This morning I met with one of our elders talking about the vision of our church. Here I'm the guy that wrote a book on vision! Essentially we are everything we ever envisioned to become, so now the question is: Now what? What's next? And I don't know. I've got lots of ideas but uncertainty is permanent and learning how to lead and be clear with lots of uncertainty is huge. Young leaders think once I am a good leader I won't have any uncertainty and it's a myth. I say to young leaders: learn to navigate through the uncertainty. It's permanent; it doesn't go away. It's not a reflection of your poor leadership.

In the book I talk about courage and the significance of the fact that many times it's our acts of courage that establish us as leaders in the minds of other people. God has gifted us but nobody knows. God's called us, nobody knows. How do we become leaders? Often it's the person that steps out first. That act of courage establishes people as leaders in the minds of others.

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I say to young leaders eventually there is going to be a defining moment and everybody will be looking off the cliff and you'll realize, "If I jump first they'll follow me." And you'll jump and you'll become the leader. You'd already been called. You'd already been gifted but suddenly in that moment is when people say, "That's somebody worth following," so be on the look out for that moment.

Another key is coaching and finding leadership coaches. I love to talk about this because it's difficult — it seems on the surface difficult — to enlist people to coach us as leaders. Unlike athletes, leaders think, "I don't need coaching — I'm the leader! If I needed coaching I wouldn't be the leader." Well nothing could be further from the truth. Among the greatest benefits of my life have been the people who have coached me in my leadership — people who, if you met them you'd be tempted to say, "Andy, they're not even good leaders so how could they coach you? You seem to be a better leader than they are."

That is the myth about coaching. You know athletes have coaches and the athletes are far better performers than the coaches but they are still coachable and benefit from coaching. So leaders at every level — especially young leaders — need people speaking into those areas of our lives. I talk about how to find those people and enlist them and not scare them off.

The last thing we talk about in the book is character. Obviously that's not a new principle but the thing I say to young leaders all the time is: you can be successful in leadership and have no integrity. Integrity is not essential to leadership but it is essential if you want to be a leader worth following. If you want to be the leader that, at the end of the day, people will say, "Not only am I thrilled about what we accomplished, I enjoyed the journey. The journey was just great." Not just the goals and accomplishments but the process, and in order to have that kind of experience with the people you lead you have to be a person of integrity. We just don't enjoy the journey with people we can't trust.