How to Develop Breakthrough Goals

If you are a person who likes to set and achieve goals, you may have faced this question:

Do you write goals to simply improve your current reality, or do you write goals to breakthrough into a whole new area?

Let’s define our terms:

• Incremental Goal – a goal which extends or improves a project on which you have already been working.
• Breakthrough Goal – a goal which pushes you into a whole new realm of reality. It exposes you to things which you did not know or do in the past.

I’ve made it a habit every year to read a book in a totally new and unrelated field so that I can learn new things and stretch my life in new ways. Some of the best growth opportunities which I have personally had started as a book or a seminar in a brand new area.

Benefits of Incremental Goals:

• An Incremental Goal improves your current reality. And that is a good thing. No complaints on this.

• An Incremental Goal is usually very achievable. Therefore it makes you feel good when you reach it.

• An Incremental Goal doesn’t rock the boat, or upset the status quo. You can keep on doing what you have always done, just better.

Problems with Incremental Goals:

• An Incremental Goal only gives you more of the same.

• An Incremental Goal can make life a little boring.

Benefits of Breakthrough Goals

• Breakthrough Goals are more difficult to create & imagine.
  Because you are working with something that has never been there before in your life, you may not even know what you don’t know. You may not even know what you could achieve. Therefore you are going to need to approach it in a really creative way. You are going to have to be exposed to new people and ideas to help you achieve the Breakthrough.
• Breakthrough Goals are more difficult to achieve.
  A whole new set of learning and performance behaviors have to be developed. You will have to study in a new field. You will have to try your skills out in an area where you may not initially perform with excellence.

Benefits of Breakthrough Goals:

• Breakthrough Goals open up a whole new world to you; that you would never have imagined.

• Breakthrough Goals make life exciting.

• Breakthrough Goals stretch you in new ways.

• Breakthrough Goals present amazing new potential opportunities to you.

Here’s the plan:

1. Write your incremental goals, as needed by your situation.

You probably have to write goals for your church or organization. Go ahead and write them as usual. But that’s not all…

2. Also include one or two breakthrough goals.

How to create your Breakthrough Goals:

1. Get into a creative state/environment.
   You need to get into a new environment which will let you think and dream in new ways.
2. Do a mind map.
   If you are not sure what a mind map is, just do an internet search. There are many great tools out there to assist you with this. It is a really great method to get from HERE to THERE, when you don’t know where THERE is.
3. Let it percolate for a while.
   Give yourself some time to think, ponder, meditate on your new breakthrough idea.
4. Come back a week later, and PICK SOMETHING, preferably two choices.
   When it all comes down to it, you must simply make a decision and do it!
5. Schedule extra time for learning & execution.
   Since you are moving into a new area in which you have never been, you will need to spend time learning. Put the learning and studying right into your schedule so you do it.
6. Just work at it, and don’t become discouraged.
   It only makes sense that you will not initially perform with excellence until you work it for a while. Just remember that everyone else who is currently performing with excellence in that area started right where you are now.

You will be successful. Even if you don’t totally achieve your new breakthrough goal, just the act of seeking to achieve it will raise you to new heights. Life will be more exciting, full, and rich. Give it a try.

God’s best to you as you try out a new adventure this year!

Dr. Bill Miller

www.HighPowerResources.com

www.SermonBase.com

Developing a Growth Plan for your Church

Hi All,

I recently wrote a post about how to develop a personal growth plan.  I also released a coaching tool to help anyone to write their own growth plan. But if you are a pastor, one question which may be troubling you, is ‘How do I develop a growth plan for my church?’ Churches, like people, are organisms which need to grow. And like all growing organisms,  they need to grow in various ways. For example, if you focused just on physical growth of your body, you could spend all of your time working out and eating vitamins and getting physically fit. But if your mind, spirit, and emotions suffered, you would be lesser not greater for having pursued such a growth plan.

