Thank you to Miles Welch for giving us permission to repost his blog article. This is the third installment in his series on self leadership. Check out his blog called Developing Next Generation Leaders to read his insightful articles: mileswelch.com. Miles has served the local church as a pastor and leader for 20 years, and has been at 12Stone Church (Lawrenceville, GA) https://12stone.com/ since 2001.

This is the third in a series of blog posts about self-leadership. In the first post, I defined self-leadership as “a proactive process where leaders first seek self-understanding, and then use it to intentionally direct their lives. The second examines how to be proactive in self-leadership, and here we’ll explore the importance and purpose of self-understanding.

After dismissing unhealthy perspectives that undermine personal responsibility, the next step toward self-leadership is self-understanding. Everything about us has been orchestrated by God to fulfill his purpose for us and the better we understand ourselves, the more clearly we can know what we were made to do. Picture the differences between a football, a golf ball and basketball – they are made differently because each one has a unique purpose. So it is with us. God designs each of us uniquely to fulfill our unique destiny. We can discover our destiny as we explore our design.

Here are five ways to explore your design.

1. Your History

You can discover much about your future by looking at your past. God chose your family of origin and the experiences that shaped you as a child. You could have been born in any time, as a citizen of any country and to any family. You did not choose these things. They were chosen for you by God on purpose. God chose your gender, your ethnicity and your appearance. All on purpose. Things that feel random are not – they are clues. Consider how the personal histories of Joseph, Moses, David and Paul give clues to their destiny. So it is with you: consider how your personal history might have uniquely prepared you for a certain task. What was your family like – healthy, dysfunctional, absent, wealthy, poor, spiritual or unbelieving? What common threads run through your experiences? What specific questions, fears, passions and strengths have arisen as a result of your past?

Perhaps, for example, your family of origin was extremely dysfunctional. Because emotional health wasn’t an innate part of you experience, you had to get healthy on purpose, step-by-step. That kind of experience would equip you to come alongside others in that same journey toward personal health, offering insight borne from your personal experience.

God is playing a long game with you. While this is easier to recognize in retrospect, it’s worth examining your past to glimpse the ways that God is orchestrating your experiences on purpose.

2. Your Personality

God wired you on purpose. Are you:

  •  Introverted or extroverted?
  • Structured or spontaneous?
  • A thinker or a feeler?
  • Decisive or thorough?

Again, these things don’t define your destiny, but they may help you discover it. For example, if God made you an extrovert, he probably hasn’t destined you for a job that puts you alone with a computer all day. 

Here are a couple more thoughts on personality:

3. Your Passion (Intensity)

God knows what He wants you to do and He crafted you on purpose to LIGHT UP about certain things. Your desires reflect your design

Your God given passion:

  • Is focused on the needs of others.
  • Is aligned with the heart of God.
  • Will sustain adversity.
  • Will grow in strength over time.

A good starting place to discover your God-given intensity is to ask:

  • What makes you angry?
  • What makes you cry?
  • What makes you rejoice?
  • What keeps you up at night?

4. Your Capacity

God knows what He wants you to do and He made you capable of doing it with His power and in His timing. Each of us have a unique set of innate and grown strengths that God has formed on purpose.

You discover your capacity as you take these risks:

  • Risk working hard at small jobs to discover what you are good at and capable of managing.
  • Risk striving for excellence when no one cares.
  • Risk investing in credible education.
  • Risk trusting honest feedback.
  • Risk training your capacity to grow it: practice, grow, go to school, get a mentor. As Dan Reiland says, do what you can’t do until you can do it.

5. Your Opportunity

God knows what He wants you to do and He will give you opportunities to do it.

You can find opportunities in two places:

  • Opportunity can be something bad happening in the world that you might be able to stop.
  • Opportunity can also be something good that isn’t happening that you can start.

Here are some questions to help you see your opportunities:

  • What problem can you solve?
  • What person can you help?
  • What progress can you make?

These questions lend themselves toward global answers, but don’t miss the opportunities that exist specifically within your sphere of influence. What could you positively impact in your immediate context?

While self-understanding certainly illuminates your destiny, remember it’s not magic beans. Your destiny doesn’t instantly appear it unfolds over time. These are guideposts that give you the next layer of clarity. The journey toward your destiny never ends, because you never arrive. But seeking self-understanding will help direct your self-leadership, allowing God to accomplish all He’s destined for your life.

[If you want to take this line of thinking to the next level, Robert Clinton has a book called The Making of a Leader that exposes patterns in how personal history affects leadership trajectory.]