Welcome to 1Kings5
If you need assistance with your next career move or your next big decision or if you just need ‘unsticking’ from where you are right now, I may be able to help.
Conversation is free. Coaching sessions may be chargeable because it costs me a lot of time and effort to do that properly. The books illustrated below are available to help with recognising both short and long-term callings and understanding decision-making from a biblical point of view.
If what you read on the site seems to make sense, please get in touch via the contact page and we can talk.
Executive Coaching
Helping Individuals, Organisations and Leadership Teams move on to the next stage
Coaching doesn’t tell you what to do, it helps you to tell a coherent story, be it personal or corporate, and to make sense of what has happened so far. It then assists you to transition into a new phase of life and effectiveness.
Something for You to Do
What are the tasks, great and small, that God has been calling you to do?
Do you feel fulfilled in what you are doing? Are you in the right place? Even if you’re ok right now, do you ever find yourself thinking, ‘I wonder whether
God has something useful that He wants me to do’? If so, how do you find out what it is?
Good Call
Good decisions are not made by adopting a formula or a methodology
All decisions have consequences - bigger decisions have greater consequences. Can you involve God and come to agreement with Him when deciding? He is committed to communicating with us and helping us to sift the options. It’s all about relationship.
To explore your own uniqueness and to make sense of it, you need someone to ask you the right questions …
I was nearly 40 before someone asked me which things, of all those I had done in my life, I had enjoyed most and derived the most satisfaction from. To be more precise, he asked me, ‘What achievements, across your whole life, big or small, did you get most joy from and gave you the most satisfaction; the things that were important to you, not to someone else; the things which, when you look back on them, you feel you did well?’
Not only was the question, and the thought process I went through to find the answers, a revelation – I had been brought up not to please myself and not to make a lot of noise about my personal preferences – but the fact that the person asking me the question was genuinely interested in the answers, and in hearing me tell my story, caused me to relax in some profound sense and ushered in a whole new way of thinking. Among other things, I realised that it’s ok to be me, even if I am different to all those around me.
To narrate your story to someone who is present in the moment and engaged causes you to come alive and truly to inhabit the narrative. It is not about self-absorption, it’s actually something to do with a recognition of the value and the uniqueness of the individual. What you can be absolutely sure of is that every person to whom that question is asked will, once they have given it some consideration, tell a different story to everyone else.
The most common tools for categorising a person – for describing their personality traits – do not work because they do not gather enough meaningful data. Just as no two people look exactly alike, every person has his/her own unique characteristics and so, to gather a few bits of information about an individual and then to run an algorithm that assigns him/her a set of descriptors must inevitably lead to stereotyping.
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How then do we ever find our own, unique way in life – or, more pertinently, how does each person get in touch with, and hopefully begin to practice, the things that match their uniqueness? Many have come to that place, either by accident or design, but the statistics from sampling are that around 70% of those questioned express (often profound) dissatisfaction with their chosen career. Why is it that a large percentage of us is not enjoying what we do?
I believe we each need to talk, at length, with someone who is interested in our story; someone who is engaged with us and actually cares to listen. We each need to take the time to think about those periods and projects and activities in which we came alive; those occasions when we either consciously or subconsciously said to ourselves, ‘I think I was made to do this’. We also need to have the courage to change direction, or at least to plan for such a change.
There is a way forward for everybody. If you believe in the God who created us, and made each individual unique, you have someone right there to whom you can talk, who is not just interested in you but committed to you reaching your potential. The books illustrated above are designed to help you to reach out to Him, hear what He has to say and to cooperate with Him as He develops your particular calling. Coaching can also be helpful, both for those who would call themselves believers and those who would not. I, for one, would not try to give you answers but we would listen and find a variety of ways to reframe the question, with the intention of assisting you to come to the right conclusions by yourself.
Whether you attribute it to the Craftsman-Creator God or not, everyone has an innate desire to produce quality work and to achieve lasting results. My contention, therefore, is that there are a whole host of craftsmen and crafts-women out there and either you know you have a craft and what it is or you have at least had clues, over the course of your life, as to what it might be. However, you may not yet have taken that knowledge seriously or divulged it to those around you.
The time may have come to explore these ideas further and to focus on what you are called to. The Blog is intended to provoke you into thinking differently and the book, as well as presenting a balanced theology of calling, should provide a way forward. If you need encouragement or someone to stand with you, call me for a chat…
If you want to make better decisions from now on, you have to be honest about your decision making performance to date…
When we consider our past decisions, it’s important to view them truthfully - to be ruthlessly honest; to discern not just between truth and error but even between what is good and what is the best.
When you consider some of the major decisions you’ve made and think back over the consequences of each one, you find yourself making value judgments, some of which might surprise you. For example, it’s possible to recall a course of action that had outwardly positive results (e.g. in terms of financial or career-related success) but you just know there was something dissatisfying about it. Despite it seemingly being successful, were you to be given the same set of circumstances over again, you might take a different route. Alternatively, you might be recalling something that led you into a period of trial or difficulty but somehow you just know it was the right thing to do and you are actually proud of yourself for having done it.
What are the tools that we all have at our disposal for deciding? They are both objective and subjective in nature - we can analyse and evaluate but we can also sense, feel and discern. What combination goes into the process and how do we find a balance? More importantly, what should be the final arbiter?
Good Call - learning to make decisions with God is an attempt to unpick the whole decision-making process and to explain how we can use our toolkit to better effect. The authors are ruthlessly honest about their own performance, dissecting a number of their decisions (both good and bad) and offering coaching to the reader to allow you to evaluate yours.