Month: June 2018

From Division and Decline to Outreach: Church Changes Focus in Barbados

Posted on June 29, 2018 by - Caribbean, Latin America, Stories

In 2017, before I attended The Global Leadership Summit, my church’s membership had plateaued and there was great division among our leadership. Unless there was a dramatic shift in the way we did church, further decline was inevitable.

Then came the Summit in March 2017 in Barbados.

Jossy Chacko’s session changed my life and ministry. I decided then and there that I would pursue the vision God had given me for community outreach.

This vision required a fundamental shift from an inward-looking church ministry to an outward-looking community ministry. With the practical skills and inspiration I received at the Summit, we launched a new outreach ministry: we have two new satellite ministries, outreach in two other cities, and one of its surrounding villages, and we adopted a secondary school.

We are experiencing growth again! To God be the Glory!

Because of the Summit, we’ve amended our vision and mission to reflect our new outreach:

Transforming lives through the love of Christ

I benefited greatly from attending The Global Leadership Summit in 2017, and will be attending, God willing, and highly recommending the Summit in 2018 to all leaders and prospective leaders in Barbados! It will change your life!

 

Rev. Carlos Brathwaite on left.

 

UPDATE: Progress on Church Shelter for Volcano Victims in Guatemala

Posted on June 28, 2018 by - Central America, Latin America, Stories

Volunteers in Guatemala praying over pastor and his wife after the volcano

Luis Pinto, GLS field director for Central America and the Caribbean, reports in on the progress on the church shelter in Esquintla, Guatemala. Luis led a team of 35 GLS volunteers to provide food, medicine, equipment, prayer and comfort to families displaced by the volcano’s eruptions, which showered ash over nearby towns and spewed pyroclastic flows throughout the area. (If you missed the first report on how local Summit volunteers got connected with Vida Real Church, click here.)

Your prayers and support for our people and our nation have been heard.

I want to thank all of you for being a part of our spiritual family. Your prayers for our people and our nation have been heard. God has been good to us, providing the resources our people need during this difficult time after the natural disaster in Escuintla, Guatemala. The volcano continues erupting from time to time, but with less intensity.

On June 23, 2018, a total of 35 volunteers joined us in a great adventure in which we visited the affected families in the church-shelter. They were waiting for us, and knew we were coming with help and to provide a word of hope and faith.

We had an opportunity to share with 105 people.

We had an opportunity to share with 105 people, most of them women and children, since some men were outside the shelter still looking for their missing relatives. Sadly, it is difficult to believe that they will find them alive.

Families who lost everything find encouragement and learn survival skills.

Some of the other men were out working. This was surprising to me, as it was a Saturday and I thought they would be at the shelter. I figured they didn’t have anything to do but to wait until their lands were recovered, or they were relocated. Most of them are farmers who’ve lost everything!

It was inspiring to me that the pastor and his congregation are teaching survival skills to the families so they can continue with their lives and fight for their families. Marlon Tzorin, chairman of the GLS in Escuintla, has also sponsored eight young men in his school. They are learning different trades in order to get a job soon and help their families.

A dignified kitchen saves food from rotting.

While we were there, we proceeded to install the kitchen, stoves and refrigerators. The pastor said, now we have a dignified kitchen and the food, especially the meat, will no longer rot.

We also installed shelves in two areas while some of the volunteers played with the children. Then we delivered hygienic kits to all the adults.

Being the hands and feet of Jesus to those who lost everything.

Some of our volunteers were professionals in specific fields, such as psychology. And when we saw how many of the women were depressed, having lost everything, including some of their relatives, they were able to serve them and offer them hope. It also created a great opportunity to share the word of God and to present Jesus as our savior and redeemer, comforter and life giver.

The work ended with a prayer for the families and Rolando Diaz and his wife, and the local pastors. Blessings to all! Thank you again for your prayers and support!

3 Variables in How We React to Feedback—Sheila Heen—2018 GLS Faculty Spotlight

Posted on June 28, 2018 by - News & Updates, North America, Regions, The Global Leadership Summit

3 Variables in How We React to Feedback—Sheila Heen

We are thrilled to welcome Summit favorite Sheila Heen back to The Global Leadership Summit! With two New York Times best-selling books and over 20 years at the Harvard Negotiation Project and Triad Consulting Group, Sheila will show us how to engage in the conversations that are critical to learning, collaboration, innovation and sound decision-making in our organizations.

