Episode 211: The Most Important Person You'll Ever Lead with James Duvall

In this episode, Hannah Augustine interviews leadership coach and pastor James Duvall to explore the essential skills of self-leadership, time management, and personal growth. Whether you're volunteering, bi-vocational, or part of a larger team, you'll gain actionable insights to develop your KidMin capacity and impact.

Use promo code KIDZMATTER at thegoodbook.com for 30% off on It's Good to Be a Boy and It's Good to Be a Girl. For personalized coaching, email hannah@kidzmatter.com. Connect with James and Lisa Duvall at artofspousing.com. You can read At Your Best by Carey Nieuwhof wherever books are sold.

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Transcript

Hannah Augustine (00:00)

If I told you that the hardest person you'll ever lead is yourself, would you agree? You may have a name or two in mind when you think of people you struggle to lead. I know I probably would. But for most of us, self-leadership doesn't necessarily come naturally, but it is critically important.

I'm Hannah Augustine, Program Director for KidzMatter. Today we're gonna be learning from James Duvall, an incredible leadership coach, entrepreneur, and pastor.

My hope for you is that you'll leave this conversation feeling more equipped to lead yourself and others well. But before we dive in, I'd love to share a great resource for all of you who are leading or parenting young kids. Discipling boys and girls comes with unique challenges in today's world. We all know that. And you can help kids celebrate God's good design for their boyhood and girlhood with the upbeat fun companion books, It's Good to Be a Boy and It's Good to Be a Girl.

Through inspiring men and women of faith, boys and girls will learn to serve with confidence, joy, and clarity in all that God made them to be. And you can use the code KIDZMATTER and get 30% off your copies at thegoodbook.com today. And we'll throw that link in the show notes. We love the team at The Good Book Company. And if you missed it, we actually interviewed Carl Laferton from their team several weeks ago. You can check it out on your favorite podcast platform.

Now, James, I'm thrilled to have you here today. For those of you listening, James and his wife, Lisa, have played a huge role in my life and in my marriage. They led our marriage counseling. Lisa helped officiate our wedding. And James, when I think of efficiency, time management, and leadership, your name is near the top of my list. I sat through many amazing calendar management classes when I was at Christ Fellowship, lots of leadership tools.

You've gone on some really cool ventures. We were chatting before we hit record. There's some great things happening for you and Lisa, and I'd love to hear some about your ministry background, your family, and what's going on in your life.

James (02:13)

Yeah, well, so glad to be here, Hannah. Appreciate you and your friendship and just watching your journey of what God's doing in your life. It's been really, really inspirational. For the last 30 years, I've been in full-time vocational church work. I actually started as a youth pastor back when I was in college and transitioned into some other roles back in 1996.

We moved from Independence, Kansas, where I was a youth pastor, to South Florida and started working at Christ Fellowship when the church was just one location. Over the next 28 years, had done many things at the church, transitioned out of student ministries into the worship ministry, led the entire worship department, and served on the senior leadership team, helping oversee the 14 locations and build out the strategy and vision of the church. Around 2023, I really felt like God was calling me to a new season to step out of that role in senior leadership. I didn't really know what that was going to be, but just trusted God.

I still do a lot of leadership development and coaching at Christ Fellowship and other churches and with organizations just around personal development, individual and team performance, helping teams really perform at the highest level. We run a nonprofit - my other passion area is cycling and fighting human trafficking.

So in 2024, we launched a nonprofit called Velo Free. Velo means bike in French, so “bike free”. And it's all about connecting a community of cyclists with using their everyday passion for cycling to raise awareness and money to fight human trafficking. All the money we raise goes to rescue kids that are trapped in slavery, and then to also work with organizations that are. restoring and re-engaging former victims of human trafficking into life and society. 

