EP 180 – 5 INGREDIENTS FOR PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT
The Bootcamp Boys are able to record from their own homes for this one.
Replanter and Revitalizer Characteristic Survey
In this thread, JimBo and Bob discuss the necessary ingredients for personal development and growth in any area of life. These include humility, teachability, self-awareness, integrity, and initiative. They emphasize the importance of being honest and owning up to mistakes, taking responsibility, and taking action to make things happen. They also recommend resources such as books on developing habits and perseverance. Overall, these qualities can help individuals become better leaders and achieve their goals in both personal and professional settings.
The necessary ingredients for personal development in any area of life are:
Humility means acknowledging that you have room to grow and that others have something to offer. We can see the importance of humility in biblical passages such as Ephesians 4:2, James 4:10, and 1 Peter 5:5, which all emphasize the importance of humility. Bob notes that humility is the first touchstone for personal development and that being humble doesn’t mean thinking less of oneself, but rather thinking of oneself less. He warns against assuming that one’s presence alone will fix everything and emphasizes the importance of recognizing one’s weaknesses and inexperience.
Teachability involves being open to learning from others, even those who may not have as much experience as you. The second ingredient for personal growth in replanting and revitalizing a church is teachability, which is built upon humility. Teachability involves being willing to receive feedback, instruction, and correction, even if it is painful. Proverbs 13:18 and Proverbs 9 emphasize the importance of heeding reproof and instruction in order to become wiser and more skilled. Without teachability, growth is impossible.
Self-awareness requires honest assessment (Romans 12) of your strengths and weaknesses, as well as your goals and motivations. Having a realistic assessment of your strengths and weaknesses, as well as an understanding of how others perceive you, can help you make more informed decisions and pursue growth opportunities that align with your abilities and interests.
Integrity is about being honest with yourself and others, avoiding excuses, and owning up to mistakes. It’s important to be honest with ourselves and others about our progress and performance, and not make excuses for our shortcomings. When we take ownership of our mistakes and take responsibility for our actions, we demonstrate integrity and earn the trust and respect of others. This is especially important for leaders, who are expected to set an example and inspire others to grow and improve. By being honest and owning our mistakes, we can become better versions of ourselves and gain the support and trust of those around us.
Check out Your Future Self Will Thank You by Drew Dyck for more on self-control (affiliate link).
Finally, initiative is the willingness to put in the work required to grow, taking action rather than waiting for others to prod you into it. If you want to grow, these ingredients are essential, and there are many resources available to help you develop them.
Personal development and growth require a combination of these five ingredients: humility, teachability, self-awareness, integrity, and initiative. It’s important to be honest with yourself and others about your progress and to take responsibility for your actions. And ultimately, growth requires initiative and hard work, putting in the necessary effort to achieve your goals. There are many resources available to help with personal development and developing good habits, but ultimately, it’s up to you to take the first step and put in the work.
JimBo Stewart: [00:00:00] Here we are back at the bootcamp. Bob, I hope you’re ready for the next episode. I’m excited. Actually, out of the last a a lot of episodes, we’re actually both getting to record this one from our own domicile.
Bob Bickford: That is true. We have been on the road around the United States and back again.
JimBo Stewart: Yeah. Yeah. So I, I’m excited to be here, sitting in my own chair, with my family just outside. So, you know, my kids are homeschooled. You might even hear them get a little rambunctious there on the other side of the door at some point.
Bob Bickford: Well, Jimbo, I’m, standing in my living room with my computer on my stereo cabinet, and my dogs are sleeping by the glass door, the storm door, and so you may hear them. Defend our house with all them in vigor. And so, you can edit them out of the podcast, but you might get a here or.
JimBo Stewart: There you go. I mean, your dogs are sweet, but they are pit bulls, and so if anybody you know broke into your house, I feel like as soon as they [00:01:00] saw two pit bulls, they would probably turn around and leave.
Bob Bickford: I know, you know, people are afraid of, some people are really afraid of pit bulls. We, speaking of, we were, um, you know, we were at an event in one of the speakers, I just mentioned, yeah, I adopted some dogs and one of ’em was young and, one was five years old. And he goes, oh, uh, what kind of dog? What kind of dogs are they?
He’s probably expecting like a doodle or a schnauzer or something like that. And I said, pit bulls. And you, did you see him? He just kinda went. And he stepped back and then I, I felt like, I should have said, yeah, you know, well, we’ve found that, life in the trailer community with the double wide, that the pit bulls are, uh, a good security system. Not that there’s anything wrong with living in a trailer community or living in a double wide. Have you seen some of the new, some of the new double wides, Jimbo? They’re pretty.
JimBo Stewart: My sister-in-law actually has a new double wide, and it’s, it is, it’s pretty bougie.
