{"id":40302,"date":"2025-01-30T09:11:59","date_gmt":"2025-01-30T17:11:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/?p=40302"},"modified":"2025-01-30T09:11:59","modified_gmt":"2025-01-30T17:11:59","slug":"gold-like-the-sun-melts-wax-and-hardens-clay","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/gold-like-the-sun-melts-wax-and-hardens-clay\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cGold, like the sun, melts wax and hardens clay.\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sir Francis Bacon once posited, explaining his quote above, that “much like the sun\u2019s heat, it has the ability to transform and reveal the underlying qualities of people and things, making them pliable and firm and exposing inherent characteristics.” [1] Tom Comacho’s Book, Mining for Gold: Developing Leaders through Coaching, is a wonderful treatise on how developing one’s skills as a coach is a near-perfect metaphor for developing one’s skills as a leader and mentor. Over the five decades that I have been in leadership, it has become apparent that leadership can generally have one of two effects on those we lead. It can either help them grow in their personal malleability as a human and leader, or it can harden them. The first is completely owed to the loving-kindness of our Father, and the second I attribute primarily to myself as a personal failure. I have never had a successful leader under my mentorship, for which I have taken credit. I have never had to fire someone or watch them as they self-destructed as a young leader for whom I did not accept full responsibility as a personal failure. I realize many will read this and, at best, tell me to not blame myself and, at worst, that my position on this is arrogant and prideful. As a retired Army combat veteran, one of the things I experienced was the trust that men put in their leaders, who were willing to pass along praise and kudos to their soldiers and accept responsibility for the failures of the men I led. Nobody respected or wholeheartedly followed anyone they thought might throw them under the bus when all was said and done.<\/p>\n

When I was a young University student at the University of Tennessee. I needed money to go to school. So, I got it into my head that I would try out for the University of Tennessee football team. I, having never really played anything but backyard football, tried out for the team. It was there that I met my first real coach. He took an interest in me, offered me a scholarship, and proceeded to test me to see if I had what it took. So many things that he did to help develop me, as Tom Comacho writes about in his book Mining for Gold.<\/p>\n

Here are several similarities that I see:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. He helped me to understand what my life was for, and it wasn’t football.<\/li>\n
  2. He helped me, for the first time in my life, to know what accountability was. This was probably one of the toughest lessons of my life.<\/li>\n
  3. He treated me like I was gold. He helped shape within me a personal identity that had been marred through the years by criticism, physical abuse by a relative, constant negativism, anger<\/li>\n
  4. He told me that every person I met each day had an opportunity to be mentored by me. The only unknown was whether I would take the time and be willing to pay the price to really be the coach that they needed. A principle that changed everything about my life.<\/li>\n
  5. It is a Spirit-led process. The key components are simple, but they require hard work, sensitivity, and focus to be done well. I think many leaders forget this principle. Well, now that I have put it on paper, many of us forget that all of life must be a spirit-led process.<\/li>\n
  6. Tom said we should open our eyes. I think my coach would have said something similar to me when I was younger, except with the warning for me to take my eyes off myself. The thought and expression, “Look at me,” was forever upon us. Our eyes must be open to seeing the opportunities to change lives, but it can also be a detriment if they are on the wrong things.<\/li>\n
  7. I first learned from Coach an expression that Simon Snek later made popular, and I think Tom would endorse it. Leaders eat last. Simply put, leaders serve others as a sign of humility and love. If we eat first, we demonstrate to those we lead that we see ourselves as more important. It’s not a good look on a leader.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    I think Tom hit a very nice balance between the need to always be thinking of ourselves as Coaches with the mind of Christ. He didn’t just use scriptures to proof-text his position. He genuinely and consistently pointed to the Word of God as a model to demonstrate that when it comes to us, his disciples, the Cross is the greatest picture given to man to reveal his desire for us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Sir Francis Bacon once posited, explaining his quote above, that “much like the sun\u2019s heat, it has the ability to transform and reveal the underlying qualities of people and things, making them pliable and firm and exposing inherent characteristics.” [1] Tom Comacho’s Book, Mining for Gold: Developing Leaders through Coaching, is a wonderful treatise on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":215,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1555,3397],"class_list":["post-40302","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-camacho","tag-dlgp04","cohort-dlgp04"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40302","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/215"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40302"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40302\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40320,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40302\/revisions\/40320"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40302"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40302"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40302"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}