When it comes to establishing yourself in the workplace, it’s easy to feel like nothing is in your control. While this may be the case at times, Stephen Brewster describes the areas where we can take control. Take initiative in the jobs you’re given, whether or not they are the ones you wanted, and use those jobs as an opportunity to showcase all of your valuable skills and hard work.
Stephen Brewster is the creative arts pastor at Cross Point Church in Nashville and an instructor for our Certification Lab.
“Obviously, there are multiple levels of leadership that we all get the opportunity to try to steward. The first one is yourself. What is your effort that you’re bringing? What is the creativity you’re bringing? What are the disciplines you’re bringing? You get to control that. What are the tools you have at your disposal? Figure out how to maximize those tools so that you’re being a great steward of that, and then, the responsibilities you’ve been given. Maybe you’ve only been given a portion of the job that you really want to have. Kill that. Make it amazing. Become so valuable inside of the organization in doing what you’ve been asked to do that the rest of the organization can’t help but include you in other things. You get to control a lot of those variables, most of those variables actually, and it all starts with you—your attitude, your effort, your approach, the lenses that you’re going to pass the work that you do through. Sadly, we’ve actually lowered the bar. It really starts with: Do what you say you’re going to do when you say you’re going to do it. If you start there, you’re probably beating 80 percent of the workforce that you’re working with. Make a commitment, do what you say you’re going to do when you say you’re going to do it, do it with excellence, do it with integrity, and then watch dominoes start to fall, and then all of a sudden, if you have a lot of momentum, your voice is heard, your voice is felt, [then] you get to be on that team of whatever it is you wanted to be on. But if you’re going to spend more time complaining about the things that are out of your control rather than dominating the things that are in your control, you’re never going to get there.” -Stephen Brewster
More:
- This video is from a 2015 Google Hangout with our Certification Lab instructors. You can watch the entire hangout.
- Check out our upcoming roster of Certification Lab events and consider attending to soak up this kind of insight and encouragement. Register now.
- Get a taste of what you can expect at Certification Lab with our round-up of Certification Lab resources.