Sheila Heen (GLS 2015) has spent two decades at the Harvard Negotiation Project, specializing in our most difficult conversations—where disagreements are strong, emotions run high and relationships become strained. Her firm, Triad Consulting Group, works with executive teams to strengthen working relationships, work through tough conversations and make sound decisions together. Her most recent New York Times bestseller is Thanks for the Feedback.

Sheila Heen Video

 If you look at the neuroscience, you discover that the way we’re wired has a profound effect on how we hear and respond to feedback. We will take a look at three variables that are particularly important in terms of reaction to feedback.

The first variable is your baseline

Your baseline is how happy or unhappy you are in the absence of other events in your life. Where is that level you come back to? If it’s a scale of 1-10, some people simply live their lives at 9. They’re unbelievably happy and cheerful about everything. From a cup of coffee to a promotion, they are always just thrilled.

This research comes from looking at lottery winners. A year after they win, they are still about as happy as they were the year before they won the lottery. And people who go to jail are about as happy as a year before they went to jail.

The reason this matters for feedback is, the positive feedback can be muffled for you—particularly if you have a low baseline, it’s harder for you to hear it.

Now we look at the second variable, which is swing

When you receive positive or negative feedback, how far off does it knock you off your base? The same piece of feedback could be devastating for one person and merely annoying to another person.

The third variable is how long it takes for you to come back to your baseline

How long do you sustain positive feeling? Or, how long does it take you to recover from a negative feeling?

Those three variables are where the big variation in sensitivity comes from. That’s why some people are extremely sensitive and other people are pretty insensitive.

Here are two reasons why this is particularly important

1) Your own feedback profile not only influences how you receive feedback, it also influences how you give feedback.

If you are pretty even-keeled, it could be that you are more likely to be direct or harsh in your feedback because you think, This isn’t that big of a deal and you are overreacting to it.

Other people who are very sensitive are likely to tip-toe around issues, and if they’re talking with someone who is particularly even-keeled, they might not know they’re being given feedback. You have to be pretty direct to even get through to them.

2) If you swing negative, it can actually distort your sense of the feedback itself and your own sense of yourself.

One piece of feedback can trigger an overwhelming flood of emotion, and the feedback itself overruns its borders. These people think, It’s not one thing, it’s everything. Or, It’s not just now, it’s forever.

The challenge is, how do you dismantle the distortions so you can see the feedback itself in actual size? Then it doesn’t become so overwhelming, and you’re in a place to learn—hearing the feedback for what it does and doesn’t represent.

This video was originally featured on Big Think.

Church Pushes Passing of Bill to Outlaw Child Marriage in Malawi

Posted on June 27, 2018 by - Africa, Because of the GLS, Government, North America, Stories

Let Girls be Girls Child Marriage in Malawi

Kyle Healy attended The Global Leadership Summit for the first time in San Diego, California in 2007. What Kyle didn’t realize then was how the Summit would become a milestone event in his Christian faith, not only changing the trajectory his own life, but also the lives of hundreds of thousands of girls in Malawi. He became a missionary in Malawi and saw his church push the passing of a bill to outlaw child marriage. This is Kyle’s journey.

A life altering idea—The Church is the hope of the world

“The idea that the Church was the hope of the world was something that got stuck in my head after the Summit,” says Kyle.” I was on a trajectory that had me wanting to give my life to Jesus, and the Summit definitely added fuel to the fire.”

In the next few months after the Summit, Kyle went on his first overseas mission trip to Uganda. When he returned, he and his future wife started a ministry to serve resettled refugees. During this time, he was also working as a CFO, and going to seminary. Upon graduation, he and his wife moved to Malawi as missionaries, where Kyle was given an opportunity to work as a pastor in 2012. Through his experience, God taught him a valuable and powerful lesson he would continue to carry with him into his career today. Kyle says,

It’s easy to look at a community and think about who or what is wrong with it, but God taught me to look at a community and think who or what is strong in it.

An injection of inspiration and vision for leaders in Malawi

With Kyle’s focus on the strengths of his community, the Summit re-entered his life under a different context. “Every community has strengths and every community has leaders. It’s so easy to look at places in Africa, full of poverty or corruption, and think the community needs leaders. But the leaders are already there. What they often need, however, is an injection of vision, a good tool or an opportunity to lead.”

