making the most out of the smallest. We see God in creation exemplifying this and we are enjoined to imitate Him as his dear children in the book of Ephesians.

Another invaluable tip in multiplying your resources is to measure your activities on the basis of your intended results. When we got to this point, a member echoed one of Pastor WD Favour’s favourite comments, “…activity does not always equal productivity.” The value of any action or activity is measured in terms of the strategic results it yields. Taken from this standpoint, some actions are valuable while others are useless. But you have to be brutally honest and unemotional in your assessment of your strategies.

At this juncture we decided to continue our discussion next week; we will feature more of our personal stories on this journey of optimization for greater success in our endeavours.

See you next week.

Excellence home church is a setting where we are trained and equipped with tools to enable us win conquests in the arena of life. Life as we are told is an occasion and we must rise to it.

After a beautiful rendition of  praise to God, we moved into our discussion for the day titled Tips on multiplying  your resources. Everyone keenly listened and chipped in their contributions. The heightened attentiveness to the interaction wasn’t a surprise to me, considering the fact that living things are intrinsically programmed to increase and multiply; if you don’t agree with me, go to Genesis 1:28 and check out God’s first commandment to mankind.. be fruitful and multiply.

Back in my college days, I was taught that Economics involved the use of scarce resources to achieve the numerous wants of man, and over the years I have found this to be true.

How do we use what we have to get to where we want to be?
The more adept an individual becomes in answering this question of life, the greater the level of success he achieves.

We looked at the book of Ecclesiastes where it says that  “the labour of a foolish man wearies him because he does not know the way to the city,” and agreed that this is the unfortunate description of  the state of a large number of  people.

Personally I have been there and I can tell that it’s very frustrating. I remember Pastor WD Favour’s comment that “life is an exact science, and once you apply the right keys, success becomes inevitable.”

Herein comes the concept of astute leadership—using very scarce resources  under very difficult circumstances to achieve phenomenal results within record time. It is no use shying away from the word ‘leadership’ because everyone is a leader even if it is only yourself you are leading. The fact remains that making the transition from where you are to where you want to be requires some form of self-leadership.

Next week, we’ll look at how to create the initial result that will give the result that will fetch you an even greater result.

Have a splendid weekend!

Becoming a great leader is no easy matter. It requires the desire to affect your world positively.

If your reaction to this statement is, “I can make a good manager in my work place but am not out to change the world,” then you’ll most likely remain an average leader.

Great leaders cause things to happen through people.

How much you cause the world to change is up to you. It happens by choice, and it defines your success as a leader.

In order to become astute leaders we must personally answer several challenging questions, such as, “How do we take our scarce resources, and transform them into phenomenal results?”

While optimizing our activities in the home church, we realized the need to enhance the participations of members in the goal setting process, because feedbacks and alternative perspectives are essential for the progress of the home church.

Finally, being an astute leader entails a lot of characteristics that aren’t always easy to live up to, and live with. But they will make us strong. By mastering and utilizing effective leadership skills we can be great leaders, by being great leaders we will leave our ‘footprints’ in the ‘sands’ of time.

Join us on this pathway to royalty and nobility…

God bless you.

This article is from my weekly lectures [on the subjects of leadership development, optimization, and productivity] delivered at the Leadership Forum of our church. It is of particular relevance to home church pastors, group leaders, and Christian business leaders. The present post is a continuation of last week’s Become an Astute Leader.

My primary emphasis in this lecture series on strategic thinking, optimization, productivity, and leadership development, is that you can accomplish so much more simply by applying your efforts at certain key areas.  As I wrote in Become an Astute Leader, optimizing your leadership performance is not necessarily about changing what you are doing; it’s rather more about upgrading, evolving, taking your most effective efforts to ever increasing levels of productivity and impact. Its about making the most out of the smallest.

Optimization is the process by which you get more and better result from WHAT YOU ALREADY HAVE by making little and incremental adjustments at critical points of your overall operations.

For more about how little things, consistently done over time, gradually accumulate into large things that can then be leveraged over and over and over again to create even bigger and more significant accomplishments, read How To Boost Your Productivity and Become A Happier Person.

Discern the results that will give you the results that will give you the results you need!

Fundamental to optimizing your leadership performance, of course, is vision clarity – a sharp, clear, definite, and unambiguous picture of your end result. In other words, you need to know the exact results you NEED to have.

In 4 Steps To Boost Your Productivity, I referred to this as your Personal Success Indices, and pointed out some helpful guides towards determining the objectives that resonate with your personality – what creates that inner sense of fulfillment, ‘specialness’, and relevance.  It will be very helpful to read that post in order to aid your discovery, in very specific terms, of the tangible and intangible results that you desire to see in your life from your various efforts.

