Latest / CEO Kingdom Seekers / Ep 38: When What You’re Best At Isn’t Your Primary Gift: How forced competence makes true success harder to discern

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Ep 38: When What You’re Best At Isn’t Your Primary Gift: How forced competence makes true success harder to discern · CEO Kingdom Seekers

• 0:00
  Dr. Lee: Hey, y'all.
• 0:00
  Dr. Lee: Welcome to this week's episode.
• 0:03
  Dr. Lee: So if you saw the title of this episode, and it's the reason that you chose this, uh, cool.
• 0:08
  Dr. Lee: And in case you're like,"Wait, Lee, what was the title?" We're gonna be talking about what it means if the thing that everybody knows you for is not actually the thing that most deeply motivates you.
• 0:21
  Dr. Lee: So this episode hits very close to home for me.
• 0:24
  Dr. Lee: I personally built a career and a reputation and an income and a leadership role around something that I was exceptionally good at that didn't actually lead me to operate within my primary motivational gift in a developed and a divinely directed way.
• 0:46
  Dr. Lee: In fact, it was pretty distorted.
• 0:49
  Dr. Lee: I think it's gonna hit really close to home for many of you as well because I know What's happened for a lot of people that I've talked to over the last several years, is that they actually learned how to operate by prioritizing or centering a different primary motivational gift than is their their gift.
• 1:11
  Dr. Lee: So before we start this episode, we're gonna be talking about primary motivational gifts.
• 1:16
  Dr. Lee: And so if you are not familiar with that, like if somebody sent this to you and you're like,"Lee, I don't know what that means," I'm gonna explain it a little bit.
• 1:22
  Dr. Lee: And if you have not taken our primary motivational gift assessment yet, I highly suggest you go do that because it's going to actually tell you what your gift is and explain what that means for you, and it's going to give you greater context for the conversation we're about to have.
• 1:38
  Dr. Lee: Now, you don't have to go do that before you're listening.
• 1:41
  Dr. Lee: Like, if you turn this on and you're driving, please don't do that.
• 1:44
  Dr. Lee: And if you're not gonna do it right now, I do suggest you go do it.
• 1:48
  Dr. Lee: I'm gonna say this link out loud for you so you've got it.
• 1:50
  Dr. Lee: It's so simple.
• 1:51
  Dr. Lee: It's growinyourgifts.com.
• 1:54
  Dr. Lee: Growinyourgifts.com.
• 1:55
  Dr. Lee: If you go there, you'll be able to take the assessment, okay?
• 1:59
  Dr. Lee: And just a quick explanation.
• 2:03
  Dr. Lee: Your primary motivational gift is one of seven gifts that Paul talks about in Romans and these seven gifts are given to us by God's grace.
• 2:17
  Dr. Lee: So we get different amounts of all seven of these gifts, and our development as humans, our spiritual formation comes about by deepening our development in all seven of these areas, and doing it in a divinely directed way.
• 2:34
  Dr. Lee: So depending on the day and the place and the time, if I went in and did an assessment or a diagnostic of all seven of these gifts I might get very different results based on, again, the situation, the timing, the season that you're in.
• 2:49
  Dr. Lee: And our primary motivational gifts tend to stay the same throughout our life.
• 2:55
  Dr. Lee: I, I'm not gonna sit here and say that they don't shift, that one doesn't become more important than another in a different season.
• 3:01
  Dr. Lee: And what I have seen over doing this work with thousands of people is that that primary motivational gift, you might have a, a second gift that's up there in terms of motivation, but typically there's one that if you center your development of all of your gifts in that gift, and then you divinely align that gift with what God is calling you to do, things are gonna just shift in some really supernatural ways.
• 3:31
  Dr. Lee: So it's important to understand that because what we're talking about today is what if the thing that you're best requires you to center your work in a gift that's not your primary motivational gift?
• 3:43
  Dr. Lee: What if the thing that everybody knows you for is not actually centered in what most deeply motivates you?
• 3:50
  Dr. Lee: What if you've built a career or a reputation or an income, a ministry, or even a leadership identity around something that you are exceptionally good at because your life led you to develop that in that way, and it's not actually what motivates you?
• 4:07
  Dr. Lee: It's not what brings you intrinsic joy.
