By: Chad Warren on February 15, 2024
It was early morning, hours before sunrise, when we realized we had forgotten a box of supplies in the office just a few miles away. We were setting up for an outreach event a few miles from our church office, and Dawson, our newest and youngest team member, volunteered to drive back and get…
By: Chris Blackman on February 15, 2024
When I was 3 years old, my family was coming home from a vacation in Portland, OR, to Los Angeles. As we approached Bakersfield, a city about 90 miles from Los Angeles, my dad was pulling off the highway so we could rest. Sadly, a semi-truck was behind us, and the driver was drunk. He…
By: Elysse Burns on February 15, 2024
This month marks the three-year anniversary of my arrival in Mauritania. My experiences in this country have pushed me further than I thought possible and made me grow more than I could have imagined. Reflecting on Poole’s list of Critical Incidents [1], I couldn’t help but think back to those early days in Mauritania and…
By: Nancy Blackman on February 15, 2024
I would never have connected the dots between leadership and blacksmithing so it’s fascinating how Dr. Eve Poole did that in her book, Leadersmithing. After watching her TEDx talk, I appreciated her metaphor of “pearls” and “peril,” both offering a sense of grit. The pearl is created through peril when the oyster thinks it’s going…
By: Daren Jaime on February 15, 2024
I can remember vividly sitting at our first lecture at Christ Church Oxford listening intently as Dr. Jason was presenting and introducing us to Oxford, describing what the DLGP journey would feel like. As I was taking in the moment, looking out the window to the green surroundings, inhaling England’s crisp air and basking in…
By: Kari on February 15, 2024
“Stop!” “Louder, with more authority. He needs to know you mean it.” “StOp!” “Say it like your life depends on it because it does.” “STOOOOOP!” “Excellent. Again.” “STOOOOOP!” “Again.” “STOOOOOP!” Our self-defense instructor encouraged us, “Practice this in the car, your room, wherever, keep practicing. You need to develop that muscle memory. Practice this so…
By: Shela Sullivan on February 14, 2024
In the book, [1] “Leader-smithing, Revealing The Trade Secrets of Leadership,” Eve Poole uses the metaphor of blacksmithing to explore leadership, suggesting that leaders can be shaped and perfected like metal. To me, it meant people can be trained, shaped and transformed potentially to take on leadership positions. Poole validates my assumption in her book.…
By: Diane Tuttle on February 14, 2024
I felt as though I was at home when reading Leadersmithing by Eve Poole[1]. The concepts in the book easily relate to the profession I have been practicing for the last 24 years. The concepts, language, and exercises were familiar. We use variations of many of the exercises in our leadership in-service training classes. In…
By: Jennifer Eckert on February 14, 2024
In her book, Leader-Smithing, author Eve Poole uses quirky wit and humor to put a new spin on the idea of leadership as a craft to build muscle memory or templates [1] for how to handle things through real-time on-the-job training. While the topic of leadership is non-novel, Poole labels it a movement bearing responsibility…
By: Graham English on February 14, 2024
“Leadersmithing” by Eve Poole follows a refreshingly practical approach to leader development. I didn’t grow up in the church. I became a follower of Jesus when I was 19. After sensing a call to ministry a few years later my wife, Wendy, and I moved our family from Vancouver to Regina to attend Bible…
By: Adam Cheney on February 14, 2024
Ca. Richard Smith is a no-nonsense kind of fire captain. He is tough but fair. The kind of fire captain who will take his crew out at 2am to drill if there was some sort of mishap on a 911 call earlier that day. His crew was straightlaced, polished and always striving to be the…
By: Debbie Owen on February 14, 2024
My violin teacher threw a pencil at me. I grabbed it in mid-air. “Nope. You caught it. Try to catch it.” I was confused. “But I did catch it,” I protested. “I want you to TRY to catch it,” she repeated. She threw the pencil at me again. It twisted through the air as it…
By: Glyn Barrett on February 13, 2024
I spent much longer reading Leadersmithing by Eve Poole than I had initially planned. Not that I was not intrigued by the book’s title, but that my time commitments were severely restricted due to travel, sermon preparation, leadership teaching sessions, and Conference attendance. However, once I began my elementary and inspectional reading, I had to…
By: Ryan Thorson on February 12, 2024
The older I get the more I realize how smart my parents were. So much of what they did, and didn’t do, as parents, shaped and formed me into the person I am today. While they will admit, and I have come to realize, they are not perfect, but the positive role models of love,…
By: Jeff Styer on February 12, 2024
Dr. Eve Poole in her book Leadersmthing: Revealing the Trade Secrets of Leadership provides readers with a list of seventeen Critical Incidents. These are based on asking “board-level leaders: What do you now know as a leader that you wish you had known ten years ago?[1] I looked over the list to determine what areas…
By: Christy on February 12, 2024
This week’s reading of Leadersmithing by Eve Poole [1] left me with a mixed review. I enjoyed the reading and the content of the book, but it seemed quite elementary. I guess that was the point – that leadership should be part of an apprenticeship, and something you learn on the job. However, as a…
By: Joel Zantingh on February 10, 2024
This is a late post, because I had a severe sinus cold and throat infection this week. So, if you want a few podcast recommendations on leadership or dementia, private message me. But I also finished a series on Netflix called “Painkillers”, exploding with insight for this week’s post [spoiler alerts]. In order to retain…
By: Noel Liemam on February 9, 2024
With regard to this week reading, “How to make the World Add up,” by Tim Harford, it is very interesting how he used those real-life stories to make his points how information can be twisted into different meanings, or to one’s advantages. I like the way he used real stories to bring out is point,…
By: Kari on February 9, 2024
I love numbers. Numbers make sense. Numbers add up. Numbers give objective data. Numbers do not lie. People on the other hand do lie. People do not always make sense nor add up. People often hide or lie about things, including numbers. These are principles I live by and found myself teaching to my employees…
By: Julie O'Hara on February 8, 2024
Back in the days before I received the smackdown call from God to prepare for vocational ministry, I was a sales manager in the sporting goods industry. The sales reps were pretty competitive and there was a lot of strutting around by the ones with the biggest territories. In a straight commission game, the biggest…