My wife, Lisa and I, we're very passionate about marriage. We have a podcast called The Art of Spousing. We do a lot of content creation around that. We speak at churches, organizations, doing date nights for couples. And then we do intensives, marriage coaching for couples as well. So yeah, doing a few things here and there, and then obviously I do a lot of leadership, development, and coaching on the side as well.

Hannah Augustine (04:45)

When James talks about biking, you need to know it's not the type of biking that I do. James posts on Saturday and we're talking 54 miles on a Saturday morning.

James (04:54)

Yeah.

Hannah Augustine (04:55)

Very impressive. It's been cool to see you take something that you've been passionate about for a long time, but really put passion and vision behind it, and miles for good, which is really, really cool. So you can all check that out. Look at VeloFree and they've got some incredible programs and Art of Spousing is amazing. They've launched some new coaching initiatives and all kinds of fun stuff over there.

James (05:15)

Awesome.

Hannah Augustine (05:16)

But James, I've known you long enough to know how passionate you are about leadership and personal development. When I transitioned to my first role, I was leading our Boynton Beach location, you wrote me a card. You were leading the family ministries at the time. And I've still got it, probably in a memory box. But you said, “you have nothing to prove and everything to offer.” And I can't tell you how many times I've quoted that.

Even last week, I said it to someone, and this conversation is couched in that. Those of you listening, you have nothing to prove and everything to offer. So as we enter into some tips and guiding around how to lead yourself, we come from a place of support and encouragement not one from criticism . . .  We don't want you to walk away feeling like a failure. The goal is that you walk away with tools to step into even more of what God has for you. 

But James, I'd love to hear why is this something, having been in the ministry space, why is leadership, time management, all of these things so important to you?

James (06:17)

Yeah, that's a great question. I think I have to go back to a little bit of my personal journey to kind of set it up. You know, I think just like everybody who's watching this podcast, we feel a calling to ministry. We pursue what God's put in our lives and we go full at it. 

During my junior year in college, I started working with the inner city youth ministry and that really firmed up that calling to work with students in my life. I had my first position part-time while I was in college. I got married, transitioned to a full-time job  in student ministries and had a few other jobs. 

Each time my role changed, my responsibility and my leadership authority increased, but looking back, my leadership capacity didn't really scale with my authority and responsibility. And that came to a real head for me around 2012. 

We had launched our first campus in 2004 and I went as the worship pastor for that campus. I was what we would call an “individual contributor”. I was part of the worship team and led that campus and just contributed to that piece. Around 2007, there were some transitions in the church, and I was promoted to the director of worship ministry. 

We had about four campuses, and at the same time, there was a consolidation of a lot of teams. So our production team, our films team, our next gen creative team, our marketing and communication teams, all came under one umbrella with worship ministry. And I was put over that to lead. And it was a huge honor. You have to remember, I went from being an individual contributor, just leading myself, to now I was responsible for about 70 people. And that's where my lack of leadership capacity really was exposed. There were a lot of blind spots and underdeveloped leadership skills that I hadn't been developed in.

Around 2012, it almost took me out of ministry. I had about four or five people who reported directly to me that went to HR and basically said they couldn't work for me, that I was heavy handed and uncaring. And if you know me now, it'd be hard to know.

That season was a really difficult season for me, but it really became the catalyst for who I am today because what I realized was that it wasn't any of the pastors I worked for’s responsibility to develop me. Now, they had the opportunity to and hopefully, you're working for leaders who are investing in your leadership,

I had to realize it was my responsibility to actually do the work. 

I was given resources. I was given the opportunity to grow. But nobody really held me accountable. And that really wasn't their responsibility, looking back. I had to realize that self leadership's my responsibility, that I couldn't blame anybody else for my lack of capacity. It really came back to me and my development.