• 4:11
  Dr. Lee: It is a very common experience For high responsibility humans to develop significant competence in an area and to be rewarded for it in a worldly manner, and to still feel very restless, or overwhelmed, or burdened, or depleted, or resentful, or just like something's not quite right because that competence in the way it was developed isn't developed in the area that brings you the most intrinsic joy.
• 4:47
  Dr. Lee: So as humans, we've gotta look at our gifts in two different ways, and this is why when we assess spiritual gifts through our SAGE diagnostic, it's why we look at gifts in four key areas.
• 5:02
  Dr. Lee: Your gift can be very, very developed and also distorted.
• 5:08
  Dr. Lee: Last week we talked about how your gift can be really developed and also how your primary motivational gifts can be centered, and it's being used in a distorted way.
• 5:17
  Dr. Lee: All right?
• 5:17
  Dr. Lee: It's not divinely directed.
• 5:21
  Dr. Lee: This week I wanna talk about what it looks like when our primary gift actually gets a little diminished and almost pushed out of the way for another gift to be developed and used in a distorted way.
• 5:36
  Dr. Lee: Because if it's not my primary motivational gift, then me centering it is distortion.
• 5:43
  Dr. Lee: I'm not using that the way that God designed.
• 5:47
  Dr. Lee: So like I said, this is an experience I see high responsibility humans, and CEOs, and leaders, and business owners have over, and over, and over because the world puts them through this growth plan, puts them through these painful experiences where they learn, and they grow, and they transform, and they develop significant competence, and they develop one of these gifts in such a way that other people start to really benefit from it.
• 6:17
  Dr. Lee: And you benefit from developing it too because it prevents pain.
• 6:21
  Dr. Lee: So that competence and that even excellence starts developing through that repetition, through the professional demands, and through the praise and reward that you receive, through that felt sense of necessity, and through the painful experiences that taught us what will keep us safe or just simply because we saw a gap that nobody else was filling, and we knew how to fill it, and it was important that somebody filled it.
• 6:48
  Dr. Lee: We develop competence for all of those reasons.
• 6:51
  Dr. Lee: And, and so I wanna be really clear starting off that, that competence isn't bad.
• 6:55
  Dr. Lee: Competence, that development of a gift is wonderful And you being excellent at something is not enough information to identify if that's actually what you should be centering your work in.
• 7:09
  Dr. Lee: The use of our gifts requires discernment, not inflated or overly simplified self-assessment.
• 7:18
  Dr. Lee: And so I'm gonna use my personal story, which I've told a, a lot of pieces and parts about here, but I wanna look at it from this specific lens of, of forced competence because I want y'all to see, number one, you're not alone, and number two, what this tangibly looks like.
• 7:36
  Dr. Lee: Because I know that some of you are like,"Okay, Lee, maybe this is what's happening for me.
• 7:41
  Dr. Lee: Like, yes, I feel restless.
• 7:42
  Dr. Lee: Yes, I feel a little burned out.
• 7:43
  Dr. Lee: Yes, I'm feeling overwhelmed at times.
• 7:45
  Dr. Lee: Yes, but, but I do love doing what I do.
• 7:49
  Dr. Lee: I, I do love this work.
• 7:52
  Dr. Lee: It, it feels important to me.
• 7:53
  Dr. Lee: It feels like it's part of my mission.
• 7:56
  Dr. Lee: It feels like it's part of my calling, so I, I don't know if I really agree with this." I want you to hear me right here when I say this is not black or white.
• 8:04
  Dr. Lee: Your gift could be a little distorted.
• 8:08
  Dr. Lee: You could have centered another gift and made it number one, but your primary motivational gift is still a very close number two.
• 8:15
  Dr. Lee: I'm not saying this is an either/or.
• 8:17
  Dr. Lee: And even in the work that I do today, having centered my work in my primary gift, there are still plenty of times where I notice that I start diminishing that gift and putting another gift above it.
• 8:34
  Dr. Lee: And then all of a sudden I'm like,"Oh, wait, this isn't feeling good.
• 8:37
  Dr. Lee: Where is this resistance coming from?" And I go,"Oh, I did it again." All right?
• 8:41
  Dr. Lee: So this isn't something that you just fix once and then move on.
• 8:44
  Dr. Lee: This is one of the main reasons why we put together our Growing Your Gifts program that starts on October 21st.
• 8:51
  Dr. Lee: Because we've gotta be able to continually evaluate this.
