EP 77: Unlock Your Potential Faster: 4 Key Areas You’ve Probably Ignored

Leadership isn’t something you arrive at—it’s something you keep developing.

Let’s be honest—most of us want to be great right now. But real leaders fall in love with the process of becoming. In this episode, we walk through four key areas that shape your potential—dreams, wisdom, character, and giftedness—and how they work together over time. If you’ve ever felt stuck, plateaued, or unsure what to focus on next, this conversation will help you get moving again.

📋 Key Takeaways

• Growth beats arrival  |  You’re not called to “be awesome”—you’re called to keep becoming. (2 Peter 3:18)
• Dreams expand your horizon  |  You can only walk as far as you can see—expose yourself to bigger vision.
• Wisdom grounds your leadership  | 
   Learn from others, not just your own mistakes. (Proverbs 13:20)
• Character sustains your impact  |  What you build matters—but how you build it matters more.
• Giftedness requires courage  |  Sometimes what feels like humility is actually fear. Take the shot.

💬 Quotes

• “It’s more fun to become awesome than to already be awesome.”
• “You can only walk as far as you can see.”
• “Character is what keeps you from blowing up your life.”
• “Fear sometimes masquerades as humility.”

📖 Scripture Tie-Ins

• 2 Peter 3:18 – “Grow in the grace and knowledge…”
• Proverbs 13:20 – “Walk with the wise and become wise…”
• Proverbs 9:10 – “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”

🛠 Next Steps for Listeners

1. Identify your focus area  |  Which one needs attention right now: dreams, wisdom, character, or giftedness?

2. Get around the right people  |  Who can speak into your growth? Ask for feedback this week.

3. Take one intentional step

• Visit a place that stretches your vision
• Sit in on a leader’s meeting
• Start a habit that builds character (prayer, fasting, accountability)
• Take a shot in your gifting

Journaling Prompt:  “Who could I become in 5 years if I stay consistent here?”