Over the next several years, I just took real responsibility for my own personal development. What I teach today is all a direct result of things that I started doing in my own life that I realized, man, if I would have had somebody sit me down when I was early on in my career and just kind of go, “hey, here are some simple things that you can do,” that aren't these moonshot, gonna take you from here to leading huge organizations, but they compound over time. And if you do these simple things, you're going to be so much farther ahead in your leadership than where you are. They're really not difficult things - they're easy things - but sometimes the easiest things to do are the hardest for us to actually give ourselves to, because we don't see the long-term results or the benefit of what those things are. So that's kind of been my journey.

Hannah Augustine (10:38)

We've got a lot of KidMin leaders and some are paid, some are bi-vocational, some are completely volunteer. And so you may be listening and thinking, well, I'm not on the senior leadership team.

And so the goal is that you're gonna feel equipped for whatever your season is. Sometimes we can feel so daunted and think, “I have so much to work on.”

We all do, right? So let's start there: we all do. But it's about having that growth mindset and saying, what is the tiny change that I can make today? With little bitty baby steps. I love that perspective of “I'm responsible for my growth; I'm responsible for developing myself.”

James (11:15)

Yeah, you can't lead people where you haven't been yourself. I love using the analogy of mountain climbing and the idea of a Sherpa. And if people aren't familiar with it . . . if you think about Mount Everest, it's kind of like the pinnacle of leadership, like summoning the mountain, right?

There's only been around 7,000 people who have ever summited Mount Everest in the history of climbing the mountain. And not one of those people, even Sir Edmund Hillary, who was the first person, did it alone. They all had to have somebody else help them get to that summit. And there's a group of indigenous people called the Sherpa, and the Sherpa are born at high altitude levels, like 14,000 feet. And because of that, they're acclimated at a high level of leadership. And so they have the ability to actually help assist climbers up the mountain. As a Sherpa, that means that they actually have to climb the mountain many times.

For a Sherpa, success isn't how many times they've actually summited the mountain. Success for them is how many times they've helped somebody else summit the mountain because they're already acclimated at that level. 

That analogy for us as leaders is that, in kids’ ministry, you're a Sherpa, whether you know it or not, because you're at a higher level of understanding, of leadership, acclimated more than maybe your volunteers or your kids. But your volunteers also have the ability to grow and develop, and your kids have the ability to grow and develop. If a Sherpa is not continually developing and growing. . . if you're gonna climb a mountain, you don't want the Sherpa who has asthma and is on oxygen, right? You want somebody who's strong and knows the pathway to get there. And that's our responsibility as pastors, as ministry leaders, as leaders, is to be able to not do the work for our volunteers, but be healthy, 100% healthy, and able to multiply that health in the other people.

When I really started my self leadership journey, I just made a commitment that I was always going to be outgrowing, out-learning, out-developing myself above people that I was leading. I wanted to be ahead of them so I could help bring them along in their journey. Unfortunately, a lot of leaders get so involved in the tasks of doing things that they don't do the things that are most important to actually develop themselves so that they can actually help other people. 

Scripture says that our task as leaders is not to do the work. We're actually to equip the saints for works and ministry. And so I have to continually develop myself on how to lead others. And that starts with how I lead myself, right? Everything flows out of self-leadership.

Hannah Augustine (14:17)

So true. It's Ephesians 4:11-13, right, that you referenced. I share it a lot with our students. We just finished our volunteer module for KidMin Academy. And just that reminder of, man, if you're doing [the work], then you're not doing your job. Again, that's going to look different in every context, right? Some of you are out there, you have three or four people. So you are gonna do a big portion of the job. But you also wanna be equipping them, right, to use their gifts and their skills and their talents. And even saying, “how is what I'm teaching them here affecting the other areas of their life?”

James (14:20)

Mm-hmm.

Hannah Augustine (14:45)

Are they a better mom, spouse, sister, employee, son, because of their time with me in the children's ministry? Because it's not just about, “okay, you handed out the goldfish,” but no, it's, “are you making an impact?” And then “are you better for the skills that you've learned?”