• 8:56
  Dr. Lee: Our gifts are constantly being formed and unformed and reformed and changed and shifted.
• 9:01
  Dr. Lee: And so we've gotta be able to have the ability to evaluate what's going on and what we're centering.
• 9:09
  Dr. Lee: And of these seven gifts that we have, where is the distortion coming in?
• 9:13
  Dr. Lee: Where is the diminishment coming in?
• 9:15
  Dr. Lee: how am I intentionally directing these gifts?
• 9:18
  Dr. Lee: How am I intentionally developing these?
• 9:20
  Dr. Lee: And how am I ordering my gifts in a way that my primary motivational gift gets to come first?
• 9:27
  Dr. Lee: And how do I catch when I move it out of that position and do what the world has taught me I should?
• 9:37
  Dr. Lee: So that program is really designed to help us develop that discernment to be able to be able to assess what's happening in any given moment with our gifts.
• 9:48
  Dr. Lee: So I wanna actually go back to the story that I mentioned in episode 34 the close but no cigar example, and I've actually come back to this a lot because this is the analogy that I, I like to use with you high-responsibility humans.
• 10:02
  Dr. Lee: What I was doing was very close.
• 10:05
  Dr. Lee: So I actually taught five different courses at Ohio State.
• 10:09
  Dr. Lee: I taught three courses that were required as core content.
• 10:13
  Dr. Lee: The first year that you were in grad school, you took those three courses.
• 10:17
  Dr. Lee: And then I taught two other courses.
• 10:19
  Dr. Lee: I taught healthcare policy, and another course I taught advanced skills.
• 10:22
  Dr. Lee: One of the things that I absolutely loved was that I was getting to teach a lot of students at once.
• 10:28
  Dr. Lee: I love teaching big groups.
• 10:29
  Dr. Lee: It's one of my favorite things to do because I am not afraid of public speaking.
• 10:34
  Dr. Lee: You can put me in front of 1,000 people and I will feel just as comfortable as if you put me in front of five.
• 10:40
  Dr. Lee: I like big groups.
• 10:41
  Dr. Lee: I love the energy and the vibe of the room when I'm getting to teach, and that makes sense because my primary motivational gift is that of the professor.
• 10:49
  Dr. Lee: So you're putting more people in front of me that I get to impart wisdom to and help them practically embody new things?
• 10:56
  Dr. Lee: Like, yes, please.
• 10:57
  Dr. Lee: So I got to teach these really big classes.
• 11:00
  Dr. Lee: Now, advanced pathophysiology was my absolute favorite class to teach, and the reason was because it was all about problem-solving.
• 11:08
  Dr. Lee: It was all about understanding every way that things could go wrong based off of how things naturally worked.
• 11:14
  Dr. Lee: And as somebody who loves to solve puzzles, pathophysiology was, the most fun course.
• 11:21
  Dr. Lee: All right?
• 11:21
  Dr. Lee: So I loved teaching that class.
• 11:24
  Dr. Lee: The other classes, I was willing to teach them, and they weren't in subject matter that I was the most excited to teach.
• 11:31
  Dr. Lee: And in fact, a lot of the subject matter was a bit hard for me to teach.
• 11:36
  Dr. Lee: It was a bit tough for me to teach advanced pharmacology because I was teaching students about medications that I wasn't always perfectly comfortable prescribing.
• 11:46
  Dr. Lee: I was teaching students about diabetic management from a pharmacological perspective when I knew that a lot of those medicines actually perpetuated issues over time.
• 11:56
  Dr. Lee: But those students needed to learn what were the guidelines and the standards from a medical perspective of what was being prescribed at the time.
• 12:03
  Dr. Lee: It didn't matter if I knew that those were the best drugs to be using or not.
• 12:09
  Dr. Lee: It was just my job to help them learn the drugs.
• 12:12
  Dr. Lee: So pharmacology was something that, you know, I enjoyed teaching and not, it was probably my second favorite.
• 12:18
  Dr. Lee: Then advanced skills was my third favorite course.
• 12:22
  Dr. Lee: Again, it was a smaller course, and it really required me to have competence.
• 12:26
  Dr. Lee: Now, the thing that I struggled with in that course was that we were doing things in a very theoretical way.
• 12:32
  Dr. Lee: In that course, I was teaching people intubations and central line placements and lumbar punctures, and suturing.
