2 out of 3 is good enough – right?
This week, I read Tom Camacho’s Mining for Gold. It is a primer on coaching to help leaders draw out the God-given talents from their team so people can flourish. I want to extend an idea that Tom Camacho developed in his book that he didn’t fully develop.
Camacho says that our Sweet Spot is “the place where we naturally bear the most fruit for the kingdom.”[1] He shares a Venn Diagram showing our sweet spot, the overlap of our passions, wiring, and fruit.[2]
What happens when we only have two of three? Camacho never addresses that. I want to take this blog post and examine what happens when we live with two of the three. He comes close but doesn’t fully explore these areas. He says, “I have worked with leaders who have never identified their sweet spot. They experience the opposite of thriving. Work is exhausting and joyless…”[3] Working off the assumption that two of the three lead to exhaustion, I wanted to tease out where these combination pairs would lead.
Passions and Fruit, No Wiring – Burnout
As the Church, we live at the meeting point between the Kingdom of God and the stolen Kingdom of Satan. I can become impassioned about extending God’s kingdom to many social causes or systems of sin in our world. I may join and lead organizations in this effort, and we may succeed. Yet, if I am not wired toward these efforts, they will come at the cost of my soul.
When we live out of our natural wiring, Camacho says it will feel like “effortless soaring” and not frustrated and doing things we hate.[4] Leaders who fail to lead out of their design are not stewarding the gifts God has given.
Let me illustrate this. I don’t remember who I heard say this: Breaking God’s law is not like breaking a law as we understand it today. Imagine I was to climb to the tallest tower in your town. It doesn’t matter if you live in a big city or the country; imagine the highest point. Imagine that I believed I could fly, so I tied a red cape around my neck, wore my red underwear outside my blue pants, and painted a big red ‘S’ on my chest. If I leap from that high point, will I break the law of gravity? No, I will break myself as I prove the law.
When we fail to live according to our natural wiring, even when we are successful, we push against God’s law and become broken. That brokenness is burnout.
Fruit and Wiring, No Passion – Lethargy
As a Westerner, I intuitively understand what working in a job I am not passionate about will do to me. We, as Westerners, place a high value on finding a career we are passionate about. So, I won’t spend as much time here. We have a phrase to describe the lethargy we feel from years of passionless work – Soul-sucking.
The lack of passion will stunt our growth. Camacho says that when “we align our working life with our passions, fresh bursts of joy and purpose rise up within us.”[5] Then, it follows that when our life is not aligned with our passions, we don’t experience those bursts of joy and purpose.
We hold our positions of leadership for a short time. There will be a day when I am no longer the church pastor. Somebody else will sit in my office. If I am not passionate about that work, I need to recognize that I may be sitting in an office God wants to give to somebody else.
Passions and Wiring, No Fruit – Idolatry
This one strikes me as the most frightful because we can live a long time in this zone without feeling the burden on our souls. What happens when we find a niche that fits our passions and wiring but is fruitless? Camacho calls this our comfort zone. Our Comfort Zone is the spot where we are:
“Safe and secure; we fight to defend ourselves. But when we refuse to be disturbed in our places of comfort, it not only affects our own growth but the growth of our organization…Facing the crisis and helping the team develop and grow past the problem is the goal.”[6]
When we live out of our passions and wiring without concern for fruitfulness, we live in our comfort zone. In this zone, we find a ministry that fulfills who we are as people without fulfilling the Great Commission. We enter a life of idolatry.
Our ministry becomes an idol. Idols always demand sacrifice. It no longer belongs to God; instead, it belongs to us. The idol of ministry will require us to sacrifice. We will sacrifice anything to ensure our safety and security and to avoid being disturbed. We teach about God without ever encountering him because if we ever did, we would have to immediately confront our idol.
I know a woman who has pastored a church for 25 years and runs a ministry focusing on five to ten-year-olds. While the church has slowly dwindled to a handful of people, they claim to reach 30-40 five to ten-year-olds. There are no eleven to thirty-five-year-olds in her church. They age out of the program and are never seen again. Working with this age group is in her passion and wiring, but there is no fruit. There is only a dying church sacrificed to the idol of ministry.
[1] Tom Camacho, Mining for Gold: Developing Kingdom Leaders Through Coaching, First published (Nottingham: IVP, 2019), 133.
[2] Camacho, 135.
[3] Camacho, 139.
[4] Camacho, 121.
[5] Camacho, Mining for Gold, 138.
[6] Camacho, 153.
About the Author
Robert Radcliff
Hi! I'm Robert, and I'm seeking to understand who God is calling me to be in my community while helping others do the same. I enjoy reading, training for triathlons, and using exclamation points!11 responses to “2 out of 3 is good enough – right?”
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Robert,
I’m so glad you addressed this concept, as it was one I barely touched on in my post. I wrestle with this idea because, honestly, it seems out of reach. How many people in the world have the privilege of living from their “sweet spot” as daily work? Maybe Camacho was proposing that the sweet spot be the way in which we lead, which can be in our interactions with others or in our parenting. Do you think it is possible for us all to work out of our sweet spot?
