Dream Killers: Part Two

on Feb 18 in Everyday Life, Faith, Leadership

As I said in the first Dream-Killers post, you can’t really kill your dreams.  You can, however, cause them to need life-support by constantly suppressing them. And nothing suppresses our dreams like continuing the same plan, but expecting different results.

That’s the second Dream Killer:  Continuing on with the same plan, but expecting different results this time.

This pattern is so easy for leaders to accidentally slip into.  I am ALWAYS tempted to fall into this faulty way of thinking.

* We advertise the same way we did last year, because someone told us that a certain online method is the most effective.

* We conduct our staff meetings the same way, on the same day, at the same time, and expect a more motivated staff team.

* We even approach spirituality the same way, using methods that worked for us when we were at a high school church camp, but that cannot possibly work now.

The group of leaders I admire the most are called Turn-Around Church Pastors.  These are pastors who go into dead churches, and (slowly and methodically) turn them around.  How do they do this?  By changing the way they do everything.

They change the way the church does everything.

Some anonymous guy once defined insanity like this:

Insanity is doing things the same way over and over again, but expecting different results.

The mental picture I see is this:  A leader runs straight into a brick wall, head first.  Each time, he thinks the wall will fall down.  But each time, his forehead just gets a little more bruised, even a little more bloody.  What he needs to try is a different strategy – maybe climbing over the wall, or going around the wall, or hiring a demolition team to get rid of the wall.

As I’ve already stated, there’s no condemnation here whatsoever.  We’re all prone to this.  And the easiest way to discover this tendency is by pointing it out in the lives of others.  But maybe this time, we need to look into a mirror, not a window.

I wonder how many good men and women have lost their dreams because their heads are simply too battered and bruised to see past the wall?