• 12:40
  Dr. Lee: We were doing it on mannequins.
• 12:41
  Dr. Lee: We were doing it on animal skin.
• 12:43
  Dr. Lee: It was done in a practice setting.
• 12:45
  Dr. Lee: It wasn't being done at the bedside.
• 12:47
  Dr. Lee: It wasn't being done in real-life situations.
• 12:50
  Dr. Lee: And so that was actually very tough for me because, again, I'm teaching students how to do these procedures in the exact textbook way, knowing that once they got into the practice setting, that they were gonna need to be a little bit more flexible with how they perform those procedures.
• 13:08
  Dr. Lee: Because, in an ideal setting, you can learn how to do something, but as soon as you get into the real world, that ideal way is not always gonna work.
• 13:16
  Dr. Lee: And that was tough for me because I had to limit what I taught those students to the textbook way of doing things.
• 13:23
  Dr. Lee: And yes, I could share a little bit outside of that, but what they needed in that moment was this is the black and white way of how to do it.
• 13:31
  Dr. Lee: When they got into their actual clinical settings, that's where their mentors and their preceptors were gonna teach them about all of the nuance that went in.
• 13:39
  Dr. Lee: And so I was missing that nuance because I really love to teach about that nuance.
• 13:45
  Dr. Lee: The same thing was true for health assessment.
• 13:47
  Dr. Lee: I was teaching students how to assess patients in a very textbook standardized way, knowing that once they got into their clinical practice setting, they were gonna have to shift and find their own ways of doing things.
• 13:59
  Dr. Lee: So what I realized was I love helping people personalize things.
• 14:03
  Dr. Lee: And so when you put me in a setting where I'm teaching things and I have to be very black and white and I can't talk about how you would personalize or shift or tweak based on the things that you're seeing, that was really tough for me.
• 14:19
  Dr. Lee: There were two other things about teaching that actually directly went against my primary motivational gift.
• 14:25
  Dr. Lee: So I already mentioned that it was tough for me to just stick to that textbook standard way of doing things and not bring in the nuance.
• 14:35
  Dr. Lee: Another thing that was very difficult for me was that in nursing, you are asked to teach things that you don't understand practically.
• 14:46
  Dr. Lee: So for instance, I was tasked with teaching neurological and musculoskeletal exams when I very rarely did that in clinical practice.
• 14:57
  Dr. Lee: I had to teach about syndromes and diagnoses that were things that as a bone marrow transplant nurse practitioner, I rarely saw.
• 15:06
  Dr. Lee: I still joke with my family today, if you bring something dermatological to me, I'm not gonna be able to diagnose it well.
• 15:14
  Dr. Lee: I'm gonna know just enough to be able to tell you to go to your doctor, or I can take a picture of it and send it to one of my primary care friends and ask them to tell you what it is.
• 15:22
  Dr. Lee: I recently missed shingles in a close family member because I was so used to seeing shingles show up in a very different way in my patient population that I didn't pick it up when it showed up in the normal way in front of me.
• 15:35
  Dr. Lee: So I share that because I felt like in some ways I had to pretend to be an expert when I wasn't.
• 15:43
  Dr. Lee: And when students would ask questions, you were expected to know the answers, and I hadn't matured enough in my own understanding of what it means to be a great teacher to feel safe and secure enough to say,"I don't know.
• 15:58
  Dr. Lee: Let's find the answer together." And so a lot of times I would kind of armor up and get a little bit defensive, and that would come across to my students.
• 16:07
  Dr. Lee: On my evaluations at times, I would have students say, you know, she gets defensive," or I would come across as judgmental.
• 16:14
  Dr. Lee: So I want you to see something here.
• 16:17
  Dr. Lee: My judge gift was showing up and was showing up in a relatively distorted way because I wasn't able to operate in a divinely directed way as a professor, and there were areas that I needed to still develop as a professor that weren't prioritized by the place that I was working.
• 16:36
  Dr. Lee: And it wasn't that they said,"Don't do that," but they definitely didn't say,"Hey, we want to make sure that you feel as developed as possible in this way, so let's help you." And that's common across teaching in the nursing profession across the board.
• 16:49
  Dr. Lee: And a lot of other practical professions is that you're not taught how to teach.
• 16:54
  Dr. Lee: There was another huge part to being a graduate professor that had nothing to do with professor gift.