It is the same way for churches. We must pursue wholistic growth. For example, if your church just pursues numeric growth, but you do not focus on love, or you do not create a system to maintain spiritual health in your body, any growth you experience will be short-lived. Why is that? Because God will give you only the growth which you can sustain as a Body in loving His sheep. If you cannot provide love and care to His sheep they will go elsewhere.

So what does that mean for your church? It means you can bring them in, but you must find a way to care for them once they are here; and you must find a way to disciple them. If you cannot provide care, then eventually something will happen in the lives of your people in which they need pastoral love and care (whether provided by the paid staff, or by loving volunteers). If you cannot provide it, they will head elsewhere. In the same way, they need to keep growing spiritually and be challenged, and you need a system in place for that.

So, you need a wholistic growth plan for your church. A wholistic growth plan is one that includes these elements:

• 1st – a system to reach them and bring them in for the first time
• 2nd – a system to welcome them and bring them back for following visits
• 3rd – a system to disciple them and train them so they keep growing
• 4th – a system to care for them and provide the fellowship needs which they have

How to get started?

A good place to start is by doing a Natural Church Development survey so that you can get a good diagnosis of which systems in your church are weak and which need to be developed. Now an NCD study includes eight elements of review, not just four, but it will give you a good start at understanding your church.

Our church just took an NCD, and we are forming an implementation team to begin addressing our growth areas. But we are also strengthening the other areas listed above.

That’s all for now. I just wanted to share with you the concept of a ‘wholistic growth plan’. Because people are people, and they have many diverse needs which must all be met simultaneously. And we want to meet their needs because Jesus loves them!

Yours for His Kingdom,

Dr. Bill Miller

www.HighPowerResources.com

www.SermonBase.com

Simple Church – Defining Your Outcomes

Hi All,

The book “Simple Church” by Thom Rainer and Eric Geiger gives us four aspects of what makes a simple church. Those four parts are:

• Clarity
• Movement
• Alignment
• Focus

Here is how we addressed the matter of Clarity at one church in which I served. Specifically, we asked ourselves the Product Question: What kind of a disciple do we want to produce at this church?

Asking that question helped us to identify a number of traits which we would like to see in our disciples. These traits were divided into the three categories of Intellectual, Emotional, and Behavioral characteristics. These we nicknamed as “Head, Heart, Hands Goals” for our disciples.

Based on these targeted traits then, we began to examine our programming to see where and how we would address each of these characteristics amongst our children, youth, and adults.

Following is a link to the pdf showing exactly what we attempted to do with this plan (3Hchart). The whole process of asking the questions, developing the outcomes, and examining our programs took several months, but it was very good for us. We did not see any dramatic changes, but what we did see and feel was increasing CLARITY, which is exactly what the first phase of Simple Church is all about.

It was a good experience, and I would recommend it to anyone.

So, again, here is a link to our Description of a Disciple (3Hchart).

God’s best to you and your ministry!

Dr. Bill

How to Create a Growth Plan

People who want to go, grow.
That is, if you want to make a difference in life you have to have a plan. Nobody changes the world by accident. Making a difference in the world means making a difference in your life. To change your life you have to change. You can no longer be content with the status quo.

So here are the three steps to begin working on a growth plan for your life:

 1. Do a Baseline Assessment.

(Find out where you are right now. ) You can download your free Baseline Assessment here.

2.  Formulate the beginnings of your growth plan.

That’s what this article is about.

3. Start executing the Growth Plan by changing your daily lifestyle habits.

WHAT IS A GROWTH PLAN?

A Growth Plan is simply a set of action steps which you create to achieve your personal growth goals in life. Note that a Growth Plan is focused on you. It is not focused outwardly on your job goals, for example. It is focused on how you need to improve as a person in order to eventually be able to reach your goals in life.

THE ELEMENTS OF A GROWTH PLAN

A Growth Plan focuses upon the following parts of YOU:

1.  Your Gifts

You have certain abilities and talents. Some of these are God-given spiritual gifts (Romans 12; 1Cor 12; Eph 4:11-12). Some of them are developed talents you have, like playing the piano. Some are skills you’ve learned, like flying an airplane or computer programming. So, whether Gifts, Talents, or Skills, they all need to be developed and extended and improved in some way. How they will be extended is up to you as you put together your Growth Plan.