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Transcript

Becoming Better Beats Being Great

Miracle Cookie And Midichlorian Analogy

Nobody Develops Potential For You

Dreams That Expand Your Vision

Wisdom Through Feedback And Mentors

Character That Survives Success

Giftedness With Courage And Humility

Three Questions And Next Steps

SPEAKER_00 0:06

What's happening, everybody? Welcome back to the Bible Leadership Podcast. Today I want to talk to you about your potential. As I've watched leaders grow over the years, there are four areas that I really believe every one of us wants to always be developing in terms of our potential. They are such things as, first, dreams. We want to always be dreaming about what is possible more and more. The second is wisdom. Wisdom helps us to connect with the rock solid reality of the world God has made so that we can keep progressing. There's also character. Character makes us leaders worth following so that we don't blow up and destroy our lives. And then there's giftedness. This is what makes us actually helpful to people. So today we're gonna pull apart all four. Let's dive right in. Okay, so let me tell you some things I've been chewing on lately. There's a difference between just really wanting to be awesome and wanting to be somebody who is becoming awesome. Every one of us wants to be known as someone who's really wise or really skilled or really um successful. And that there's nothing wrong with that, but can I tell you, as someone who I feel like has now done both for a while, it's it's easy to want to be great right now. It's more fun if I can look back even just a few weeks, a few months, a few years ago, and be like, wow, praise God, like I'm really getting better at this thing. And it's fun to be getting better. Leaders know that it's actually more fun to fall in love with the process of getting better than just to be really good. So, in other words, instead of like, oh, I'm intelligent, no, I'm getting more intelligent, or oh, I'm wise, no, I'm getting more wise. Oh, I'm skilled. No, it's exciting to know that I'm getting more skilled every day because I'm practicing developing my potential. Peter said it this way in 2 Peter 3, 18. It says, Grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Leadership is not a thing that we're supposed to like land on, it's a thing that we're supposed to be developing and growing more and more and more over the time we have left on planet Earth. So let me give you an illustration that's a little bit goofy. Okay, you know that if you're gonna make some chocolate chip cookies, some delicious chocolate chip cookies, you can put in the chocolate chips, you can put in the brown sugar, you can put in the butter. But eventually, if you put in too much of one of those things, you're gonna jack up the recipe. It's gonna be like, ah, this doesn't taste totally right. But now imagine with me a miracle cookie. A miracle cookie that if you just add more chocolate chips, it doesn't mess up the recipe. It just gets sweeter. If you add more butter, it doesn't mess it up. It just gets sweeter. You're in my potential is a lot like that miracle cookie. We can just become more and more delicious to the rest of the human race through developing our potential. We're more helpful, we're more usable by God. And it doesn't ever like, we don't have to mess up the recipe. In other words, if I get more and more wise, it doesn't mess up the recipe. If I get more and more courageous, it doesn't mess up the recipe. If I become more and more gifted in the area of my giftedness, it doesn't mess anything up. Let me give you a maybe a nerdier version for some of my nerd Star Wars uh folks who understand this kind of thing. You might not know what this is, okay? But if you do, you might know what midi chlorines are. In the Star Wars universe, whatever you think of midi chlorines, what they are is they're these little microscopic fictional organisms that live inside of people and they tell people, like they connect them to the will of the force, so to speak, which means if you have a high midi chlorine count, you are very strong in the force. So Yoda would be a person who's very strong in the force because he has a very high midi chlorine count. Now, in the Star Wars universe, you can't really increase your mid chlorine count. You just have what you have. But in the spiritual realm, we can increase our spiritual midi chlorines by developing our potential. Now, here's the bad news, and you already know this. No one is gonna develop your potential for you. It's gonna be you and I doing it ourselves, or it's not gonna happen at all. Now, you can have coaches, and coaches are great things to have. But if you remember, a coach doesn't actually do it for the one who is the player or the the athlete. The coach, the coach challenges, the coach encourages, the coach maybe even lays out the like, hey, here's the plan, here's what we're gonna do. But they can't actually get out there and run for them. They can't hit the ball for them, they can't go into the weight room for them. No, the coach can only say, I see your potential, I can help you develop your potential, but I can't do it for you. Every one of us has got to decide we're gonna be the ones who develops our potential. Now, if you're still with me, if you want to be the one who develops your potential, let's talk about the four areas that we wanna be developing. Okay, you remember what we said they are? We said they are dreams, they're wisdom, they're character, and they are giftedness. I want you to think about these like the the first and the last one are bookends, okay? So dreams and giftedness, these are actually the ones that hold the center to in place. These two are actually the more fun ones, the ones on the outside, the dreams and the gifts. We're like, ah, yeah, it's easy for me to like, yeah, I want to go do this thing and I want to be great. Character and wisdom are the ones that, man, they take a whole lot more longer to develop, uh, but they're the ones that hold everything together. They're the ones that actually make this thing worth it over the long haul. So as we talk about these four, just think about the things that develop our potential, okay? Dreams. Everybody starts with a desire for something. Everyone says, hey, man, you know what be cool is this if I did this. What our responsibility is, if we're going to develop our potential, is to water those dreams. And the way we water those dreams is, well, we do think about it, we maybe even pray about it, God increase my vision about this thing. But then we go see places and people who are doing that thing, or we go to them online, or we read about them, but we we expose ourselves to stuff that is way beyond where we are. And we say, God, increase my vision, help me believe. No, it's not just that I can I can go as far as I've seen so far, I can see further. And then I can say, Oh, that thing out