Welcome back leader. It's December. How exciting for us. We've made it. Listen, I'm not going to start talking about twenty twenty six. Like I'm not we're not going to do that yet. We have so much to do until then. So welcome to December. I'm happy that you're here. I'm so excited to serve you as always. I hope that you are joining me from a place of Openness, a place of wanting more, a place of setting aside any doubt, setting aside any negativity, setting aside any pain so that you can experience what embodiment is as a contemplative. And I do this with every single one of our episodes. I want to share with you an idea, share with you a principle, and then inspire you to go take action, right? Because words don't teach. I'm a teacher. So I know words don't teach. I've taught thousands of people and hundreds of leadership students. And so I know that when I say something, it doesn't mean anything to you unless you go experience it for yourself. And so my job is to share an idea and then inspire you to go experience this for yourself. That's what I'm here to do. And that's part of embodying these ideas. Because when you experience this in your body, through your eyes, through your brain, you get to then wear it like a shirt, wear it like a coat. It's now yours. You have embodied it. And so that's the idea. And so today I want to talk about divine assignment. This has been coming up for me so much, divine assignment. It's principle number one of five. And I want to touch on that briefly here today because the divine assignment is the foundation. This is where we lay the groundwork before we move into principle two, three, four, and five. And so there is sequential order with these principles. And so it's important that we understand this first principle and so that we can then build upon this principle. And so the divine assignment principle is this knowing that we each have our own unique assignment in this world. Now, my assignment is not yours. Yours is not his. His is not theirs. Your divine assignment is different. It's unique. It's special to you. It's like when I look at my husband and he's a physician and I'm like, I don't know anything about science. Like I just know about research, but like human body anatomy, get out. What? And there was such strong inclination for him growing up and going through, you know, his experiences, you know, he's like, yeah, I mean, it was just something I was interested in. It was just something in me. It was like, it was an assignment. It was given to me and, And I know that. I know my gifts and I know my inherent inclinations for certain subjects and certain things. And yeah, I've answered those breadcrumbs. I've followed the breadcrumbs and I have found myself honing these very specific skills that I have. And I look at him and go, wow, well, me too. Like I've got my own specific skills too that I have answered, those breadcrumbs that I answered. I found awareness around those breadcrumbs. And guess what? Those breadcrumbs were delicious. I've talked about how delicious those breadcrumbs are because these are signs, right? These are signals that you're on the right path when it feels good. When you're learning something, you're doing something, you're excited to go do something. Like I have a client who's getting a PhD right now in, oh gosh, don't kill me. Oh, she's a therapist and she's going to then get her PhD in it. So she is leveling up her skills. She's like, this is what I'm called to do. this is what I enjoy doing. And the next natural step is to hone these skills even further. And it's like, yes, answer the breadcrumb. I have a stepson who is an architect. He has an undergraduate degree working right now towards a graduate degree, working with a firm right now. And he is answering his divine assignment through these breadcrumbs. And so what is your divine assignment? Now, listen, We may be answering our assignments. We may even know what they are, but we're finding ourselves in circumstances like in a bad organization or answering to a crazy leader, right? We may find ourselves in these situations where we don't believe that these are our divine assignments because of how chaotic and How rageful, how angry these situations are that you are having to work through. You are working in these environments. And although you may have been answering your divine assignment this whole time, but you have found yourself in some very troubling situations. situations. And you're questioning whether this is your divine assignment or not. And I'm here to tell you, it's your divine assignment. You answered the call, you have followed the breadcrumbs, and you're now here and you're in a situation that you are unfulfilled in. And that doesn't feel good to your soul. There's so much contrast, contradiction, resistance that you're experiencing right now. And so it's okay. It's okay to know that. It's okay to be in that situation right now. But for the purpose of this episode, I just want for you to acknowledge that you have a divine assignment. And that we're going to find ourselves in situations where we're living our divine assignment, but there is such great contrast in trying to fulfill these roles. And this is a sign for you to start questioning, do I belong here? Because I don't have control of these external variables. The only thing I have control over is what's in my mind, in my heart, in my spirit. I have no control over anything outside of my brain or body. I know it's hard for some leaders out here to believe that because we were sold a bad bill of goods that we go into leadership and dominate. We go into