Creating Positive Energy Through Your Church Leadership
We all know someone whose smile can light up a room and leave everyone feeling happier, but we probably also know someone who seeps negative energy and pessimism whenever they are near.
The bottom line is – energy is contagious.
As the leader of the church, you have the potential to influence the entire congregation with your energy. However, assessing your own can be difficult, as we naturally fall into energy patterns on autopilot.
Are you interested in improving your church leadership skills to serve your people to the best of your ability? Keep reading for an outline on different work energy types leaders produce and how to become the master of your energy.
Identify Your Energy Field
Knowing how your team responds to your meetings and messages says a huge amount about your church leadership energy. If your church volunteers and workers leave interactions with you feeling uplifted and energized, you probably have positive or motivating energy.
However, if they feel fearful every time your name pops up on their emails, then your energy is far too aggressive – and if they leave your meetings feeling drained and exhausted, you might have “vampire” energy. Though the name sounds harsh, there are many different types of energy vampires and ways to deal with them.
Reducing energies like this isn’t always helpful, as a person’s energy can change throughout the day, week, month, and year. However, everyone has energy they tend to resort to when things get tough. Spend some time reflecting on how you approach other people and how they react to you to assess what yours might be.
Learn to Control Your Energy
Leadership requires more than mastery of your trade. It is a skill in its own right and requires impeccable communication skills, emotional intelligence, organizational skills, and resilience. On top of this, influential leaders have a certain je ne sais quois that draws people to them, otherwise known as their energy field.
Learning how to control your energy to benefit your team is a powerful skill that can influence the people you serve for the better. In fact, Forbes cited a leader’s energy field as the most vital factor when determining team performance.
A team’s energy fluctuates. So, when morale is low and your team is struggling to get by, being able to turn this around is an invaluable skill. Tap into your energies by noticing how something simple like sharing positive feedback can alter someone’s mood or even make someone's day.
Prioritize Positive Energy
We all have down days where nothing seems to go right, and the world feels against us, and this is entirely natural. Church leaders aren’t superhuman – they need their days off like everyone else. Give yourself space and time to recover from a low-energy day to prevent burnout and excess stress.
While you shouldn’t fight your natural energy cycles, you should prioritize cultivating a positive disposition within yourself. If you see the glass as half full, your team will too. An optimistic team of church workers and volunteers is far more effective than a worn-down and disheartened one.
Use the heliotropic effect to your benefit to create contagiously inspiring work energy. This effect refers to the desire of all people to flourish, which attracts people to positive energy while drawing them away from draining energy. Church leaders who are positive energizers will probably have frequent positive exchanges with their teams.
Self-Correct Negativity
If you ever catch yourself engaging in a negative thought cycle in your internal dialogue, no one else would ever know, right? This might be true (unless someone at your church is a mind-reader), but the thoughts we think seep into the words we say, the things we do, and the energy field we produce.
Sometimes, negative thoughts stem from an issue that needs addressing. In these cases, facing up to the problem is the only way to solve it and put an end to your toxic thought cycles. However, in other cases, the negative thoughts don’t serve a purpose. All they do is urge you to see the bad in every situation and lower your energy field.
Next time you think a judgemental thought for no reason or are pessimistic about a situation, call yourself out on it. It really is as simple as nipping these thoughts in the bud. Stop yourself from voicing negative thoughts and feelings that aren’t constructive, because when these are out in the world, there’s no getting them back.
Uplift, Don’t Knock Down
The subtleties of how you navigate your church leadership role have the power to influence every member of your team. It's in the small things, from a warm smile on a cold winter’s morning to a “You’re doing great” on a busy afternoon. Practicing the art of uplifting others will transform your energy into something beautiful.
Bite your tongue when you catch yourself about to make a pointless negative comment. When someone asks you, “How’s it going?” in passing, and you respond with, “Hanging in there” or something equally as bleak, it makes it a reality. Plus, it tells your church worker that they should be feeling equally as low because there is a reason to be down.
Instead, practice gratitude daily and lead by example. Be the church leader your people need by demonstrating through your actions what it means to be thankful for every daily gift God gives us. Do this on the days when the light is harder to see, and you might find it glows within yourself.