And so when we live from that perspective of what you shared, “how do I help other people grow? How do I help them operate?” Not just focusing on me. And Jessica Bealer said this in our last class, right? That if you're the lid of the ministry, then your ministry can't grow and expand. So we've got to say, “how do I grow and how do I help my team grow?”

James (15:21)

Right, and the fruit of leadership is the legacy of leaders that go around you. I think it's in the book of John where it talks about producing fruit, fruit that lasts into eternity. And I really had taken that as, “who are the people that I've helped become better followers of Jesus, better leaders, better disciplers of disciples?” That's the fruit of leadership. That's the fruit of ministry. And it doesn't happen if I stay where I'm at. I can't do that. I have to continually build systems and processes in my life that I'm getting better so that I can help other people get better.

Hannah Augustine (15:58)

That's right, and this applies to our families. I can't remember where I heard this saying, but that my ceiling would be my children's floor, right? And I don't have kids yet, but you and Lisa have kids our age and you're saying, “I want my highest level to be where they get started.”

That's true for our children, that's true for our volunteers, and it’s true for the kids in your ministry, right? Saying, “if this is my potential, I want them to even far surpass [that]”, right? And have that fruit and say, “I want even more for you because I did the work to work on myself and to be the best leader I could be so that you could then go and be the best you can be.”

James (16:26)

Yeah.

Yeah, that's great. Yeah, it's true.

Hannah Augustine (16:34)

Something that I encountered while at Christ Fellowship, while in different roles - and I know many of our KidMin leaders feel this - we're not at the top of the org chart, right? We are towards maybe the bottom or the middle, depending on the structure of our church. And so sometimes it can feel like, I think Stephen Covey calls it the “tyranny of the urgent,” right? And this idea that there's always an emergency and we're not in control of our schedule. 

Ultimately, if our senior pastor gives us a call, we need to take that call. Or if the executive pastor comes to our office, we’ve got to stop and do that. What are some ways that we can - while staying flexible to honor the needs of the people on our team and the needs of our volunteers - what are some practical steps for saying, “I need to grow my leadership, I need to guard my time, I need to be the most effective I can be”?

James (17:20)

Yeah, that's great. I would say first of all, from being at the lowest levels of organization to the highest level of one of the largest churches in the United States: that challenge doesn't change. You're always going to have things that are going to be demanding of your schedule and time. 

I think it's easy to think, “I don't have control of my schedule because I'm not the top of organization.” Well, I think a lot of senior pastors will tell you they feel the same way, that they don't have control of their schedule because they have boards, raising funds for the church, and initiatives. There are a lot of things that are pulling at their schedule too. 

A couple things that I would say here. The first is to start where you are. I love what Henry Cloud says, that you are ridiculously in control of your life. So take control of your life. One of the things that I teach a lot is control the controllables. What are the things that you have control of, that you can control 100%, and then you control those things. You put guardrails around those things. You put some boundaries around those things. Guardrails and boundaries sometimes can have a negative bent to them, but they're really the things that you're saying yes and no to.

Right? They're your yeses and your nos. So control the controllables, and then plan for the things that you can't control. 

The things are uncontrollable, like when there's an emergency, a death in the church or something that happens - you can't control those things, but you can actually make a plan for the uncontrollable. So control the controllables, make a plan for the things that you can't control. 

Start systematizing your life. We undervalue, or maybe we underestimate, the amount of time that we waste. We would probably say, “no, I'm very efficient.” Well, if we're not using our calendar, if we're not having some systems in place and prioritizing those systems, then there's probably going to be a lot of wasted time. That's going to make us feel like we have no control over our schedule.

What are the things that I can systematize? I can systematize my calendar - it's not a new concept. One of the things I teach is how to time block. How do you prioritize the things that are the big rocks that you have to do: the meetings and so forth. Then all that white space in your calendar that you're not in meetings and such is like your financial budget. If you're not making a plan for every dollar that you make, that money is going to be wasted on something, and you may not know what it is. It’s the same thing with time. If you're not putting a plan in your calendar, even for the white space, then it's going to be wasted on something. It's going to be wasted on scrolling, you know, TikTok or Instagram. So you’ve got to make a plan for your time, control the controllable.