Bob Bickford: Yeah. I mean, I live in a hundred and, I don’t know, 13, 14 year old house. And, there’s [00:02:00] a lot of amenities that I don’t have that might be present in today’s modern double wide.
JimBo Stewart: I bet so. I bet. So I’ve seen some really nice ones. Hey, today what I wanna talk about is, as we develop. Personal development plans and we think about how to grow in things. It’s one of the things I love to think about and talk about and help people with is, is how do you identify areas where you need to grow and then how do you create a development plan?
And with the assessment that I created, and you know this, Bob, my heartbeat behind an assessment is ideally, I don’t want to give you a yes or no. I really don’t want to give you a pass or fail. What I would really prefer to do is say, Hey, here is the areas you could probably grow in that would help you do this even better.
Because I think when you do assessments and you give a pass or a fail, it’s just so binary that it feels. Final. Like if, you get the No, it feels like, oh, well then I am not called to do this. I [00:03:00] thought I was called to do this, but I guess I’m not. Or if you get the yes, it can maybe make you feel like, oh, then I’m gonna be awesome at this and let me just, let me just run ahead and just do what I think I need to do.
And my philosophy is that all of us, every single one of us, have areas where we need to grow. And so even if it’s a yes, it still I think should be a yes. Here is some suggestions of some ways that you could grow and a no. I would much prefer rather than just being a blanket no be a no, not right now, but if we could see some growth in these particular areas right.
than we could do that. And it’s a little bit even of that leadership judo that we’ve talked about before of if I’d rather, I’d rather do something that moves you towards forward progress.
Bob Bickford: Yeah. I, I really think that’s important for us to know every, every single one of us have areas of strength in areas of challenge or opportunity or weakness, however you wanna term it. And, [00:04:00] Our strengths can be strengthened and our challenges, opportunities, or weaknesses can be improved. So in the strength, we’re looking at strengthening stuff.
On the other side of the scale, we’re looking for improvement. We’re not looking for perfection. And I may not go from a five to a a 10, but I can make some progress. And so what I would want to say to everyone is, is if you could take a long view, Mind. Keep that in mind and remember that even scripture says that he who began a good work in you is gonna carry it on to completion, right?
So what does that mean? Every single one of us is not everything we can be. But we can become more than we are right now through the grace of God. So I think those are some some really important things. And what I would just say is if you could go back to in your mindsets, particularly the guys here, if they played middle school sports, you probably had a coach with coaching shorts and a whistle who rode you hard.
Right and demeaned you in front of the whole middle school PE class or the football team [00:05:00]or whatever. You might be. Even having flashbacks as I, as I say this right now, but the coach was on you because he saw more in you, right? And he probably went about it in an old school negative way. But what we’re trying to say is, hey, lean into those areas that you have opportunity to, to become aware of and work on ’em, and it’s a good.
JimBo Stewart: Yeah, absolutely. I was a chaplain for a high school football team for a little while, and being a chaplain for a football team is a weird deal, man. Like, cuz it’s a weird experience cause they would want me to, , you know, give like a devotional before the game and I’d be like, I, I don’t know that you really want me to, like, my devotional is not gonna fire you up to go like, try to rip some guy’s head off.
Like, and so, you know, and always cracked me up. Cause the coach would, you know, always talk to me with this very spiritual language, you know. And then on the sidelines he’s dropping. You know, four letter words all over the place and chewing kids out and making ’em feel horrible. And I just, I just, I always struggled as a, as a chaplain to the team.
Like, this feels really [00:06:00] incongruent. Uh, , like, I’m not really sure what I’m doing here. the, my favorite was one night. To do our devotional, we were a visiting team and the home team to try to intimidate us cuz we were heading towards the playoffs, didn’t give us a locker room. And so we like met in a field behind the field.
And so we’re like back in this field behind the field. and I was doing a devotional about, old Testament prophet and how he put his foot on the neck of these, you know, kings to show that the thing was done and was just talking about finish what you start and, you know, wasn’t my best work.
But Eminem’s blasting behind me and I’m talking about stepping on people’s necks and man, it was like they were so fired up and like they ran out of my devotional. Like I’d just given them everything they need. And I thought this, no, this was not what I was trying to do. Like, I don’t know what I just did.
Bob Bickford: Did you guys win that game?
JimBo Stewart: We did, we did win that game. Ended up losing in the playoffs to Leonard Fornet single-handedly beat the team [00:07:00] that year.
Bob Bickford: Wow.
JimBo Stewart: I mean, he was just taking direct snaps and just running ’em over.
Bob Bickford: Yeah. He was a LSU guy, right? Is that right? Did he play for lsu? He probably ran over the Razorbacks too.
