Eavesdropping at Your Funeral

If you could time travel and attend your own funeral, what would you want to hear?

Not the well-crafted words from the stage, but the authentic conversations in the foyer while family and friends reminisced over cookies and small triangle sandwiches.

What would you want to hear?

What would I want to hear?

Would I want to hear about my leadership, vision, capacity, skill, or LinkedIn profile?

No.

If that is what people remembered me for, I would be disappointed.

I would want to hear how something I said had a meaningful impact on someone’s life.

How the unhurried time I spent with them made them feel valuable.

How I listened well and wasn’t distracted while they talked.

How what I said and how I lived were in sync.

I would want to hear people say, “When Mark said/did _____, that made a difference in my life.”

As much as I enjoy leadership, it is just a means to an end. I need to remember that.

Maybe you do too.

Over thirty years ago (yikes!), while I was at a small Bible college in southern Saskatchewan, Canada, I had an experience that changed the trajectory of my life.

Someone invested in me and opened my eyes to realize there was so much more to the world than what I could see.

In ways that I didn’t fully understand then, I experienced that God could be encountered through the ancient Scriptures and that both still speak to our lives today.

What? For someone with a scientifically oriented mind, that was revolutionary!

I could be both logical and spiritual?

I could embrace both physics and metaphysics at the same time?

Wow!

Since then, I have been committed to having others experience the same thing. It has influenced my relationships, career, travel, leadership, and more.

In reality, it is what I hope I am remembered for at my funeral.

I want people to tell stories about how I helped them encounter God through the Scriptures and how they experienced meaningful transformation.

Okay, let me bring this back to leadership (that is the title of this newsletter, after all!).

How do you integrate your sense of personal calling and purpose into your day-to-day leadership?

Three ideas:

1. Keep your sense of personal calling and purpose front and centre. Put it on a post-it note on your monitor. Have it be the background on your phone. Write it at the top of your journal. Schedule a monthly 30-minute meeting with yourself to reflect on how you are doing.
2. Infuse it into your communication. Whether explicit or implicit, incorporate it into what you say and write.
3. Say no to things that are out of sync or distract you from it. You can't do everything, so choose wisely.

There are more ideas, of course, but those are three to start with. I’ve also listed them in order of difficulty.

What about you?

What do you want to be remembered for?

Mark