2.  Your Personality

This would include your passions and interests, your way of relating to both people and work. A major component of your personality is your temperament. This can be determined by taking a DiSC inventory. If you know whether you are more of a choleric, sanguine, phlegmatic or melancholy personality, you are well on your way to knowing what kind of a growth plan to put together for yourself.

3. Your Capacity

This is your ability to handle the work load of life. Some people have greater capacity than others. Your capacity will determine the pacing which you place into your growth plan.

HOW DO I GET STARTED?

1. Do a Baseline Assessment.

This will help you determine where you are right now. Then you have a foundation from which to launch your Growth Plan.  You can get your free Baseline Assessment here.

2. Rate yourself in the following areas:

• Relationship building:

- How are you at being a friend? Do you maintain long-term relationships, or burn through them? Are you winsome? Would you rate your friends as ‘close’, ‘close-enough’, or just ‘acquaintances’?

- Where could you improve in this area?

• Spiritual well-being:

- How is your spiritual life? How is your relationship with God? What can you do to strengthen it?

- What steps could you take to build up this area of your life?

• Physical health:

- How are you physically? Do you need to lose a few pounds? What’s your capacity before you become exhausted? What kind of medications are you on?

- While some issues here could be chronic, what positive movements could you make to improve your physical health? How badly do you want to do this?

• Intellectual Ability:

- How sharp and aware are you? What have you been feeding your brain? What is your capacity to think, plan, and create? How much time do you take each day or week to do so?

- What steps can you take to sharpen your brain, and expand your knowledge?

• Developing Joy

- This last area is simply a measure of your overall happiness and satisfaction with life.

- How is your joy? What are your current frustrations or joy-blockers? What can you do to either deal with them, or adjust your attitude in the face of them?

3.  Now you need to start addressing these areas in your life.

These are best accomplished by changing your daily lifestyle and your weekly lifestyle. There are some things which you will need to start incorporating into your daily life habits if you want to grow. Some of these are more weekly activities. But you will need to change something. Because if you keep doing what you’ve always done, you will keep getting what you’ve always gotten.

Here is a Personal_Growth_Plan which will get you started.

It can be done alone, but is best accomplished by linking up with a personal life, success, or leadershp coach to help you mmaintain objectivity as you work through it all.

God’s best to you as you work through your Growth Plan for this year.

Dr. Bill Miller

www.HighPowerResources.com

www.SermonBase.com

How to Set GREAT Annual Goals

Hey All,

A lot of people set goals each year. I love to set goals and usually take a couple of days each December to do so. But unless you know what makes a good goal, you can just be wasting a lot of time. So, what makes a goal GREAT, and worth the effort?

About ten years ago, I set a goal to run my first marathon. I spent some time asking myself the question, as I contemplated that challenging goal, “Why would I possibly want to do such a thing?!” It really came down to the issue of setting great goals for my life that really make a difference. See if you can identify with the things I learned during that process.

Five Requirements for GREAT Goals

1st Requirement for GREAT Goals:  Significance

A goal has to mean something. It must be important, significant, potentially life changing. If you are going to try to do something, let’s make sure it is something which counts. If it doesn’t excite or inspire you right now, while you are making it, then it certainly won’t have staying power to take you through the rough times throughout the year. So make sure when you write your goal, that you are really fired up and pumped about it now. And not only should you be fired up about it, but it also must have significance. Achieving this goal must make a big difference in life. It must alter life significantly. It must greatly advance your life by achieving it.  That is “significance”.

For me, running a marathon – a 26.2 mile race – counted as doing something significant. I didn’t know if I could do it, but I wanted to try. It would change my life, and my perception of myself. This passed the significance test for me.

2nd Requirement for GREAT Goals: Goldilocks Challenge

A great goal is going to be both attainable, and yet also challenging.  If a goal is too easy to achieve, it really doesn’t mean much to meet it. It’s not really a goal if it requires little additional effort or life change. So it needs to challenge you a bit.  However, if the goal is so outrageously difficult, that it actually discourages people to state it, then that will not help either.