JimBo Stewart: yeah. In high school he played, in New Orleans, and man just ran over the team I was chaplain for. But here’s here, here’s just carrying on your analogy of coaching. My point is I think I, I have the belief, and sometimes it’s a little bit naive and idealistic that anybody can grow. in anything if they put in the work and, can put a good plan together on how to grow.
I’m just convinced we can accomplish so much, if we have a good plan. But I have encountered some people that have challenged my belief, and make it really hard for me to think through. And how would I. This person and they’re just missing some key ingredients and I don’t know if you’ve ever encountered that.
Bob Bickford: Yes. we would, sometimes say that they are a few fries, short of a happy. Right. [00:08:00] they’re missing the, they’re missing the prize of the kids’ meal. Right. Or some, and, and I don’t say that in, in terms of, like capacity for thought. Here’s, here’s the word. I mean, there’s something missing in the ingredients that makes something complete.
And so as we were talking before, we started the podcast, you mentioned there’s several key ingredients. That will help someone develop if they’re looking for a personal development plan to improve. And so I’m, I’m excited to unpack these with you.
JimBo Stewart: Yes, I would say you can learn how to grow in just about, just about, I’m sure there are exceptions, but in just about any area of your life, if you have these five ingredients, humility, teachability. Self-awareness, integrity, and initiative. and those kind of come across with each other a little bit.
you know, in a Venn diagram, you, if you put it together, and I would say these may sound familiar to you from a series we did on. godly characteristics of leaders, which, Erin Cofield is writing blog articles on right [00:09:00] now on our website that you can go see. And so she’s bringing out those older episodes and writing some articles.
And so some of those words like humility and integrity, I think even maybe self-awareness were in that list. so those are things that leaders need. But the reason leaders need them is cuz leaders have to continue to grow and leaders have to be lifelong learners. , and so whatever your starting point is, if you want to grow in any given area of your life, it’s gonna be really hard, if not impossible to do so without humility, teachability, self-awareness, integrity, and initiative.
Bob Bickford: Absolutely. Are we gonna take these one by one, perhaps, maybe. And just kind of walk through them?
JimBo Stewart: Yeah. Let me, let me highlight just a little bit on each one and, and then get your feedback from that one. Humility. Uh, we’ve discussed the role of humility on here so many times before I just looked it up, I just typed in humility into the search bar on our website, replant bootcamp.com, and 25 different podcast episodes and three blog posts came up as mentioning humility, so it’s one we’ve talked about.
[00:10:00] A lot in particular in the characteristics of Godly Leader series. It was episode 1 21, but here’s, I just wanna throw a couple verses to you to show this is a biblical concept and idea. Ephesians four, two, which is kind of a, you know, part of a central passage for us. Ephesians four. Ephesians four is about, Ephesians four, two is about walking worthy of the calling that God has given to us, and it starts with the posture of humility.
It’s humility and then gentleness, and then patience, and then mutual tolerance or forbearance and love. James four 10 says that we’re to humble ourselves for the Lord and then he’ll lift us. first Peter five, five takes that same idea, says God opposes the proud, but shows favor to the humble. and for all those that, all those that exalt themselves will be humbled and those that humble themselves will be exalted.
And so if you can start with humility, understanding that god’s the, the hero here, not you, and that you always have room to grow in every, even things you’re really good. You have room to grow. Bottom line, you cannot grow without humility.
Bob Bickford: Yeah, I, [00:11:00] absolutely agree, and I, I really like that you started the list with this, right? Because I think this is really the first touchstone, for you and your personal development if you are not humble. Then you may not think that you need to develop anywhere like you are the, the real deal. So I’ve always loved the definition of humility is when it’s stated like this, it’s not thinking less of yourself, but it’s thinking of yourself less.
So it’s, it’s not this. You know, being humble doesn’t mean like I’m awful and I can’t do anything and I’m this and that, you know, but it’s just basically saying like, I’m not the end all be all right. I’m not the answer. Right. Probably. When you were in elementary school, remember the basketball player, Alan Iverson, he was called himself?
What do he call himself? The answer, right? Well, as far as I remember, he wasn’t the answer. , right? So, A replant and a revitalizer may come into a church and think, man, now that I’m here, everything’s gonna be awesome. Well friend, buckle up cuz that probably ain’t so, [00:12:00] and one of the deals is, is you’ve just gotta be humble and realize that you’re gonna bring some skills and strengths, but you’re also gonna bring a lot of inexperience and weakness.
And so just, man, be humble about that. Right. Be, ready to acknowledge that.
JimBo Stewart: Yeah. And humility’s really a pre prerequisite for the second ingredient, which is teachability. , you know, it’s one thing to be humble. Kind of a step from that is teachability in your humility, not only recognizing that you are not the answer and neith, there was Alan Iverson, but that you’ve got room to grow.