there, that's really cool for me to maybe go with. So one of the things that my staff and I have been doing for years is we will go to other places, other churches. We're in the church business, we'll go to other churches, other places, um, and we'll say, What are y'all doing? And and I mean, we'll pick some places that are doing pretty awesome stuff. And we'll go there, we'll just just to open up our eyes to see what else is possible. We're in our own little grooves, we're in our own little boxes, and we go to these other places and we see what their staff does, and we see what their ambitions are for one weekend. And it's what's what's awesome is I don't have to just give everybody vision. I can just expose my staff to vision and then they get vision in their own area. But it's because we decided to dream together and to tap into developing our potential of our dreams. So the question for you is what could you do to increase your vision, to increase your dreams? What could you do to maybe go see some places, maybe ask God to increase it, maybe read about it, maybe just believe, you know, I could maybe do this with God's help. What would that look like for you to increase your dream and maybe believe a little bit higher and a little bit further? You can walk as far as you can see. But if you can't see anything but three feet ahead of you, we're just not gonna walk that far. Okay, so we had dreams. Now, dreams, they show us the horizon, they show us what could be. Wisdom nails our feet down to the ground of earth and says, look, man, that's awesome that you have that dream, but you want to develop your, your, your nimbleness, your ability to deal with the facts of reality. So, in other words, we want to grow our capacity and our ability to think through and be aware of and understand what's coming, that um, yeah, sometimes it just doesn't work that way though, dude. But sometimes people behave this way. Sometimes leadership doesn't work like that. Sometimes money doesn't work like that. Sometimes time doesn't work the way that you think it is. Sometimes if you'll give it time and you won't rush it, this other thing will happen around the corner, and that really adds to what we're trying to do. Sometimes if you loop this kind of person and this kind of person into that conversation, the whole thing is gonna go a whole lot better. But that takes wisdom. That comes through not just experience or learning, it comes through evaluating our experience and especially the experiences of others. Here's what I wish I would have done uh as a younger leader. I did want to learn from other people and learn what they knew, but I also was very excited to get out there and do it. And as I was out there getting it done, I was also making a lot of mistakes because the truth is, I wasn't trying to get as much feedback as I could have. I should have been going around to others and said, Hey, look what I just did. You see that? Um, instead of like, oh, I feel good or bad about whether or not that worked, say, Hey, would you tell me what do you see there? What do you feel like we did right or wrong? And specifically, I mean people that were wiser than me. Go into people and just say, Hey, would you evaluate this thing? You have areas that you could grow in wisdom if you would ask other people to weigh in on your stuff. You don't have to do it. They're not gonna force you into it. Remember, um, they they at best will, you know, just be your coach, but only if you ask, what do they see when they look at some of the things that you're trying or about to try? That's how wisdom works. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. We can ask other people, but we can also go to books. Not only books, but we can go observe how other people do stuff. So this is where maybe you can get in, and this can be really helpful. Ask a mentor, can I sit in on your meetings? If you sit in on somebody's meetings, like their whatever, what whatever their business is, whatever their industry is, if you get to sit in on their meetings, you're gonna see some things. You're gonna see how do they deal with conflict? How do they deal with the problems that you didn't even know that was a problem in those areas? How do you deal when somebody does this instead of this? How do they treat people? And how does the way they treat people affect the entire culture of the team? That kind of thing is wisdom. And it works best when you don't have to learn that whole thing on your own. You can just go watch how they do it and then glean. And sometimes, as it has been for me, I'll go watch one of my mentors lead their staff and I'll be corrected by how they communicate to their staff. There's been multiple times I've walked away from a certain mentor and I'm like, dang, he is so loving to the people around him. Like, I so want that. That's wisdom that I would just not have if I didn't go hang out in his context and see what he was doing. If we walk with wise people, we ourselves will be wise, Proverbs 13, 20. Okay, so we had dreaming, we had wisdom. Let's talk about the next one. We need to be developing our potential, and that is character. Character is the thing that's gonna keep us from blowing up our lives. Character says, I'm gonna get better whether or not my dreams are coming true, whether or not the vision is coming to pass, whether or not I feel like I'm growing in uh being the person who knows everything there is to know about whatever. I'm uh I'm gonna be worth following even if none of my stuff is necessarily working. And here's one of the reasons that's so important. Because we live in a culture and a time where success is like so sexy. Everybody wants to be a success. We can forget, and I've forgotten, especially on the on the front end. You can achieve a lot of stuff, but you're as you get closer to death, you're gonna answer. You're gonna start to realize I'm gonna answer for not only the thing getting done, I'm gonna answer for how it was done, how I treated people while it was happening, which corners I did or did not cut, even if only internally. I really regret, you know, there's times when I saw some leaders do stuff and I was like, wow, man, yeah, it's that simple. And I knew kind of in my conscience, I think they cut a corner like internally. I think their motivations are not necessarily right, but I saw it quote unquote work. And I regret every time that I followed that uh corner cut, even if only internally, uh, because now that time is gone. And I wish I could build on a sure foundation. And the sure foundation is character. This means I'm gonna pray over my motives more. This means I'm going to pray for my integrity, that I'm getting better at certain things and getting less bad at certain sin. That means I'm going to fast and ask for accountability from others. This also means I'm going to spend time reading biographies of people that did this right, even if in other times, even if they didn't have the tech that