Category: motivation

The green-eyed monster of pastoral envy – is it just me?

I admit to becoming increasingly aware of envy, and it is ugly.  And I’ve started to notice a pattern, which you might recognise, and maybe a way through.

The flappy sail – 6 tiny signs to pay attention to as you hit a new season at church

Another sailing cliché that you can mull on as you still enjoy the remnants of that holiday glow.

How can you tell if you’re positioned to get the best possible amount of energy from the wind, to get where you want to go?

You listen, and you look. Because – ‘a flappy sail is not a happy sail.’

Why the camera cannot tell the truth

It’s true that we get used to things, and don’t notice them after a relatively short period.  We get used to the odd way you have to turn the handle on that door, the way that sign is unreadable.  The stain on the carpet. Once, to focus our thinking, I unleashed a photographer on our

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Momentum

One of the questions I ask myself regularly each week, is how does this coming Sunday move ‘The Project’ on? If that sounds a bit ‘management speak’, let me explain. In the biggest of pictures, ‘The Project’ is to adore God as his people, and to do so in a way that encourages us to

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The talkative walk – how leaders affect morale

I once had a colleague who had a very talkative walk. As he came up the road you could tell what kind of meeting it as going to be, and for the next three hours his mood would dominate.  His body language communicated everything  we needed to know – and we worked it out from

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“I see that hand!” #evangelismfail

Out of the best of motives, at the end of my evangelistic talk, I invited the young people who prayed the prayer of commitment, to raise their hands as they did so.  I wanted them to make some definite movement to show that they had given their lives to Christ. Why?  To encourage them. But

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What makes you feel strong?

Identifying your strengths is a key part of finding a job or moving on in your career at the moment. Knowing your contribution will lead to your personal satisfaction and worth, and to your being productive and energised. Perhaps the most engaging exponent of this view is Marcus Buckingham. A Brit living in the States,

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Should we be fighting fires, or lighting them?

One of the first, simplest, and best tools for time-management is to distinguish the urgent from the important. But I discovered this week that it has hidden, secret powers. You know how it goes of course: the threat is that the urgent drowns out the important. And so every time management system I’ve seen has

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Godly motivation (with added cheese)

I’ve been running off-and-on since I was at uni, but my latest ‘off’ has been my longest, around 18 months because of an ankle injury.  But I’ve been easing myself back in, and this morning I did my first timed, distance run. What helped me was a series of podcasts which I downloaded for nothing. 

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