The Hidden Truth of How God-Given Identity Shapes Leadership

Leveraging Who God Made You to Be For Influence

From the world’s perspective, if you don’t see yourself as a king then you’re nothing but a pawn. From God’s perspective, when we see ourselves as pawns we become part of the king.

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In This Article:

• If you don't know who God made you to be, there's no way to align your leadership with his kingdom.

• Your role and achievements don't define your identity. Rather, your identity defines how you flesh out your role and contribute to your achievements

• Humility is seeing yourself as God sees you.

Key Application:

• Embrace seeing yourself as God sees you.

• Surrender your version of your identity, in favor of the version God has in mind for you.

• Seek out partnerships (you don't have it all; you can't be everything to everybody in every situation).

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In my last article, 3 Reasons a Flawed Leadership Identity Sabotages Your Success, I quoted Anthony de Mello’s The Song of the Bird, a fable about an eagle who hatched and grew up in brood of chickens.

(Here’s the article, if you want to read it…)

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3 Reasons a Flawed Leadership Identity Sabotages Your Success

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The tragic moral of the story is that the eagle never explored his true identity. He spent his entire life thinking and behaving as if he was a chicken—even when seeing other eagles like him.

I used it to introduce an equally tragic but opposite fable: A chicken thinking he was an eagle. Despite the fact that he was a chicken, he acts like an eagle (who sees its fellow chickens as a tasty meal, by the way). Not an effective way to influence and lead.

Yet this is exactly what the world would have us believe, and it’s the primary practice of leadership the world is pursuing and promoting.

We are called to think differently…