Stretching People Beyond Their Comfort
One of the greatest challenges I face as a leader is getting people to step outside their comfort zone to grow. Most all of them have the desire to grow, but are just unwilling to move beyond the boundaries of familiarity and comfort. However, if any of us are ever going to grow to new levels of leadership and influence, we will need to identify areas of weakness and develop a strategy to stretch beyond them.
Let’s just recognize that leadership is getting people to do what they don’t want to do so they can become what they are supposed to become.
We must ask ourselves, “is it God’s will that they stay that way?” If the answer is, “no,” then we have to ask ourselves, “what role do I play in challenging them to get out of their comfort zone?”
People are like sharks, they grow into the environment in which they’re placed. You take a baby shark and put it into a small aquarium and it will stay small. You put it into the endless ocean and it will grow huge. People who are not stretched beyond their comfort will remain small in the potential.
What size tank (your ministry area) do you create for your leaders? It is perfectly alright to stretch people. God actually did this frequently. From Genesis to Revelation, God’s people were stretched.
Don’t apologize for asking them to build the church… Jesus never did, neither should we!