While in Malawi, Kyle’s church hosted the Summit. “It was crazy to me that we were now hosting the Summit,” says Kyle. “Because of how influential it had been in my life, we tried our best to get as many people to the Summit as possible. Every year after the event, the team of staff and volunteers at our church would have week-long meetings talking about new strategies we wanted to implement and new objectives we wanted to meet. It was easy to do this at the time because after being at the Summit, our vision buckets were always overflowing.”

Post Summit strategy meeting becomes transformative for the country

During one of these post-Summit strategy meetings, their church raised up various issues they could address in their community. It became apparent that it was heavy on the heart of their church to do something about the issue of child marriage in the country.

“Child marriage and early pregnancy was so widespread in Malawi that around 50% of Malawian girls were married before turning 18, and about 25% of those are already mothers,” Kyle explains. “Most girls are forced into these marriages, even though pregnancy and childbirth are the leading cause of death in teenage girls in Malawi. On top of that, when girls becomes wives or mothers, they usually stop going to school, which traps them in a cycle of poverty.

“Practically everyone in our church knew of someone who had been negatively impacted by child marriage. Our church was passionate about starting a movement to end child marriage so that we could empower girls to be educated, healthy and economically stable. We wanted to let girls be girls, not forced to be mothers and wives.

“From that point on, we knew we had to focus our efforts and lead people from here to there.”

Little did the church know how God would use this campaign not only to serve girls in their local communities, but change the trajectory of girls’ lives throughout Malawi.

“A year after we started our ‘Let Girls Be Girls’ campaign, our senior pastor, Chitsanzo Kampondeni and I, were invited to parliament to see the passing of a bill that outlawed child marriage!” Kyle exclaimed. “They told us that the church caring for this issue is what pushed this bill into law. We were being thanked by parliamentarians because our campaign shifted people’s thinking about child marriage and rallied young Christians around this issue of injustice.”

Spreading the idea that the church is the hope of the world in other parts of the world

Kyle with former President of Malawi, Joyce Banda

With a passion to see more churches become the hope of the world, Kyle and his wife felt called back to the US for an opportunity at Willow Creek Community Church. “I interviewed for a role for six months, and I turned down two job offers during the process, but eventually I had a job offer,” says Kyle. “It still gives me goose bumps to think back to that time in my life!

“In my current role, I work with churches in countries where Christianity is by far the minority. In the Middle East and Asia, many churches are under resourced and just fighting to survive. My grander vision is to see all these churches strengthened, given vision and find unique ways to offer hope for their community and their country. I’ve seen firsthand what a small church with vision can do, and I want to unleash that potential!”

“I am not shy about saying how much I love my job, and how I feel like I have the best job in the world. And if it wasn’t for the Summit, I definitely don’t think I would be in the role where I am now.”

Why go to the Summit?

“I think the Summit is the best thing there is for learning how to be a better leader, getting new leadership tools and getting an injection of vision and fresh ideas,” says Kyle. “The Summit has become a checkpoint during my year, almost like Christmas, Easter and my birthday. It’s a milestone on the calendar that I know is going to come and I know is going to be special. And now, I get to attend the Summit with global partners and have similar meetings with them like I did in Malawi. I love the Summit.”

The Perfect Amount of Time to Work Each Day

Posted on June 27, 2018 by - Articles, Leading Yourself, Productivity, Replenishment

The Perfect Amount of Time to Work Each Day---Dr. Travis Bradberry

The eight-hour workday was created during the industrial revolution in an effort to cut down on the number of hours of manual labor that workers were forced to endure on the factory floor. This breakthrough was a more humane approach to work 200 years ago, yet it possesses little relevance for us today.

Like our ancestors, we’re expected to put in eight-hour days, working in long, continuous blocks of time, with few or no breaks. Heck, most people even work right through their lunch hour! This antiquated approach to work isn’t helping us; it’s holding us back.

 A study recently conducted by the Draugiem Group used a computer application to track employees’ work habits. Specifically, the application measured how much time people spent on various tasks and compared it with their productivity levels.

In the process of measuring people’s activity, they stumbled upon a fascinating finding: The length of the workday didn’t matter much; what mattered was how people structured their day. In particular, people who were religious about taking short breaks were far more productive than those who worked longer hours.

The ideal work-to-break ratio was 52 minutes of work, followed by 17 minutes of rest. People who maintained this schedule had a unique level of focus in their work. For roughly an hour at a time, they were 100 percent dedicated to the task they needed to accomplish. They didn’t check Facebook “real quick” or get distracted by emails.