That could be project block times. It could be people block times. It could be, you know, processed block times. 

Another thing that can affect anybody is our attention and distractions. I think email is a huge distraction and waste of time, honestly. Put a process in place for your email. A guy named Kevin Kruse that talks about the three, two, one, zero email system. It's really simple.

Three times a day, set a timer for 20 minutes and process your inbox down to zero.

The difference between processing and checking your email is if you check your email, you're going to have to go back and do something with it. So when you process your email, you're actually taking the time in that 20 minutes to make a plan for every single one of your emails. If it's junk, you just delete it, throw it in the trash. If it's something you can do within two minutes, you do it right then. If it's an answer or something like that, or if it's something that's gonna need more time, you put it in an inbox that you know you're going to go back to later and actually put that in your calendar to deal with that. 

Doing that three times a day, 20 minutes; it won't even take you that long. Honestly, after you get through it, you're not living your calendar and that's going to give you a lot more time than your day: a lot less distraction, a lot less of other people's priorities. 

I’ll give you one more thing and I’ll keep this short: it is priorities. There are things that you must do. They are, as Stephen Covey would say, important and urgent. Like your job depends upon, your life depends upon, those things you have to do: they're must do's. 

There are some things that are urgent, but they're not important to you. They might be important to a colleague or somebody else. They're urgent to them. They’re somebody else's priority. Those are things that you could do. And a lot of times as we grow in leadership, we continue doing those things instead of delegating those things.

  would say as leaders, if there are things that are important, but they're not urgent for you to do - if you're not the only person that can do it -those are things you’ve got to start delegating to volunteers or other people. Train people to take that off your schedule. 

Then there's the things that we should do, and these are the things that we typically don't do. This is where self-development and leadership happens, is in the things that are really important, but they're not urgent. Things like our health, things like our quiet time, things like prayer, things like building systems, planning for the future. All those things are things that are important, but they're not urgent to us because we don't feel the benefit or pain of those things. 

But if you neglect sleep, eventually you're going to be sleep-deprived. It's going to affect your life. If you neglect a healthy diet, eventually you're going to…you can eat a cheeseburger one day, but if you eat cheeseburgers every day of your life, eventually you're going to have some issues, right? If you don't work out one day, it's not a big deal, but if you never work out, it's going to affect you. If you don't read one day, it's not a big deal, but if you never read….

And then the last category is the things that are not important and they're not urgent. And those things are things that you should not do or should do very limited amounts of. Gaming, chilling out on Netflix. It's okay to do that sometimes, but not all the time. A lot of times we allow the things that we should not do to consume a lot of our time. 

So all that to say, it's a struggle for every leader. It doesn't matter where you are in the organization, but where you're at in the organization right now, you can actually structure your life in a way that you can control the controllables, and then make a plan for those things that are uncontrolled.

Hannah Augustine (23:57)

Something that's helped me a lot - I don't know whether I'm type A or type B; sometimes I'm one or the other - but energy management has been huge for me. Learning what are the rhythms of my life and my energy. For me, I'm great in the mornings, and so I need to prioritize what you mentioned, right? Those important and urgent things are the first thing in the day and then I know things that are more mindless… at two o'clock almost every day, I’m [exhausted]. So the mindless things could be - that email in 20 minutes - could be at two o'clock, right? Where I can knock a couple of things out. Easy mindless tasks are great for me at two o'clock. And then I usually get another boost of energy right before the end of the day. You've got to learn that for yourself.

James (24:23)

Yep.

