Stay Humble, Eliminate Pride
There were SO many great nuggets of wisdom and inspiration shared in my reading of Living Among Lions this past week. (I encourage you to look at my recent posts on LinkedIn to review my daily journal entries about my reading there.) The bit that resonated most with me was on the risk of pride and the reward of humility within an organization. To me, it comes down to one point:
Are you running an organization that has the mindset of being a learning-based organization?
I think the prerequisite to being open to learning is humbling yourself and understanding that, although you give your best every single day, you must submit to the fact that there is always so much more for you to learn. You even have to learn some lessons more than once to truly learn from them.
The biggest hindrance to a learning-focused organization is pride. When your guiding personal or organizational principle is pride – in who you are, in your work product, in your rank as the best at what you do – that pride starts to cloud your ability to see how much you still have yet to learn. That pride disrupts your motivation to seek out opportunities for learning and places you at the brink of stunted growth.
Most people fall victim to pride by comparing themselves to other people and other organizations. If you feel compelled to compare your life to anyone, compare your life to that of Jesus Christ, who lived a perfect life. Then your humility will show up. Don’t compare yourself to people of the world – not in an effort to become more like them, nor in an effort to justify who you are today. This will fill you with the wrong type of pride, which is a dangerous way to live your life.
“Every follower of Jesus is going to go through the pruning process multiple times in life. God uses this to trim the world out of us and put more of Him in us. This loving discipline from God takes us to a stronger level of humility, squeezing out more pride. While being humbled is never any fun, the end result is worth the pain because this purifies our hearts and minds. It makes us more useful to God and more available to our neighbors in Babylon.”
The process of “pruning” is inherent in our humanity. To eliminate pride from ourselves and our organizations, we must implement a value of humility.
Use this humility as a guide to cutting off those dead branches so that your tree can reach higher levels of growth.
Don’t forget that pruning is a part of healthy growth.
Stay humble, eliminate pride.
Written by Schuyler Williamson
REALTOR. Leader. Veteran. Business Owner. Investor.
Weekly Email List: https://www.schuylerwilliamson.com/weekly-leader-note
God Bless!
~ Schuyler Williamson