When they felt fatigue (again, after about an hour), they took short breaks, during which they completely separated themselves from their work. This helped them to dive back in refreshed for another productive hour of work.

People who have discovered this magic productivity ratio crush their competition, because they tap into a fundamental need of the human mind: The brain naturally functions in spurts of high energy (roughly an hour) followed by spurts of low energy (15 to 20 minutes).

For most of us, this natural ebb and flow of energy leaves us wavering between focused periods of high energy followed by far less productive periods, when we tire and succumb to distractions.

The best way to beat exhaustion and frustrating distractions is to get intentional about your workday. Instead of working for an hour or more, and then trying to battle through distractions and fatigue when your productivity begins to dip, take this as a sign that it’s time for a break.

Real breaks are easier to take when you know they’re going to make your day more productive.

We often let fatigue win, because we continue working through it (long after we’ve lost energy and focus), and the breaks we take aren’t real breaks (checking your email and watching YouTube doesn’t recharge you the same way as taking a walk does). 

The eight-hour workday can work for you if you break your time into strategic intervals. Once you align your natural energy with your effort, things begin to run much more smoothly.

Here are four tips that will get you into that perfect work rhythm.

1) Break your day into hourly intervals

We naturally plan what we need to accomplish by the end of the day, week,or month, but we’re far more effective when we focus on what we can accomplish right now.

Beyond getting you into the right rhythm, planning your day around hour-long intervals simplifies daunting tasks by breaking them into manageable pieces.

If you want to be a literalist, you can plan your day around 52-minute intervals if you like, but an hour works just as well.

2) Respect your hour

The interval strategy only works because we use our peak energy levels to reach an extremely high level of focus for a relatively short amount of time. When you disrespect your hour by texting, checking emails, or doing a quick Facebook check, you defeat the entire purpose of the approach.

3) Take real rest

In the study at Draugiem, they found that employees who took more frequent rests than the hourly optimum were more productive than those who didn’t rest at all. Likewise, those who took deliberately relaxing breaks were better off than those who, when “resting,” had trouble separating themselves from their work.

Getting away from your computer, your phone and your to-do list is essential to boosting your productivity. Breaks such as walking, reading, and chatting are the most effective forms of recharging, because they take you away from your work.

On a busy day, it might be tempting to think of dealing with emails or making phone calls as breaks, but they aren’t, so don’t give in to this line of thought.

Don’t wait until your body tells you to take a break. If you wait until you feel tired to take a break, it’s too late–you’ve already missed the window of peak productivity. Keeping to your schedule ensures that you work when you’re the most productive and that you rest during times that would otherwise be unproductive.

Remember, it’s far more productive to rest for short periods than it is to keep on working when you’re tired and distracted.

4) Bringing it all together

Breaking your day down into chunks of work and rest that match your natural energy levels feels good, makes your workday go faster and boosts your productivity.

This white paper originally appeared in the TalentSmart newsletter.

Serving the Elderly, Transforming Ukraine

Posted on June 25, 2018 by - Because of the GLS, Eastern Europe, Europe, Stories

Serving the Elderly, Transforming Ukraine -- WCA

Valentina lived alone in a small shack on a remote mountainside in rural Ukraine. A byproduct of her culture, she experienced a long hard road of poverty, abuse and war. She had lost her hope. To drown her pain, she had become a lifelong alcoholic. At her advanced age, she was discarded by society, even by her own children. Her saving grace was a neighbor couple who had made it a habit to walk to her shack to check in on her periodically, even though she was mean, angry and rarely, if ever, grateful.

But one year, the winter on the mountainside was particularly harsh. The snow was waist deep, and the cold was unbearable. Her children came for their monthly visit to take her $50 pension check from her and get her drunk. Then they left her to suffer the winter alone, with no resources to care for herself.

When her neighbors returned after being gone a few days, they noticed there was not smoke coming from her fireplace chimney, so they went to check on her. Inside she was freezing and unresponsive. Immediately, they tried to warm her up—dripping hot tea and milk to her lips, placing warm water bottles against her body. They did whatever they could think of to bring her body back to life. She finally awoke the next day.

The neighbor’s daughter, Veronika, a Marcel Fund compassion worker and nurse in the city, happened to be visiting that day. Suspecting pneumonia or worse, she knew Valentina needed to go to the hospital immediately.

