Have You Written Your Passionography?

I've been asked about my passionography assignment and if I would share it.  The passionography is the result of self-examination and surveys of others about yourself.  The following are what served as inputs to ponder while compiling a passionography:

• Understanding of your personal strengths
• Your personal skills
• What is important to you
• Strongly held beliefs that are aspects of your personal faith/values
• Survey of what others think that you feel is of importance
• Survey of others of how they view you as a leader

From: faithoncampus.com

With all of that input, you then begin to formulate your own personal passionography with respect to your leadership outlook.  As you will notice, the first paragraph is what I used as input into my leadership manifesto.  This is a very personal document and serves as a compass to revisit in order to reset my direction.  

Think of the passionography as saying, "This is who and why I am"  The leadership manifesto says, "This is where I'm going and how I'm going to go about it"  The two together are like a map and a compass - they work together to guide you on your journey.

If you have any questions or thoughts, feel free to comment or shoot me an email at jgriffin@seniorsguide.net.

My Passionography

 Importance of Leadership

 Everyone is a leader in some way, but not everyone accepts the responsibility of leadership.  Leaders influence and inspire – in both negative and positive ways.  When we accept the responsibility to be influential and inspirational to others, it is then that we are stepping out of our comfort zone of complacency and self-absorbed egos to put our focus on others.  How can one possibly think they can influence someone else without first understanding those they desire to influence?

 Personal Impact of Leadership

 I have been blessed by having influential leaders in my life.  Mrs. Cain, my high school chemistry teacher that told me that I was good at a lot of things, but she’d love to see me narrow the focus to be great at a few things.  Tony Gossett, my first mentor, made me memorize chapters 6-8 of the book of Romans, to understand human struggle and the opportunity to have quality in life through a real and growing relationship with God.  John Yancey, my second mentor, challenged me to write out every verse in the book of Proverbs that was related to the use of our lips, tongue, mouth, or spoken word teaching me to power of life, death, success and failure that our words can have on ourselves and others. Michael Woolstrum, my current mentor (at various times in the past 12 years) has taught me the value of selfless living, high work ethic, and focus on others.

The life and legacy that I see in these people has influenced and inspired me to want to grow in personal and spiritual maturity.  I could only hope that my life can influence and inspire at least one person as much as they’ve done for me.

 Personal Leadership

 I love God and love people, but understand that many do not feel that same way.  I’ve met many people who “don’t know and don’t care” about God, but seem to have a love and care for humanity.  Meanwhile, I know others who love God, but somehow miss the mark when dealing or caring for people.  I am not implying that my love for God and people is perfect, but I’d like to think that I am intentional and authentic when relating to another person.

I want “to leave the world a better place”.  I want to achieve great things and help others do the same or surpass those achievements.  I want people to have a choice to know my God in a real and personal way.  I want to help people discover what makes them “come alive” and find ways to incorporate that into their life’s journey.

What does this have to do with leadership?  Everything.

Jim Elliot, a missionary killed in Ecuador while trying to evangelize the Waodani Indians, said “Let me not be a milepost on a single road; make me a fork, that men must turn one way or another on facing Christ in me.”  (Shadow of the Almighty, by Elisabeth Elliot)  For some, this quote takes on the meaning of bold, in-your-face Bible thumping evangelism.  For me, the quote takes on a different meaning when paired with this quote often attributed to Theodore Roosevelt: “Nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care”.

I do not want to simply be a road sign declaring how many miles one has traveled or how much farther they have to go.  I want to be a tour guide for many on this journey called life, providing maps of navigation through the tough terrain of disappointment and grief and celebrating on the summits of the mountains of blessing and peace.

There is nothing more rewarding to me, than to see the miraculous change in a person’s eyes when they’ve encountered God in a real and personal way.  My hope is that intentional servant leadership and success will open the doors that will permit me to introduce others to my creator and the ultimate servant leader, Jesus Christ.

What are you passionate about? Please share.

Week 13: Passionography and Critique

I left very early last Tuesday morning to drive to MS to visit with my mother.  About an hour into the journey I discovered that I had left my computer at home, so I was not able to get a jump start on my leadership assignment.  This week we had to list our strengths, values, skills, and enlist others to provide us with a list of what our top 5 things they most important to us.  Before I left for MS, I sent out my requests to friends, family, and employees for their feedback on those top 5 things and also requested a short paragraph on how they view my leadership. More on that shortly.

Normal vision

Same view with macular degeneration

Forgetting my computer was at first irritating, but in some ways liberating, as it helped me to spend much more time with Mom on this trip.  This was a tough trip for me as I could tell that my mother has declined since my last visit.  She has dementia and macular degeneration.  The short-term memory loss, declination of her eyesight, and recent changes in her medications have made her more anxious - which is understandable.  It's hard to understand what a person sees with macular degeneration, but I found a good example that helps me understand it better as shown in these pictures from Wikipedia.  In the past, Mom relied heavily on my father to keep her medications straight, to help her navigate when in public, and even cover up her memory issues.  With Dad's passing, my brother keeps her medications straight, but she is not wanting to leave her home much because of her sight and her memory issues.  Thankfully, I was able to convince her to go out to dinner one evening and on another day to visit with her sisters (one of whom has advanced Alzheimer's).  All in all, I'm glad I was able to make the trip and have some quality time with her.  Time went by so fast that I missed visiting her sweet sweet neighbors that are the same as family to us, so I'll have to be more intentional on my next visit.

While in MS, Thursday evening, I had a conference call with my learning team where we discussed our Economics assignment.  We had to critique another learning team's paper and be prepared to turn in that critique this Monday night.  We struggled collectively with the balance of not wanting to be too critical of the other team's paper, while making sure that we were objectively holding them accountable to the criteria that we all had to write our papers.  It was a very productive call and I felt compelled to share with the team just how much I genuinely appreciated them.  For the next few minutes, the rest of the team was sharing with each other their same sentiments.  It was a very nice ending to our phone call that evening.

From: kamyabology.com

Upon my return to Austin, I had to catch up on the work that I couldn't do without my computer.  As I began to read through all of the feedback that others had provided for the passionography assignment, I was humbled and appreciative by what I read.  I found this assignment to be one of the more difficult papers that I've had to write so far.  My main struggle was making sure that I would be true to myself and write exactly how I felt and thought in the paper rather than what I would think is expected.  After mulling this over for almost 5 hours (yes, seriously), I came to realization that there were no expectations on this assignment (except to complete it).  I, then committed to write straight from my heart and see where the paper goes.  After all, this class isn't intended to mold us into any one particular shape, but rather, to allow us to discover who we really are individually and then free us to live it out loud.  An hour and half later, the paper was finished.

This evening's leadership class was quite introspective.  We were put into groups of three with other team members and that allowed us to get to know a couple other people that we don't normally interact with regularly.  We took the time to write out specific milestones in our life that were pivotal moments for us on our leadership journey.  I was astounded and inspired by the transparency the two people in my group.  We each ran out of time while telling our pivotal moment, so I hope to hear the rest of their story soon.  As exhausted as I was physically going into this evening, I find that I really come to life in this class.  I absolutely love this class!