we have, there's great men and women of God that, man, they handled incredible pressures and they did it with integrity. That means I'm going to be, I'm going to be reading when others' people are watching movies. I'm going to be investing in memorizing scripture when other people are doing other, you know, fun things. I'm, and I'm going to do that. You and I are going to do that to develop our potential as people of character so that God can trust us in the future. Okay, here's the fourth one. And it is giftedness. This is the fun one we we often might think about. This I'm going to develop my giftedness because I want to really be good at this stuff. Uh, we just want to make sure the other three are mixed in here. But then, yeah, we want to be developing our giftedness. Giftedness is where's the is where the spirit's grace is, it's where the power is, it's where he's getting behind us and making sure, yeah, that thing's gonna work for the kingdom of God. As long as I know that's not the only thing I need to be weird about, it works great. You know how to do this. We take gift inventories, we take personality profiles, and honestly, dude, we step up to bat and we try stuff. We try again and again and again and again, and we see what's working, we get feedback on it. We're not afraid to try stuff, and this is where I want to challenge some of you. Sometimes we're trying to be humble, but we're also responding in fear. Fear masquerades as humility sometimes. Well, I don't want to step up because I don't want to, you know, I don't want to appear like I'm I'm I'm haughty. I I get that. And that there, that there's good to that. However, uh, sometimes all that is, is is us being afraid to take the shot. And dude, you have to be humble, but you also have to have the guts to take the shot. I'm going to step up. I'm not gonna throw myself and raise myself up, but dude, if there's any opening, I'm gonna take that ball and I'm gonna run toward the end zone uh under the submission of the authorities I'm under, but I'm gonna do it so that I can develop my giftedness. Now, here's one more pitfall that you might, just in case it's helpful to somebody. There have been times when some of my elders, people that love me, people that had my back, people that were were developing me, they maybe miss said some things that didn't stop me, but might have stopped me if I let it hurt hurt me a little bit. I had one mentor who I said, hey man, as you look at me, what are you maybe concerned about? He said, I'm really concerned about your communication skills. Now, what he meant probably was I didn't necessarily communicate the way that he did. He was very much of the seeker church generation. He was very much of like, everything he says sounds buttery and smooth and loving and nice. And I just wasn't that dude. I have much more of a prophetic edge. And um, there certainly were things that needed to be smoothed out and buttered up, but it was still he was evaluating me through the lens of his own giftedness, and that was only kind of helpful, but kind of not helpful. And what am I saying? I'm saying there might be some mentors that evaluate you based on their gifts and not your actual gifts. Don't just because somebody somewhere says, I don't know if that's true. If other people are saying it's true, and other people were saying it was true in my case, it doesn't have to look like theirs. It doesn't have to look like anybody else's. You just run, take the ball and run, and let the Lord develop you the way that you are because you have a unique gift mix. Don't let somebody stop it just because it's not exactly like yours. And I know this dude, he didn't mean to be mean like that. He was not trying to misspeak. In fact, he was trying to protect me. Uh, but he just happened to be maybe doing it wrong and not really looking at the potential of the wisdom. Me, he was just filtering it through him. So I want to encourage you to ask the question: what are the gifts that I could be developing if I would just apply a little bit more intentionality, a little bit more discipline, a little bit more chutzpah, a little bit less fear? What could you be developing if you were just gonna do take that ball and run? Okay, so here is the challenge. Who could you be in five, 10, 20 years if you will just not let go of being dogged about developing your own potential? Forget about being awesome. Why don't you and I just try to be becoming awesome all the time? Because then we don't even have to rate ourselves compared to anybody else. We can just rate ourselves to how far have we traveled since we started being disciplined and ferocious about developing our potential? Let me ask you three closing questions uh to get you to think this through uh and then I'll I'll let you go. Here's the first one. Which of the four areas needs the most attention right now? Is it dreaming? Is there dreaming that you need to do to expand your thinking? Is it wisdom? Are you intentionally growing in wisdom the way maybe that you need to? Is it your character? Is your character keeping pace with your influence? Is there more focus that needs to be going on that right now? Do you need to embrace more accountability, more fasting, more prayer, more uh even just character studies so that your character stays in line with the way God wants it to go? Uh, are you actively developing your gifts? Are you getting a little bit passive with the things that God has generously given you giftedness in? Here is the second question. Who around you is helping you develop your potential? Who knows about this? Who knows that you're trying to take ground on this? Who's praying for you? Who's got your back? Doesn't mean someone has to like get in and be your life coach. If they will, that's great. But even if they won't, is there somebody just who can pray for you and agree with you about it? And here's the third one. And this is just to think about it. Really think about one thing that could be true in five, 10, or 15 years. If you keep developing that thing, if the if if the wisdom or the character or the dreaming or the giftedness, if those keep going up and to the right, where might you be in five years? What else might you be able to do for the kingdom of God? Guys, that's all I've got for you today. Do me a favor, put it in the comments. Uh, you know, whatever your answer to any of those are, or in the if you want to email me, infot Bible leadership.com. But lead strong today. Thanks for tuning in, and we'll see you next time. All right, everybody. Thank you so much for tuning in today. Hey, if this was helpful, would you consider liking and sharing, putting it places where other people who need this kind of content are going to find it? Also, you may know that we have a lot of other places you can find our stuff TikTok, Instagram, all the things. So go ahead and check those out in places where you're going to be anyway. And don't forget to lead strong today.