Being a leader isn’t always easy. Sometimes you feel like there’s nobody you can talk to that really “gets it.”

Often times it’s extremely lonely. People can think you’re too busy to join in on something they’re doing so they never ask. Other times when they do it gets weird because you turn into the “answer man” – or even worse nobody talks about everyday life because they feel like they need to have some deep spiritual conversation because you’re there. Regardless, you feel on the outside of things.

Leadership is busy. Very true, however we can often feed this perception because we like “being busy.” There’s something inside us that likes a ton of phone calls, a lot of emails and voice mails. We feel wanted – or needed. But then this eventually wears off and you dread the emails and phone calls. You start to shut off your phone more, you may even put on an automatic email reply just so you don’t have to reply immediately. In other words, once you actually are really busy you wish you weren’t so much.

Leadership has some real dangers. There are many, but I’ve been thinking about one danger that I wanted to address here. As a leader our mind and mouth are used a lot. We think and pray through things and then communicate the vision of where we feel like God is taking us. The danger in this? When our mouth’s are used to such a capacity our ears can often shut down, or at least tune other voices out. This is very dangerous for a leader (or anyone). We think we always have something to say when in fact the truth is we should probably be listening more than speaking.

May we be humble, having ears to hear what God is saying – directly to us personally and through the mouth’s of others…