• 17:02
  Dr. Lee: Yes, there was some distortion, and yes, there was also some diminishment of,"Hey, we don't wanna give you the time to actually develop here.
• 17:07
  Dr. Lee: You just need to show up and do it." But the biggest piece was is that we didn't have teaching assistants.
• 17:15
  Dr. Lee: We didn't have any grading support.
• 17:16
  Dr. Lee: So in some of these classes, we had 300 students, and there were two or three of us that were assigned to this course, and we had to grade everything, and we had to handle every single email that came in and all of the communication while also doing the instructional design, while creating the midterms, while, while ensuring that the, the teaching and the formation was actually occurring.
• 17:39
  Dr. Lee: We had to do the administrative paperwork of all of those pieces and parts.
• 17:43
  Dr. Lee: We also were part of an academic university where you had to, on a yearly basis, show that you were progressing in specific ways.
• 17:52
  Dr. Lee: And the ways in which you were evaluated didn't always ensure that you were growing in that professor gift.
• 18:00
  Dr. Lee: It wasn't necessarily about how well you were teaching.
• 18:03
  Dr. Lee: A lot of times it was about how often you were publishing or how often you were speaking somewhere and sharing about a topic, about the research you were doing, about the professional development that you were doing.
• 18:14
  Dr. Lee: But a lot of times you weren't getting to learn about the things you wanted to learn about.
• 18:17
  Dr. Lee: You were doing the professional development that was required of you.
• 18:20
  Dr. Lee: So when you added those two things up, the teaching what wasn't necessarily in my wheelhouse, and the extreme amount of administrative expectation that was put on that role, can you see how that could feel close but no cigar?
• 18:38
  Dr. Lee: And so there was forced competence because I had to become highly skilled at grading.
• 18:46
  Dr. Lee: I had to become highly skilled at answering emails.
• 18:48
  Dr. Lee: I had to become highly skilled at teaching things that I did not understand to the level that I would like before I taught them.
• 18:57
  Dr. Lee: And what I want to be intentional about here, and pardon the pun, but I don't want to pathologize this, okay?
• 19:03
  Dr. Lee: I don't think that forced competence is something that we should look at and go,"Oh, that's bad," or,"That's wrong." Forced competence is normal.
• 19:13
  Dr. Lee: All right?
• 19:14
  Dr. Lee: And forced competence serves us in a lot of ways that are beneficial.
• 19:17
  Dr. Lee: It helps our family.
• 19:18
  Dr. Lee: It helps us progress in our career.
• 19:20
  Dr. Lee: It helps our organization reach its benchmarks.
• 19:23
  Dr. Lee: It helps us get through a particular season beautifully.
• 19:27
  Dr. Lee: And what I've seen in my own journey is that God used that forced competence as preparation for what I'm doing now.
• 19:35
  Dr. Lee: There are a lot of things that I was thrust into in those settings where I was asked to operate outside of my primary motivational gift or to operate in a distorted way inside my primary motivational gift that have benefited me greatly in the work that I do now.
• 19:56
  Dr. Lee: And this is where the discernment comes in because for a lot of you, I just put to words something that you've been experiencing, where you're like,"Yeah, Lee, my career is mostly great, and oh, wow, over here I'm having to do some stuff in a way that really doesn't work for me," or,"Over here I'm having to do some stuff that's actually taking me out of my gifting." This is a place that we examine how our excellence is impacting where we are centering our contribution.
• 20:27
  Dr. Lee: And this is where we get to have a conversation that I don't get to have with most people, because success is gonna make that discernment harder.
• 20:37
  Dr. Lee: If you fail at something, it, it makes you reconsider it, right?
• 20:41
  Dr. Lee: If you are operating outside of your primary motivational gift or you are operating in your primary motivational gift in a distorted way and you start failing, I am positive you look at that.
• 20:52
  Dr. Lee: You wouldn't be listening to this podcast if you're the type of person who doesn't look at that.
• 20:56
  Dr. Lee: Now, there might be some areas in your life that are very tough to look at or that you've kind of like closed yourself off from looking at because they are so painful, and we're not talking about those right now.
• 21:06
  Dr. Lee: In general, if you think you're failing, you're gonna do something about it.
• 21:12
  Dr. Lee: And success reinforces existing patterns for high responsibility humans.
