Four questions that will help you evaluate the importance of any opportunity

By Stan Toler

Leaders make dozens of decisions every day. In fact, before you get that first cup of coffee, you’ve probably made several choices. Casual or business? Dress shoe or loafers? Jacket and slacks or suit? Dress pants or khaki? Tie or tie-less?

But the most important choices you make are not about appearance they’re about importance. The things you decide to do, will directly influence your energy flow throughout the day.

Here are four questions that will help you evaluate the importance of any opportunity.

Is it God-honoring?

Will your decided action maintain its integrity once it’s strained through the filter of your faith? If it’s not a Kingdom priority, it has the potential to drain your energy instead of enhancing it. Elmer Towns once said, Greatness involves more than measurable achievement; it starts with the leader’s heart and not his head. It is rooted in virtues like self-sacrifice, love, courage, loyalty, accountability, humility, meaning, mission, passion, and commitment. Those are Kingdom qualities, and your decisions must possess that dynamic.

Does it have an eternal dimension?

Does the proposed action merely result in accumulations on earth, or does it invest in eternity? Actions that are centered in the temporal are energy drainers. Will your proposed action increase your stock in the things of earth or will it add to your account in Heaven?

Will it add quality or merely quantity?

Those unclaimed jewels of Jesus time, Mary and Martha, struggled with this very issue (Luke 10:3842). Martha was too heavenly, and Martha was too earth-ly. Where’s the balance? That’s the important question. Once you reach adulthood, chores are usually a choice. But keep adding chores, and the result is fewer choices! Chores begin to dominate and soon siphon your energy reserves.

How will it affect my family?

The family is a God-given institution, but that doesn’t mean were incarcerated in it. Interpersonal relationships with those we love the most should be joyous, not tumultuous. Adding an item to your to-do list might not necessarily be good for the family.

Every day you have a cash reserve of 1,440 minutes. You can’t afford to waste them on any activity that doesn’t add value to your life and advance the goals of your organization. Because you can do something is no reason that you should.

Evaluate every opportunity carefully.

 

Copyright © 2012 by Stan A. Toler

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