leadership and we control. We manipulate. We coerce. We do everything we have to do to move these people. No, wait a minute. No, we were taught this. the complete opposite of what leadership is supposed to be. Leadership is about influence. It's about inspiring a group of people. It's about moving a collective forward. It's about deeply understanding yourself and those that you steward so that we can then move together in unison, not by manipulation, not by coercion. See, that's the thing about a very interesting generation of leaders that I'm in. And we were taught that that's what leadership was about. And look at us now with all this abuse of power. Look at us now. Dictators, tyrants, all kinds of interesting things that are happening in this world. And we are going, no, we've had it. And those of us that are contemplatives, we're saying enough is enough. Enough is enough. How dare we undermine these incredible, brilliant people in this world? How dare us use our power to abuse these systems and abuse these people? See, that's the thing about contemplatives. We are the prayer. We are the solution. We are the remedy to bad leadership, generations of bad leaders. This is why contemplative leadership style will single-handedly, mark my words, single-handedly change a field of study. Contemplative leadership approach will change the way we lead forever. This is my conviction. This is how strongly I feel about this approach. This is why I'm talking about your divine assignment as principle number one, because we have to acknowledge that first and foremost. I'm not talking about religion. I'm talking about spirituality here, y'all. I'm not a theologian. I will tell you until I'm blue in the face. I am not a theologian. I will never undermine your religious beliefs. I'm just asking you to bring your spirituality to the table. I'm asking you to bring your spirituality to the organization. That's what I'm asking you to do. Bring it. Don't leave it at home. Don't leave it in the closet. Bring it because we need it. We need you. And the first thing we need to acknowledge is that we have a divine assignment. And what are we doing about it? Are we answering it or are we abusing this assignment? It's like when you assign your kids a task, go do this, go clean up the room, go clean the toilet, go put your shoes away. You have an assignment for them specifically, right? Because you're looking at them individually. You're like, okay, Sally over here, you know, she takes a while to get ready. So I'm going to have to assign her something to do before so that we can get out of this house on time. Okay. And Timmy over here, I'm going to need to have him do this and assign him this very specific task because I know he's going to, you know, do this, this, and this. So here you are looking at them individually, right? just like you do in the workplace. You're looking at your teams individually, your employees individually, and you are assigning tasks based on their unique qualifications. So we look at Sally over here in the workplace. We assign her a campaign. We assign her this very specific campaign because she will be able to deliver on all of these objectives, right? Like I got some KPIs that I have her to follow and we're going to make sure that she follows them because she's got strengths in these areas. But then Timmy over here, oh my gosh, he's so incredible, doesn't even know what he's capable of. So I'm going to assign him this project with these deadlines because this is going to grow him. This is going to move him into a new space where he can believe in himself and the confidence he's going to have. My goodness, I'm going to show him through his experience that he is capable of more because he doesn't see what I see in him. And so these are assignments that we're giving to our employees. We give to our family members. So where do you think your divine assignment came from? You were specifically assigned a very unique purpose for this time, space, reality, not for two lifetimes ago. I'm not, okay. I ain't talking about any of that. I'm talking about right here, right now. You were called to do very specific things. What are they for you? That's your job is to discover that for yourself. And if you've been following the breadcrumbs and you're here now going, yeah, okay, this is my divine assignment. Okay, how do I protect this divine assignment? How do I nurture it? How do I keep it from... getting into the wrong hands. How do I protect this divine assignment that I was given? Well, who gave it to you? Huh? Who gave that to you? Who assigned it to you specifically? Start asking yourself who that is. For me, it's God, period, point blank, end of story. I'm going to talk about religion. Forget it. Get out of here with that. I won't do that with you, and I won't undermine you. For me, it's God. For you, it could be something else. How fantastic, though. How fantastic that we're all on the same page. that we all believe we have a divine assignment. How incredible is that? And it is my job to discover it, to nurture it, to blossom it, for it to be in bloom and then harvest and then bloom again. We're tending to this incredible assignment that we were specifically given. I know I may have lost some of you and that's okay. But give yourself this opportunity to learn about something new, to learn a new way to lead your people and a way where it feels in total and complete alignment with your divine assignment. There's a lot of us out here in this world, made to believe that we were to do this or to do that and go into these careers go into these professions go be