I knew that lots of people had run marathons before me, so I believed it was attainable. I was in good shape, having been a short distance runner for most of my life. But it would definitely test my perseverance. So a marathon fit the Goldilocks Challenge for me.

So it must be Attainable. It must be Challenging. That’s why I call the Goldilocks Challenge of goal setting: not too hard; not to easy; “just right”.

3rd Requirement for GREAT Goals: Accountability System

If you are really serious about achieving this significant, and challenging yet attainable goal, you are going to need an accountability system. The accountability system could simply be a friend or co-worker who asks you how its going. Or it could be a more formal accountability system like the one found on the stickk.com website. In either case, it is a universal fact of human existence that we perform better when somebody is checking on our progress.

I found a running buddy that had just run his first marathon the year before. So he was both a coach, and a friend as part of my accountability system. I also told my family that I would be running a marathon. That kind of locked me in to seeing it happen for sure.

So if you are serious about making your goals for the new year, then get an accountability system in place.

4th Requirement for GREAT Goals: Measurability

Since this is an “annual” goal which you are writing, it is understood that this is a goal which will take a lot of work – approximately a year’s worth of work to achieve it. Therefore, you have got to break that plan down into segments. You need to know that you are making progress toward the goal, and you need to be able to measure that progress. So take that goal and break it into twelve parts, or ten parts, giving yourself a couple of months worth of tuning or adjustments as you go. But however you divide it up, you need to be able to measure progress. Then you need to schedule regular evaluation into your lifestyle, so that you can keep your eye on those goals all year long. You don’t want to get to the end of the year, and then realize you’ve let some important goals slide until the last minute.

There are lots of systems out there for marathon training. It is quite measurable. When I got home each Saturday morning, it was easy for me to see if I was putting in the distance necessary to eventually do 26.2 miles non-stop.

Measurability can encourage you, by letting you know that you are making progress toward that big, gigantic, year-long goal.

5th Requirement for GREAT Goals: Sustainability

Some goals are the “one and your done” sort of goal. But others are the type of goal where you are raising yourself or your organization to a higher level. Once you get to that higher level, you want to stay there! That means the goal you set must be “sustainable”. For example, if you want to lose weight, once you drop those pounds, you want to keep them off. Or if you train for a marathon, you want to develop an on-going running lifestyle after that long run.

I never want to stop running. And so running must be part of my daily activity. This means either I run outside in the Minnesota winters, or I buy a gym membership, or I buy a treadmill for at home. Either way, if I am serious about running, I must change my daily lifestyle.

Sustainability means that your goals must fit into your future lifestyle; they must fit into your way of living from this point forward. So as you work on your goals, and make your plans, you must find a way to keep on attaining that goal well after the achievement date.

Sustainability is what separates flash-in-the-pan success from long-term success.

Finally:

So, these are the requirements for setting GREAT annual goals. They must be Significant; they must meet the Goldilocks Challenge; you need an Accountability System; they must be Measurable, and Sustainable.

These worked for me. I ran not just one, but three Chicago Marathons. They were some of my personally most challenging and rewarding achievements. I’m still running, and I’m still setting Annual Goals.

Put these five elements into your goals, and you will surprise yourself with your success!

Dr. Bill Miller

www.HighPowerResources.com

www.SermonBase.com

Four Step Recruiting Process

Hi Leaders,

I just had a conversation with a staff person who was interested in knowing exactly how she could go about expanding her team and recruiting additional leaders and workers.

So here is the quick four-step process which I outline for her. This will work for almost any position for which your staff are recruiting people.

1st Step – Generate the Names

How you do this will vary depending upon your unique setting. Some will call upon a computer-generated report from a sophisticated database of skills, abilities, and interests. Others will simply go through the church directory manually, page-by-page, to locate prospective candidates. Others will use a spiritual gifts-based system to find pre-qualified candidates who have the necessary gifting.

