Detached
”As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.”
- Proverbs
I was listening to an interview with an alcoholic in recovery. He was describing all the rhythms and practices he put in place to help him maintain his sobriety. Sleep schedules, places, and even ways of interacting/responding all had to change. As a successful businessman, he is a person of high intensity, a problem solver, and used to reacting quickly to whatever problem arises.
All of that ability to react quickly to a stimulus with a response is particularly unhelpful when it comes to being a better human. It is the antithesis of the slow and easy way of Jesus and being a more thoughtful and present person.
Learning to do life slower has also become an essential practice in his sobriety.
He mentioned that he has learned to detach, discern, and then decide. I’ve spent too much time in church to not be a little jaded about alliteration or acrostics when it comes to forming a message or teaching, but there was some incredible wisdom and power in these three d’s:
Detach - stepping outside of the given situation or challenge and rejecting the tendency to personalize what is going on. Turning off that natural urge to think about how this affects you or might be related to you.
Discern - engaging the wisdom of eternity to source clarity and understanding of what is going on and what you are supposed to do at that moment.
Decide - choosing to do the thing you clearly know is the right thing despite how hard or costly it might be.
Sound pretty simple? All those mnemonics have a way of making everything seem simple. We say that most things are simple, but not easy. This is no different.
Leaders are increasingly facing their lives and leadership alone. And the world has become so chaotic and noisy that we had to create a discipline that is very similar before the meetings we have with clients.
Consecrate - before every conversation, we take time to set aside everything that we normally bring into one (motives, agendas, attitudes, prejudices, opinions, preconceived ideas, etc.).
Discern - we try to be slow to speak and quick to listen. Instead of reacting to what is said, we work to sift through what we are hearing and discern what is most important to focus on and respond.
Offer - only when the recipient is open to receiving feedback and focusing on only the most important 1-3 things. Everyone is living in overwhelm. Helping them solve or make progress on their 1-3 biggest issues is a rescue, providing too much feedback and information or trying to address too many problems just contributes to overwhelm.
We all need people in our life that are with us, for us, and can set their own issues and agendas aside. That can listen to us with discernment and clarity from above and offer simple and clear advice on how to solve our most pressing issues. All of us are in need of that kind of rescue.
Consider
Who do you process your life and leadership with?
Who is helping you find order, clarity, and a way forward with the challenges you are facing?
Are you finding that you are simply admiring your problems (talking about the same ones year after year) with very little progress?
When are you going to finally do something about that?