• 21:18
  Dr. Lee: The more money that's involved, the more promotions and titles that get added on, the more clients you get, the more followers that you get, the more praise you receive, the more people start being dependent on you, the more responsibility you're given, all of that tells you to keep doing the thing that you are excellent at.
• 21:35
  Dr. Lee: And this is where the internal fruit becomes really important to pay attention to, because the internal fruit's gonna start giving you some additional information that shows you that you are in that close but no cigar state.
• 21:52
  Dr. Lee: This is where you're gonna start seeing that restlessness and resentment or exhaustion or just this sense of like,"Man, I'm so good at this, and also it is so depleting What I want to impart here is that the presence of that restlessness or resentment or burnout, whatever, it's not proof that you're in the wrong spot.
• 22:17
  Dr. Lee: I have people ask me often,"Would you go back to nursing?
• 22:22
  Dr. Lee: Would you go back to being a professor?" And my answer to that is I would be willing, and there are things that would have to be present in order for me to say yes to that.
• 22:39
  Dr. Lee: It's, it's not for lack of opportunity that I don't do that.
• 22:42
  Dr. Lee: Right now, in the season of life in this business, I get to show up in a way where I get to center myself in that, center my work in that primary motivational gift, develop it, divinely align it, and then also order the rest of my gifts in support of it.
• 23:00
  Dr. Lee: And so if that stopped being the case, and there was an opportunity for me to go back into teaching or into clinical practice that allotted that, I would be so happy to say yes.
• 23:13
  Dr. Lee: It wasn't being the nurse practitioner itself.
• 23:15
  Dr. Lee: It wasn't being the professor itself.
• 23:17
  Dr. Lee: It was the way in which I was expected to show up.
• 23:21
  Dr. Lee: So for you, I don't want you thinking right here,"Oh gosh, this means I have to switch professi- professions," or,"I have to find a different place to work," or,"I need to start my own business." Like, just hold please, okay?
• 23:35
  Dr. Lee: If you're starting to have those thoughts, you're moving You, you're running ahead of God.
• 23:42
  Dr. Lee: If this has brought up some things for you, I want to invite you to take this to God and lay it at his feet, and to ask him for his wisdom and his discernment in figuring out what your move is.
• 23:56
  Dr. Lee: Because we do want you to be obedient.
• 24:01
  Dr. Lee: Obedience is the most important piece.
• 24:04
  Dr. Lee: While we want to make sure that we are focusing in on your joy, we know that joy is actually a fruit that is produced by divinely directing your gift.
• 24:16
  Dr. Lee: Joy is actually a byproduct of obedience true joy comes when we know that we are doing what God has called us to do in the way that he has designed us.
• 24:26
  Dr. Lee: Being obedient is gonna be difficult.
• 24:28
  Dr. Lee: Like, you might be sitting here going,"Well, Lee, yeah, it would feel so great to just teach the courses that I want to teach, but if I went to my boss tomorrow and said,'Hey, I just want to do this,' she's gonna tell me no.
• 24:39
  Dr. Lee: She's gonna fire me.
• 24:40
  Dr. Lee: I'm not gonna have money to feed my family, and I'm not gonna be feeling a lot of joy then." Yeah, I, I yes, heard, okay?
• 24:48
  Dr. Lee: This is why we've got to take it to God.
• 24:50
  Dr. Lee: because obedience is difficult, and your gift formation is going to be uncomfortable.
• 24:56
  Dr. Lee: You surrendering and submitting yourself to God's leadership and him developing these gifts in you, him forming the divinely directed expression of these gifts in you, is gonna require sacrifice And at the same time, Intrinsic joy is not selfish, and we've talked about that before.
• 25:17
  Dr. Lee: Why are we automatically distrusting the joy that God has wired into us?
• 25:24
  Dr. Lee: Why do we settle for societal positions in which our work doesn't make us feel like we come alive.Why is it selfish to do work that makes us feel like we come alive?
• 25:51
  Dr. Lee: How would focusing on that not benefit the most people?
• 25:59
  Dr. Lee: Notice how different of a question that is too.
• 26:01
  Dr. Lee: What kind of contribution if I was able to make it in the job I'm in right now would make me feel more alive?
• 26:09
  Dr. Lee: Would exhaust me less?
• 26:11
  Dr. Lee: Would bring me more peace?