Mika, I think we can all eventually learn to live out of our sweet spot. You’re right to call it a privilege. According to Camacho, the sweet spot is 80% of our time—there’s still that 20% of stuff we don’t like to do that still needs to be done.
I think Camacho and Parker Palmer overlap considerably. In his book Let Your Life Speak, Palmer says, “Self-care is never a selfish act—it is simply good stewardship of the only gift I have, the gift I was put on earth to offer to others. “He also says, “Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you.”
Let me tie this together. When we live out of our sweet spots together in community and authentically as God created us, we will find that everything that needs to get done will get done because God will call and equip us to do his work. My weakness will be overcome by your sweet spot and vice versa.
We were not meant to do it alone. It is a privilege to live out of our sweet spot because it is a privilege to live in a community that embraces me for who I am.
Robert,
I really thought that when I got to the highest point with my red cap, you were going to have me paint a big red “R” on my chest, which I would have happily done!
As I read Camacho’s book, I often came back to the “Peter Principle” and its connection to the Sweet Spot and leadership. As leaders with increasing demands and limited human resources, how do we help keep people in their sweet spot when other places have vacancies and holes (within a church context)?
Darren, we have to know our people well. Then, as leaders, we come alongside them and use our strengths to shift their roles, responsibilities, and expectations toward their sweet spots. Even though job descriptions may say one thing, we can shift roles, responsibilities, and expectations to better fit our team dynamics. Then, most of the time, most of the team works out of its sweet spot. Camacho says on page 140, learn to delegate and eliminate the things that are not in your sweet spot.
There is an implicit belief that God will equip our team with all the skills we need to do his work. I believe he is faithful. We have everything we need to do the work God has for us, not because of how great I am as a leader (I’m not), but because of God’s faithfulness. Believing that God will equip his church, we just have to get the right people into the right roles, responsibilities, and expectations and we can all live out of our sweet spots and fulfill the mission God has given us.
I agree. It seems that the Church often wants to push things ahead on a felt agenda, using whatever resources it happens to have at its disposal. This approach is often the precursor to people being expected to work outside of their sweet spot for long periods, forgetting that if God was truly in it, He would have supplied the human resources needed for it to happen.
I’ve enjoyed this post and the comments. If Tom goes for a revised or 2nd edition, fleshing out the remainder of the Venn diagram would be worthwhile. Your illustration of the no fruit section is in contrast to Paul’s description of running the race to get the prize.
I wrote and deleted a rant on the notion that the common person has discretion with 80% of time. That isn’t the point of the book nor of chapter 10. Your exchange with Darren gets to the context of available time for volunteers in the church. When I served in a church plant in London, there was a continuous dialog in the background asking if the church could thrive without a rota. We are one body with many members. If we mine enough gold, one person’s challenge spot can become another person’s sweet spot.
Thanks Rich, I’m not sure it was necessary for him to fill out the Venn diagram. His point is that fulfillment happens when we live out of the sweet spot. His book want about what happens when we don’t. There’s other books out there that do a good job of warning about these, Pete Scazzero and Ruth Haley Barton come to mind.
I think there’s something to your point about volunteers. How many of our churches focus on filling our committee and teams and plug people into the spots we have rather than knowing the person and carving a niche for them. How would that transform our people and churches?
I enjoyed your reflections a great deal, Robert; so much so that I felt inspired to create a Venn diagram like the one you describe, with my own added perspective on what it means to have one out of three. Here you go: The Fruitful Sweet Spot
Joff, thanks for putting this together. I thought about including a graphic but didn’t for no particular reason. Those are interesting ideas about how one out of three would look in a person’s life. I wonder what the percentage distribution for people would be for these seven categories.
Okay, Professor Robert! You got me thinking here in your post.
I started to imagine how you climbed that tower – thanks for sharing that analogy.
Under “Fruit and Wiring, No Passion,” I find it interesting how doing what we don’t want to do drains the life out of us. Personally, I have experienced many of those moments, especially when I was deciding on my college major. There’s a reason it took me two years and four major changes before I chose the path of ministry. Even though there is a lot that I do, I really love what I do. I can’t imagine how many people today are working for a living at jobs they can’t stand.
Also, unfortunately, ministry can indeed become an idol. We engage in so much work—preaching, teaching, visitations, and more—yet as Jesus said, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and troubled about many things. But one thing is needed, and Mary has chosen that good part, which will not be taken away from her.” Whatever we do, we must do it wholeheartedly for Jesus, not merely for the sake of doing.
Great post.
Ivan, one of the leaders of my denomination told me the longer we’re in ministry the more likely we’ll read the stories of Jesus and God and our perspective will shift. We will no longer default to seeing ourselves as the followers of God in the story but instead we’ll identify with the Father. His point was pastors and ministry leaders ought always try to default to being followers because we’re not God. I think there’s something about living in our sweet spot that enables us to live as followers – I’m just one beggar telling another beggar where I found some bread