What does it mean to be a leader in this day and age?  What does it mean to be a leader in a faith community? What does it mean to be a woman of faith and incorporate our faith in leadership? This is the first in a series of three blog posts about leading with gratitude.

Who am I to talk about this? I’m an ordained pastor in my fourth decade of ministry. I have a Master of Divinity degree and completed a year of clinical pastoral education, which is an advanced program. I’ve been trained in the Option Process® Dialogue method, which is a form of mentoring and counseling, as well as training as a coach. For five and a half years I was the host of Aflame Ministry, a weekly live radio show which reached people in at least 25 countries across 6 continents.  The episodes of the show are available as a podcast on all major podcast platforms.

Those are all the typical kinds of things in a bio. What’s not so typical in a bio is another part of my story. 

In my second position as a pastor, I was serving in a large congregation and was one of four associate pastors.  In about my fifth year there new senior pastor came on staff.  After a few months, he asked me one Friday afternoon to come to his office. He said he was allowing me to choose; I could either resign or be fired. 

Those were not the kind of choices I had ever been given before. That was not the kind of situation I’d ever been in before. Frankly, I was devastated. At that time in my life, all my beliefs about being told to resign or being fired meant failure. I believed that such a choice meant I had been a total failure in what I was doing. I was devastated and on the verge of quitting ministry.

Shortly  after I left the congregation, my best friend came to me and handed me a book she had found in the public library. She said I had to read it! I looked at the title and thought she was nuts. The title was, Happiness is a Choice, by Barry Neil Kaufman.  I was thinking, amid my feelings of pain, despair, confusion, anger and more, how could I choose to be happy?  That seemed absolutely ludicrous!

Because I trusted my friend, I read the book. It’s about six shortcuts to being happy. Barry Kaufman starts the book by talking about how the way we choose to see the world creates the world we see. Shortcut number five is all about seeing the world through eyes of gratitude. Here’s what he says in the second paragraph of the chapter on being grateful: 

 “When we are happy, we are truly grateful. The reverse also holds true. When we are grateful, we are truly happy. In fact, oftentimes I call gratitude the sweetest way to embrace happiness. We can cut through all of the misery by turning our attention to being grateful.  In spite of all the catastrophes that might occur, we can find in little and big ways bottomless wellsprings for our thankfulness. Gratitude then becomes the shortest of shortcuts to happiness.”2

When I read Happiness is a Choice after being told that I was leaving my position as a pastor, I can’t say that the idea of gratitude being a shortcut to happiness immediately changed my attitude, but it helped. It got me into the process of seeing life in a different way. I still went through some struggles, and I did some work with a mentor and coaches along the way. But learning to find little things to be grateful for even amid the hard days really helped get me through that time.

Even though at the first glance when I read this book, I thought, “You’ve got to be kidding me. This is a bunch of hogwash. There’s no way to see good things amid all of this.” Yet, there are so many ways and so many places within experience and scripture that say exactly the same thing. 

Rumi was a poet in 13th century Persia. Many people find the things that Rumi wrote to be very meaningful. One such quote says, “Your depression is connected to your refusal to praise.”  Every time we give thanks and praise; that’s a form of gratitude. Praise is always a form of gratitude. Think about that. The Apostle Paul starts all his letters with some statement of gratitude for the community that he is writing to, even when there are many things going on in that community that he talks about in the rest of the letter that were problems. In First Thessalonians chapter five, he says, “Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances.” That’s like Barry Kaufman’s words of choosing to be happy, give thanks in all circumstances. In other words, there are things to see and be thankful for even in the most difficult times.  

Not long ago, I was looking through the book of Psalms, which is one of my favorite books of the Bible because every conceivable feeling and emotion is expressed somewhere in the Psalms. Many of the Psalms have words of thanks and praise in them. Just looking through Psalms 1 through 34, I found that 19 of them, that’s over half of them, have some way of saying thanks to or praising God. Even when there are other things going on in any of those Psalms there’s still a word of thanks in there and praise to God. 

When we think about it, we know there’s always something that we can see to be thankful for. True, sometimes we must look hard. Sometimes, especially when we’re dealing with other people, like someone whose words or behavior just rubs us the wrong way, it’s going to take a very dedicated effort to stop and think, “Is there anything that person does that it is possible to be grateful?” Maybe they have a gift in one area that we don’t always see or appreciate. As a leader, we are called to find and to point out the gifts in others that are not always appreciated or even noticed by others. 

I titled this blog Leading with Gratitude: Choosing How We See the World. If asked, I would expect leaders would not say that they are leading in a negative or ungrateful manner. Yet, there are people we’ve all met who you would describe as difficult, critical, gruff around the edges. What does it mean to choose to lead with gratitude as opposed to seeing problems, weaknesses, mistakes or how someone or something doesn’t measure up to a standard – our own or a standard set by others?

As I learned from Barry Kaufman, we have a choice in how we see the world and the choices we make about that have a significant impact on the world we create for ourselves and the people we lead.  In the next blog I will be talking about how gratitude or different forms of motivation impact our leadership.