• 26:14
  Dr. Lee: I would inherently be more disciplined if I was able to do this kind of work because I wouldn't be pulling teeth to try to get myself to do things As someone who now does something very similar to what I used to do, I teach y'all, and I don't teach things that I don't feel very, very comfortable teaching anymore.
• 26:37
  Dr. Lee: If I still feel nervous about teaching something, I'm not ready to teach it, and I go learn some more.
• 26:41
  Dr. Lee: I go pray to God first and ask him for the wisdom of what I need to learn in order to be able to teach it.
• 26:49
  Dr. Lee: I don't create programs where I have to grade things or where I have to do a lot of implementation or execution work because I know that I'm gonna let people down and disappoint them if, if that's the case.
• 27:03
  Dr. Lee: And if the offer requires that, I hire somebody who is really good at implementation and execution to do those things for me so that it will be good.
• 27:15
  Dr. Lee: So notice, you may have opportunities inside of the work you're doing right now.
• 27:21
  Dr. Lee: You don't need to go get a different job.
• 27:22
  Dr. Lee: You don't need to shift positions.
• 27:24
  Dr. Lee: You're in charge.
• 27:25
  Dr. Lee: You might even be an entrepreneur yourself.
• 27:27
  Dr. Lee: You might be the CEO yourself.
• 27:29
  Dr. Lee: There might be no one you have to ask before you change something.
• 27:34
  Dr. Lee: So you going to God and asking the question,"Hey, God, when I'm serving you and serving other people, can you help me see what kind of contribution makes me come alive?
• 27:42
  Dr. Lee: Can you help me see how centering my work and my primary motivational gift will produce fruits of the spirit?" You asking that question is not even a dangerous question.
• 27:54
  Dr. Lee: For some of you, it's gonna feel like a more dangerous question because you know, you already know after listening to me right here, you're like,"Ugh, Lee, I already know the answer to that question is gonna lead me to make some changes." And I'm gonna say what I said a minute ago.
• 28:08
  Dr. Lee: Obedience can be difficult, and the formation of your gift expression can be uncomfortable, and leading in the way God calls you to lead can require sacrifice.
• 28:17
  Dr. Lee: And also, I would bet dollars to donuts that there's a good amount of joy and peace And love and kindness and other fruits of the Spirit on the other side of you making that tough decision.
• 28:34
  Dr. Lee: This question is so different than what am I best at?
• 28:37
  Dr. Lee: Y'all, I don't care what you're best at.
• 28:40
  Dr. Lee: I don't care what you're best at if you're doing it in a way that God didn't direct you to do it.So here's an exercise I wanna give you, okay?
• 28:51
  Dr. Lee: You can do this right now or you can do it later.
• 28:53
  Dr. Lee: I want to invite you to get out a, a sheet of paper and draw a line down the middle.
• 29:01
  Dr. Lee: And you can go voice text this to yourself if you're more of a talker than a writer.
• 29:09
  Dr. Lee: But you're gonna answer, you're, you're gonna make two columns.
• 29:13
  Dr. Lee: There's two categories, and you're gonna answer these questions in these categories, okay?
• 29:19
  Dr. Lee: What are you known for?
• 29:21
  Dr. Lee: What do people always ask you for?
• 29:24
  Dr. Lee: What are you paid for?
• 29:25
  Dr. Lee: What responsibilities do people automatically hand to you because they know you will take care of it?
• 29:30
  Dr. Lee: Where are you exceptionally competent?
• 29:39
  Dr. Lee: What do you and other people know you are awesome at?
• 29:43
  Dr. Lee: That's column one.
• 29:44
  Dr. Lee: Column two, what brings you joy?
• 29:48
  Dr. Lee: Where do you lose track of time?
• 29:50
  Dr. Lee: What kind of serving or contributing through your work, it doesn't even have to be work, it can be, you know, volunteering, it can be in your family, it can be with your friends or in your community, okay?
• 30:02
  Dr. Lee: When you are able to contribute, what leaves you more energized than before you started?
• 30:11
  Dr. Lee: What do you naturally notice or zone in on that other people seem to miss?
• 30:16
  Dr. Lee: What do you wish you had more opportunities to do?
• 30:21
  Dr. Lee: Where do you love contributing even when nobody else notices?
• 30:29
  Dr. Lee: So make those two lists, and then I want you to compare them If you find any overlaps on that list, and especially if you go back and look at your primary motivational gift assessment and you're like,"Oh, I see how that connects," go take that to God in prayer.