Hannah Augustine (24:41)

Sometimes we get stuck in this idea that “this has to be at this time” and” this has to be at this time”. Now again, I know there are rhythms and things - you can't avoid when your church's staff meeting is. You can't avoid school pickup. But when you're in where you can control…

A phrase we use at Christ Fellowship is, we don't want to work in the ministry so much that we can't work on the ministry. You touched on that idea of, if we're not focusing on the ways to grow, if we're not focusing on, “what's the vision of our ministry?”, we just find ourselves in this endless cycle of Sunday, Sunday, Sunday. We're never setting goals, we're never dreaming about what the future could look like.

This is true for a lot of us, whether it's recruiting, whether it's developing your curriculum. Whatever it looks like for you, if you actually look back, you may think, “I'm doing this. I'm devoting all this time to this.” And then when you look back at your calendar, you realize, “I actually didn't spend as much time on that as I thought I did.”

Naking space for that. Again, it's not “I failed.”  It’s saying,” let me be honest with myself and know, am I spending my time on the right things?”

James (25:42)

Jim Rohn said an ounce of discipline weighs far less than a ton of regret, you know. 

First of all, on the time blocking piece, one of the great things about that is your calendar can become your guardrail. If you've already planned your week, your day, then when somebody's trying to get on your calendar, they already know that you're not available. So you've already made a plan for how you're going to use your time. Now, there are always exceptions; you know, if my wife wants me, she can get on my calendar anytime she wants, right? [Same for] my senior pastor and key team members. But a lot of time is [lost], especially if you have shared calendars where people can just request time with you. If it's unblocked, it's free for somebody else to use the way they want to use it.

Carey Nieuwhof wrote a book (I forget the name of it), but he talks about energy and about green zones, yellow zones, and red zones. We all have them. Morning for me is my green zone. I have to protect that up to about eleven o'clock. It's when I'm sharpest, and then kind of yellow between eleven and two, and after that I'm just mindless. You have to determine what your green zone is, and you have to protect that. Now, you don't always have the opportunity to do that, but as much as you can, that's your most productive time. 

Dee Hock, the founder of Visa, once said that 50% of our leadership amperage should be spent on self-leadership, and the other 50% built on team and business organization. A lot of people don't value self-leadership enough, that the more you spend on yourself, the better your business, the better your ministry, the better your teams are going to be. It is really important to actually invest that time.

Hannah Augustine (27:41)

So good. I think that book is At Your Best. I haven't read that one, but I've heard it's by Carey Nieuwhof. It's a good one.

James (27:44)

That's it.

Hannah Augustine (27:47)

We have scratched the surface on this and given you a couple of thoughts. I'm available to offer one free coaching call through KidzMatter. If you ever want that, you can email me at hannah@kidzmatter.com. 

James has some amazing resources on his podcast, which we'll link. You can go check out his podcast and any of those books. A lot of them are available on audio, so you can listen to them while you clean out that craft book closet or drive the kids to school or whatever your work day looks like, but find the space to prioritize your growth.

James, it's been so good to have you. I feel like we could go forever, and we need to maybe link some other things and come back to this conversation. Again, for any of you listening, we'd love for you to contact us. If you want to learn more about James and Lisa and ways to connect with them, you can email me at hannah@kidzmatter.com. I know they'd love to chat with you. 

Remember, you can get those books from The Good Book Company with the code KIDZMATTER at 30% off for those two books: It's Good to Be a Boy and It's Good to Be a Girl at thegoodbook.com.

You can check that out.

James, I would love if you would close us in prayer.

James (28:48)

Yeah, I'd love to. 

God, thank you for the ability to serve your kingdom and to work with kids and to make a difference in this generation. I just pray blessing upon each person who's watching this podcast, that you would help them in their own personal development so that they can have greater impact and help other volunteers, leaders, and kids know you and grow in their relationship with you. I pray this. Amen.

Hannah Augustine (29:17)

Amen. You all have a great day. Thanks for joining. We'll see you next time. Thanks, James.

James (29:21)

Take care.