this go be that and and you're going to be fine and have a great life and then you realize wow that was not what i expected and actually that caused me more harm than good and i am miserable in this life with this title with this job with this marriage and oh my gosh I was answering somebody else's dreams and completely neglected mine. And so your job is to contemplate what that divine assignment is for you. And this could be in your love life. It could be in your professional life. In whatever area of your life you're finding yourself questioning if you're fulfilling that assignment. And that's where you need to spend some time. And so the divine assignment is where we start. This is the beginning of the roadmap. This is where we begin. And when you realize you have a divine assignment, then it's easy for you to see others and their divine assignments. And sometimes as a leader, we're perched at a very unique vision. We're perched at a different level. So we're able to see the strengths, the greatness, the capacity in our employees. We're able to see what they're truly capable of. And if you're paying attention, you can find their divine assignment too. If you're paying attention to them, you will know who they are and what they were put on this earth to do. And they may not know it or believe it for themselves. But our job is to number one, realize we have a divine assignment, which then number two, If I have a divine assignment, then everybody I talk to today has a divine assignment. Everybody in this meeting has a divine assignment. Everybody that crosses my path has a divine assignment. Wow. If they only knew that, how much more fulfillment could they find in this role? And as a leader, well, it's my responsibility to steward them. And so wouldn't it be fun? to help them figure that out. And that's the beauty of contemplative leaders is we don't take them at face value. We don't take them at face value. And a lot of us contemplatives, listen, we're natural skeptics. We're not cynics for sure. We're very hopeful in humanity. So we're definitely nowhere near cynicism. We are skeptics. You tell us something and we go, really, can we talk really about this at a deeper level? Because you're, you're talking to me on the surface and you know, I've got meaning and substance and I like, we got to take this conversation down below because that's just, that's just too surface for me. And so when we see our employees at a distance, right, we look at them, not at face value, but we look at them from this unique perspective of seeing their greatness. And we see that through their actions. We see it through their behaviors, how they treat themselves, how they treat others. You know, you may hear them in conversation about their family members and, you know, you get a glimpse of who they are in their personal lives and you go, wow, that's Like here he shows up and he's surface level and nothing very deep about him. But gosh, I see something completely different. And I wonder if he knows that. I wonder if he sees that. And that's our job as leaders. That's what we do as contemplative leaders. So this first spiritual principle is pretty darn important because without this foundation, the other four principles will not work. will not be sturdy enough. The foundation has to be sturdy because you're not gonna build a house on a flawed or deeply unstable foundation. We gotta build the foundation and that's this first principle because then we're gonna start building the walls and we don't want that house to collapse midway through. We don't wanna hurt anybody so we need to set the foundation first. before we can then add these next layers of the house. And so how is this true for you today? So think about this, contemplate, reflect on this, and then go put this into practice because I want you to embody this. I want you to go experience this for yourself. So first and foremost, what is your divine assignment? Are you answering that? Are there areas in your life where you need a little more time to think things through? Cool, great, do it. Spend some time in prayer. Spend some time in meditation. Spend some time in stillness, whatever that looks like for you. It could be away from the family. It could be away from the children. It could be waking up thirty minutes early just to have a cup of coffee or a cup of tea with you and God or whatever you believe. And sit and reflect on what it is that you were called to do on this earth, in this time, space, reality. And then go and see for yourself how your employees have their own divine assignment or your clients or your students or your family members or your lover or your spouse, whatever. And be curious about what they were brought to this world to do. Because I believe every single one of us, yes, has a divine assignment, but this assignment is to help humanity. It's to help each other. It's not to fulfill our egos. It's not to stroke. It's not to serve ourselves. It's ultimately to serve others. That's my belief. And that's the kind of leader that I want to serve. All right, dear leader. I hope we're off to a great start this month. I hope this episode is helping you build a strong foundation for what's to come for the remaining spiritual principles that we'll talk about soon. But for now, what is your divine assignment? And then go see for yourself what others, how others are approaching their divine assignments and how you can help them discover it for themselves. All right, Jerry Leader, take very good care. Have a fantastic rest of your day. And I'm looking forward to serving you again very soon. Bye for now.