They came down the mountain and made the trek to the hospital in the city, where they discovered not only did Valentina have pneumonia, she was also suffering from tuberculosis and cancer. By this time, the alcohol was leaving her system, evoking agitation and anger in her already miserable state.

But Veronika visited her every day. And a mean Valentina began to heal.

When she was able to leave the hospital, a Christian family at a local church in the city offered to take her in. They fed her, prayed with her and loved her. By the time spring came a few months later, the snow had melted, and her heart had begun to warm.

Valentina began asking questions about God. At 83, she heard the Gospel for the first time and gave her life to Jesus.

Today, she is on fire for Jesus. She is a completely transformed woman. Not only was she able to get help with her alcoholism, she was reconciled with her children as well. Today, she lives in the city with the family that took her in, is a part of a church and lives and serves in a community she loves, and that loves her.

Today, Valentina has hope.

A vision for the elderly in Ukraine

Valentina’s story is just one among thousands who have been impacted by the Marcel Fund Ministry in Ukraine. With a vision to serve one of the most marginalized, under-valued groups of people in the country, the Marcel Fund hopes to reach more than 12 million elderly with hope, care and the love of Jesus.

Though the elderly represent nearly a third of the country’s population, they are largely forgotten by society. Ninety percent are women, as most of the men passed in the war. Most are home or bed bound, or even worse, they’re in living in 20 x 20 rooms in elderly homes with 15-20 beds, and no hot water or heat. Their small $50 pension checks go to the elderly home, and even though they are fed, it is not good food, and no medicine is provided. They suffer bed sores to the point of bones coming through the skin, and essentially they are left to die.

But there is hope.

Debbie Sutton, president of Marcel Fund

Their heartbreaking reality of life is one of the reasons Debbie Sutton, president of the Marcel Fund Ministry, and her team care so deeply. When Debbie looks into the eyes of someone like Valentina, she doesn’t just see an angry, mean old lady, she sees someone who needs love. She sees someone who can transform the country.

“These people have lived through wars, when everything was taken from them,” says Debbie. “Just touching them, saying I love you and telling them about Jesus…it’s shocking to them because most of them have never experienced this kind of care before.”

Initiating this ministry through the local church in Ukraine, Debbie believes transformation is possible for and through the elderly. Now Marcel Fund compassion workers are seeing change happen.

Transformation is possible.

Doing unpopular work and going against the grain of the norm is hard. So are callings. But through The Global Leadership Summit, God is equipping the called for hard work. For Debbie and her team, the GLS is not just a conference; it is a life source of information, encouragement, team building and leadership growth.

Each year, the Marcel Fund team leaves the Summit filled up and prepared for another year of serving the elderly—the babushkas of their society. And as a result, thousands of elderly have already experienced hope through their service through the local church.

“I’m hopeful more than ever before for the way the Gospel is beginning to change Ukraine,” says Debbie. “Churches are realizing that if you win the heart of babushkas, you have access to the hearts of her children. Churches are changing their attitudes toward the elderly. They are starting to see the elderly have so much to offer!

“In our churches, babushkas serve as greeters, share testimonies, tell stories, become buddies with orphans and pray with young women struggling with whether or not to keep their babies. They have wisdom and understanding, and are some of our best witnesses in the country; they’re convinced of the power of the Gospel. They’re our best prayer warriors. And I truly believe revival will come to Ukraine because of the elderly. We need to value them. We need to listen.”

Why the Summit is so important to ministries like Marcel Fund

“The Summit is so important to us,” says Debbie. “I’m really thankful for the GLS. When I go, I’m often tired, overwhelmed, even empty. We always pray in the weeks before, asking God to give each one of us on our team something from Him, something personal, something specific. Then we go in anticipation. Many times God speaks to us indirectly—through the stories we hear, through a speaker or even through the loving way we are served at the location where we attend. It feeds us. It is so encouraging for to my team to hear this great content in their own tongue, in their own country. The work we do is really hard, even on a good day. I always come away from the Summit knowing that God uses ordinary people in extraordinary ways!

“Anyone can change diapers, but this is providing medicine for the soul. I can’t imagine anything better to remind my team of the importance of what they’re doing.

“The GLS helps us keep our focus, clarify our ministry in each region, build strong partnerships and relationships and remain hopeful and patient in the process. Doors are wide open to us. We have seen God do some beautiful things because our team is not afraid to initiate ideas. The GLS has directly impacted my leadership and my entire team. I am a better leader because I attend the Summit.”