Free your team from the poison of complaint
Imagine you are in the gym and somebody comes and pushes down on the weights that you are lifting.
That's a picture of complaint.
If things weren't hard enough, when you add complaint into the day's to-do list, you can make already challenging activities become seemingly impossible.
Nobody likes complainers, but they seem to abound in our world. Social media has made complaint only worse, as people now have a forum to share their complaint with a thousand people people whereas twenty years ago they might have shared it only with a close friend.
If we're honest, we look inside and we see our inner complainer poised to belt something out at the slightest inconvenience. It could be a slight change in our schedule or a car that's moving ten miles an hour below the speed limit or a friend who isn't responding to texts. But inside, there's a voice telling us how each and everyone one of these things is an injustice worthy of a good rant.
Complaining to ourselves is its own problem. The challenge with complaint is that it’s more contagious than Omicron. It travels from mouths to ears, through sound waves and through texts and emails. And it starts with one person and makes its way to a thousand. And soon fifty percent of the country is complaining about something they saw on their favorite brand of news channel.
How harmful is complaint? What power does it have to do damage in your life?
If you look at the story of the twelve spies who went to check out the promised land, you will see that twelve people saw the same situation, but ten of them saw through a lens of complaint and two of them saw it through eyes of belief.
The ten who complained spread their negative report to an entire nation, and even though Caleb stood up to encourage everyone that “God will lead us into the land” (Numbers 14:8), the damage of the ten complainers was already done. Their complaint metastasized to become unbelief, making way for the deadly disease of inaction.
If you are a leader, and you find yourself making inspirational speeches to people who fall into the disease of complaint, you have to realize something very important.
If the majority of the people on your team are full of complaint and unbelief and fear, it can impact the timeline of how quickly you can enter into the next season. Caleb and Joshua eventually got to go into the promised land, but it was after forty years of wandering around the desert. It’s crucial that you build a culture of belief and hope and positivity in the people you lead.
I recently was thinking about this for my own staff, and I realized that it was paramount that I teach people how to have faith, that this isn’t a natural skill for most people. I know this from my own journey, as complaint and unbelief are my natural bent, and I have had to learn to overcome them (I am still learning!).
I created a resource for my staff, and it highlights something that you can do for only a few minutes a day to strengthen your faith muscle. It was taken from the book Ten-Minute Toughness by Jason Selk (I highly recommend buying this book). It helps you do three things:
Clarify the most important thing you can do to engage in a specific problem
Imagine yourself solving the problem
Declare a statement about your identity and your ability to solve the problem
These three actions are powerful to help create a path for victory in our lives. The book was written for athletes, but it can be applied to your leadership as well. Jason Selk also has a book entitled Executive Toughness that was made specifically for leaders (which is on my list to read).
Here is access to the resource. Use it yourself. But then use it with your team to help give them tools to change their perspective, decrease complaining, and march with you into the promised land.
Are there other tools that you have used to help decrease complaining and increase faith on your team?