However, beyond a clear picture of your end result, you must be astute enough to recognize the primary results that will give you the secondary results that will give you the  tertiary results, on and on to your ultimate results. 

You see, it is very easy to become so focused on the end result that we become blind to those little things that NEED to be accomplished in the moment before the ultimate dream can be achieved. This is a common cause of failure among dreamers.

In reality, though, the path from the foundational result, to the ultimate result is not always linear and logical.

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Illustrations from my pastoral experiences

How in the world, for instance, as a young and inexperienced pastor, would I have known that overcoming my need to socialize was going to be critical to growing the numerical and spiritual strength of the church?

I wanted our church membership to increase in numbers as well as grow spiritually, and I theorized that I would accomplish this by frequently visiting each member in their various homes. By so doing, I imagined, they would know I cared for them and loved them, which in turn would inspire them to become more devoted to God, church attendance, and evangelism.

This idea was inspired in part by what I had read in a church growth manual. I called it my home visitation strategy. It made sense, appeared smart, and I felt it was going to work.

Well, it didn’t.

I quickly observed that the church grew more when I wasn’t visiting than after I implemented my home visitation strategy.

As a matter of fact, I noticed that the numerical strength and spiritual development of the church was rapidly diminishing, not in spite of, but actually as a result of my home visitations!

Of course I was bewildered!

But then I also got the point, and thankfully soon enough; they didn’t want me visiting them. They would rather I stayed back at home and did whatever it was I did that made them experience God every time they assembled in church.

It had seemed to me that visiting them would have gotten them to come and commit. In practice, however, it didn’t; it rather had the opposite effect.

In the end, I could have stubbornly stuck with an unproductive fantasy of mine just because it appeared ‘pastoral’ and ‘caring’ and then watched the church die as a result. Instead, thanks to God, I learnt. I got the point.

I learnt that the fundamental result I needed to have, towards a secondary result of growing the church numerically and spiritually, wasn’t the goal of visiting 50 members per week as a pastor. That wasn’t a basic result to gun for.

A more fundamental result was to overcome my own need to socialize, become more disciplined in prayers, meditations, personal spiritual growth, and intimacy with God.

This understanding, of course, reshaped my priorities and redefined the focus of my time and resources.

Yet in the beginning I saw a logical but illusory path from (achieving the visitation result of) 50 members per week, to growing the church numerically and spiritually. In retrospect, considering my personality and several other factors, I now know that that path never existed for me.

The Paradox

So identifying the primary results that will give you the secondary results that will give you the tertiary and ultimate results you need – and hence define what you need to focus on in the moment – does not necessarily happen by backtracking from the ultimate results. Such backtracking might yield a logical sequence of steps that ultimately lead to failure!

The wise man identified this paradox when he wrote that:

"There is a way that seems right to a man, but in the end it leads to death." (Proverbs 14:12).

Nevertheless, you can become adept at discerning the results that will give you the results that will give you the results you need.

As you can imagine, this discernment – a core aspect of the distinction of astute leaders – comes from a combination of instinct, intuition, observation, experience, and even more.

Accurate discernment that THIS, (a present ‘insignificant’ occupation), will inevitably lead to THAT, (an ultimate phenomenal result), is an invaluable asset.

At the onset, astute leaders usually don’t make sense because they appear to be so focused on very ‘insignificant’ objectives (like, in my case, spiritual contemplation as opposed to house call). In the end, however, the world is wowed by their ultimate results.

The Key

The key to this discernment is to not become emotionally attached to your ideas and opinions (or those of others for that matter) as to what will or will not work; and neither to the means and methods adopted by you, or anyone else for that matter.

Yes, you might have to begin with a hunch, an intuition, an intelligent guess, your best bet, whatever you may chose to call it, plus lessons from others’ experiences, as to what will work. But then you must quickly begin to pass them through the hot crucible of actual performance.

You would notice the principle at work in my case. The initial idea as to what should work came from a book I had read, in combination with my own religious instincts. However, when it was subjected to the heat of actual practice, it proved counterproductive. So I abandoned the idea, but in the process stumbled upon what I should have been doing in the first instance.

Bear in mind, however, that I was able to abandon that idea as a pastor because I was not sentimentally attached to it. Otherwise, I would have been stubbornly stuck to it to my detriment and that of the people I was trying to pastor.

Develop the brutal objectivity that judges methods and performances strictly on the basis of fruitfulness; in other words, on the basis of how well they enhance, enable, accelerate, or actually produce desirable and strategic results.

In learning from your own efforts and those of others ahead of you, be brutally honest and objective in separating what is working from those that aren’t working.

This is critical to optimizing your leadership performance.