• 30:49
  Dr. Lee: And then the other thing to take to God in prayer is all the places that those don't overlap Now, the last thing I wanna be clear about, I don't want y'all to hear what I didn't say, okay?
• 31:03
  Dr. Lee: We don't just center our work in our primary motivational gift and then that's all we do.
• 31:08
  Dr. Lee: Like, forget the other gifts.
• 31:10
  Dr. Lee: That's not what happens.
• 31:11
  Dr. Lee: In fact, I have a much easier time implementing and exe- I have a much easier time being a good steward In fact, as somebody who used to really struggle with delivery dates and deadlines, the way that I have centered how I show up in our business in my professor gift- I'm better at implementing and I'm better at executing because whenever we design implementation or execution, whenever we think about the boxes that are gonna need to be checked, we make sure that the process and the deliverables are in alignment with my professor gift.
• 31:55
  Dr. Lee: I am a better steward and a better builder and more consistent and can hold greater responsibility there because I've ordered them toward the professor gift.
• 32:07
  Dr. Lee: Okay?
• 32:09
  Dr. Lee: So we don't want to just look at what you're good at, and we don't want to just go,"Okay, this is my primary motivational gift, so this is what I'm gonna center everything in." No, we, we don't want to do that.
• 32:18
  Dr. Lee: All right?
• 32:19
  Dr. Lee: We've got to go deeper.
• 32:21
  Dr. Lee: And that's why inside Growing Your Gifts, we're gonna not only separate that competence from your motivation, but we're gonna examine how all seven of your gifts have been formed.
• 32:32
  Dr. Lee: How are they divinely directed?
• 32:33
  Dr. Lee: How are they developed?
• 32:34
  Dr. Lee: How are they distorted?
• 32:36
  Dr. Lee: How are they diminished?
• 32:38
  Dr. Lee: And look at that current expression, because from there, we can move past this identification, and we can get a much clearer understanding of your current formation and your motivation and how you're being invited to grow in those gifts that God has given you, how you're being invited to participate in that sanctification process that he invites all of us into to become more like Christ.
• 33:04
  Dr. Lee: So I wanna close this out just by inviting you all to consider where have you tangled up your competence with your calling?
• 33:13
  Dr. Lee: Where do those need separated out?
• 33:18
  Dr. Lee: And like what could become possible for you if you stopped asking just,"Well, what am I good at?" Or,"What do people need from me?
• 33:27
  Dr. Lee: What do people expect from me?" And you instead went to God first and said,"How did you design me?" How do you wanna direct me?
• 33:39
  Dr. Lee: I think that that will really shift things for you.
• 33:43
  Dr. Lee: And next week's solo episode, we're gonna talk through How your gift and your identity are not the same thing.
• 33:50
  Dr. Lee: So this week we talked about how your gift and your competence aren't the same thing.
• 33:53
  Dr. Lee: Next week we are going to go even deeper and look at how you define yourself, who you are, and how your gifts have gotten tangled up in that.
• 34:04
  Dr. Lee: So I just want to close in quick prayer.
• 34:09
  Dr. Lee: In the name of the Father, Son, Holy Spirit, amen.
• 34:13
  Dr. Lee: Dear God, thank you so much for bringing us together today for this episode.
• 34:17
  Dr. Lee: I just pray that you will help every single person who's listening to this to distinguish the difference between their competence and their gifting.
• 34:29
  Dr. Lee: Help them to deepen into that intrinsic joy and to recognize that you want us to love how we serve.
• 34:40
  Dr. Lee: You want us to be fulfilled and filled up by giving to others, and so you've designed this in such a beautiful way that we get to enjoy loving and giving.
• 34:55
  Dr. Lee: That you've made obedience and sacrifice become something that we can not just appreciate and grow from, but enjoy.
• 35:04
  Dr. Lee: Because it helps us deepen in your will, and it helps us deepen into the way that you have created us, and the way that you have motivated us.
• 35:18
  Dr. Lee: And so I just pray that you will help us to have deeper discernment this week, and to notice the places that we focus in on what we're best at and what other people expect us to be able to do, rather than what we feel really truly called to do by you.
• 35:33
  Dr. Lee: And I pray all this in Jesus' name.
• 35:35
  Dr. Lee: Amen.
• 35:36
  Dr. Lee: All right, y'all, we'll see you next week