The main point is to get a big pile of names to start working with, however you do it.

2nd Step – Contact the Prospects

The biggest mistake people make at this point is to approach the prospects in a serial fashion. That is, they will first call up one person, and ask if they are interested, and then wait for days or a week or more while that person thinks about it. Then when they say ‘no’, the staff person moves on down to the next person on the list. This is the WRONG WAY to recruit people.

It is much better to present the offer to everybody on your list all at once – and let them all know that you are doing so. For example, “Hi John or Jane Doe, we have an opportunity to make a difference for eternity in the following area of our ministry. We are asking God to lead us to just the right person to make this ministry happen, and you might be that person. We are contacting several people that we believe God may have gifted for this ministry. So, if you would give this prayerful consideration, I will be calling you soon, to explain it in more details and to find out how you are feeling about this, and to answer any questions. Thanks and God bless.”

3rd Step – Host a Q&A Meeting

Next you call a meeting for everybody who has not already self-selected themselves out of the process. Just bring them in, and let them know that this is a ‘no commitment’ meeting. It’s just a chance to answer questions and explain what it is all about. Then create a fun, exciting meeting with a lot of relational opportunities, and present the ministry to them all.

4th Step – Solicit Commitments

Either at the end of that Q&A meeting, or else within a day or two afterwards, you will contact each person and ask if they want in on the ministry. You might by this time already have your eye on one or two likely candidates, so you will contact them first.

So what happens if you get more than one person?  Great! Wish I had your problem! You can apply the two-by-two method of Jesus and pair them up so they can work together. Or, you can simply select one, and thank the others and let them know it has been filled. This happens all the time in other walks of life, and there is no need to be afraid of saying this to someone.

But what happens if you don’t get any to step forward to help out?

Then you must examine your methods or calling. First of all, did God really call you to do this ministry? Maybe this is God’s way of beginning to shut down a ministry. Or the other possibility, is not a spiritual call issue, but a methodological one. Maybe you did not start with enough people to begin with, or did not cast the vision well, etc. Problems do not always mean that God is trying to say something. Sometimes He is just saying to you, “Do a better job next time”(!)

So, the steps then are to “Generate, Contact, Host, Solicit”.  The process couldn’t be simpler. But it is important to ask for God’s leading in the whole process so that you are not pursuing your own personal goals, but truly His goals to help you fulfill the Great Commission in and through your ministry.

Yours for the Kingdom,

Dr. Bill Miller

HighPowerResources.com

SermonBase.com

Symmetry is a description of how you write your Main Points.  ”Symmetry” means “balanced proportions”.  If your sermon displays symmetry, it’s main points will be balanced and proportionate.  That is, each main point will seem to have an equal and valuable relationship with all of the other main points.  No main point will dominate, either in terms of importance, impact, or the amount of time you spend on it.

The three main benefits of sermon symmetry are:

1.  Understandable

Main Points with symmetry, make your sermon easy to follow and understand.

2.  Memorable

It is easy to remember a sermon with has symmetry flow.  I’m writing this blog from memory, based on the sermon symmetry I heard last night.

3.  Beautiful

Main Points with symmetry, are a thing of beauty.  (Note how the three points of this blog also display symmetry.)

Sermon Example:  Take a look at this sermon which I just listened to last night from Dr. John Crocker at Crossroads Church in Albert Lea, MN:

He was speaking on 2 Peter 1:1-12.  His mains were:

1. Establish Your Identity  (2 Peter 1:1-4)
2. Exercise Your Responsibility  (2 Peter 1:5-8)
3. Erase Your Uncertainty  (2 Peter 1:9-12)

This sermon contains symmetry.  Each main is a command verb (Establish, Exercise, Erase). Each main begins with the letter “E”.  Each main is focused on You.  Each key word at the end has a symmetry as well, with each one ending with a “-ty” ending.

This is not just word play.  This gives a sermon memorable power and greater impact in people’s lives.

Yours for better preaching,

Dr. Bill

SermonBase.com

HighPowerResources.com