Back on March 8th, I shared some Church Leadership Thoughts from a consultant named Dave Jacobs. Dave spends numerous hours working with Churches all over the country from different denominations through coaching calls. After most of these calls, he then posts a “coaching takeaway” for a group of pastors on social media. Here are ten of the best ones I have read over the past few months. They apply far beyond just Church leadership, and I thought you might learn something from them too. Enjoy.

1. If there are problems that need dealing with, you can deal with them now or deal with them later. Problems left until later have a tendency to grow into bigger problems. You choose.
2. In the absence of information, people will come to their own conclusions, and sometimes those conclusions are the conclusions we wish they didn’t come to.
3. Pour yourself into your best people. Give some of yourself to the rest but only your best to the best.
4. When faced with relational conflict, or any frustration with a leader, begin by asking yourself, “Is there any way in which I have contributed to the problem?”
5. The test of our spiritual maturity is seen in how we handle the boring, unexciting, monotonous routines of life.
6. We must become comfortable with having uncomfortable conversations with people.
7. We all make mistakes. When your mistake affects someone else, admit to them you made a mistake. Don’t beat yourself up too much; it does very little good. Learn and move forward.
8. One of the jobs of a leader is to help those they lead to face reality.
9. Before you can think outside of the box you must understand what’s inside of the box … and why.
10. Whenever someone’s behavior is “out of character” that can mean something is going on with them that you don’t know about. Find out if that is true before you deal with the behavior.
11. The older you get, the less time you have to recover from mistakes. God designed us to get wiser as we get older. If you don’t get wiser, then all you get is older.
12. Don’t blindly believe everything the “experts” tell you, especially if they have a book to sell.