And so being willing to hear whenever you need to hear things in order to grow teachability is hard. It can be painful. Proverbs 1318 says, poverty and disgrace come to him who ignores instruction. But whoever Heeds Reproof is honored, Proverbs 99 says, give instruction to a wise man, and he will still be.
Teach a righteous man, and he will increase in learning. If someone’s hum, humil, humble and wise, then they can take the [00:13:00] pain of reproof and rebuke and instruction and correction and become better, and become wiser and become, you know, more. More skilled at what they do, even if they were already good at it prior to or had no skill in it whatsoever.
If you can start with humility and then your next step to build on that was teachability, then you can grow. But without just like humility, without teachability, you cannot grow without teachability.
Bob Bickford: Yeah. One of the best questions that helps you get to the heart of this is if you’ve done something maybe. Or you’ve led something, or you’ve created something or written something. Taking that, step to ask someone for feedback and then saying something, something as simple as this, Hey, if I were going to improve this, how might I do it?
So that acknowledges you just didn’t create the, the most awesome and complete thing. But it also recog you also recognizing that people can see something that you can’t see in what you’ve done in terms of [00:14:00] leading or creating or speaking. And so you’re asking them to come alongside you and give you some instruction how that teachable spirit to go, here’s another way to say it.
Here’s another way to stage it. Here’s another way to, to strategize. Here’s another way to, here’s a consideration you may not have thought about. All those things are just more information, and typically, Jimbo, what I’ve seen is when you invite people in, rather than being in a position where people feel like they have to force their way in, it’s so much better.
JimBo Stewart: Mm-hmm. . No, absolutely. When you invite that in and you, when you invite it in, you can be mentally prepared when you ask the question. But what I would say is, and this leads to, integrity, so I’m gonna skip self-awareness for a second and skip over to integrity. don’t ask that question if you don’t really mean it.
Right? Like don’t ask for feedback if you’re just really. , somebody to tell you that you did a great job. because if you’re saying that kind of fishing for, affirmation so that you can feel better. and they give you actual feedback, you’re gonna get offended and you’re gonna have a hard time.
And it’s not, it’s not their fault. You, you [00:15:00] asked them to provide that feedback. And so part of it is in integrity, like you, you have to be honest about how things are. And I would say self-awareness and integrity kind of go a little bit together. So self-awareness would be, uh, you know, Romans 12 says not to think too highly of our.
To have sober judgment, to have a, a real honest assessment of who we are. You know, we’ve had over a thousand people I think, have taken our replant your revitalize assessment. And that’s not, I’m not specifically just talking about that on this podcast, but it’s a tool we use. And one of the patterns I’ve seen, Bob, is there are some guys who will take it and they will score above average when you take it, if you’ve never taken it.
We’ll put a link in the podcast notes, show notes, it’s gonna give you a chart, a spider chart that tells you how you scored on each of the 13 characteristics. And then there’s this like black dotted line that goes around the chart that takes everybody who’s taken it before you and averages their results.
And so you can see how you compare to the average. Taker of this survey, and so what I’ve seen happen a few [00:16:00] times is guys will take this, they’ll score above average on every category. And then one of their lowest ti kind of lowest out of view, if you were to take their lowest four or five characteristics, one of those is gonna be emotional intelligence.
and that pattern typically shows that they don’t have a great self-awareness and understanding of their gifting and abilities. and what I’d say is if you. Above average on every single one. chances are that means you’re probably lacking some self-awareness.
Bob Bickford: Yeah. This is the, I think one of the super. Key ingredients for, for growth is the possessing self-awareness or being open to pursue it,
JimBo Stewart: Mm-hmm.
Bob Bickford: becoming self-aware. Right? So, you know, we, we all have had those moments in life where we’ve said something and then we are watching the, the people’s face who’ve just heard what we said and we , we go, oh, I think I said the wrong thing.
Oh man. Right? Some people don’t have that Jimbo, they’re just, They’re just, they’re just [00:17:00]going, man. And they just keep going. And most everybody listen in. The audience is going, man, is somebody gonna tell him? Like, is somebody gonna let him know? Like, if you’re leading to small, like you’re leading a, a small group meeting.
And I remember I was on a staff one time and the pastor was just, man, he was like the smartest guy in their room and he was, Man, it was just like everybody was dying inside and you could just see the non-verbal communication, he was completely, completely missing it. Right? So I think it’s really good to, possess self-awareness, but if you don’t possess it in great quantities, pursue it.
And it is something that you. Grow in like just by asking somebody, Hey, how did, how did I do when I led that meeting? Is there anything I could have improved? Hey, when I wrote that email, did it come across okay or did what did you see? Or, Hey, when you’ve heard me, Lead or teach or whatever you’re doing.
when you see me do a a care, pastoral care visit, how do I come across right? So we have a good, a good picture, of our own, image [00:18:00] or our own abilities, but we often don’t see how we come across to others. One of the things, that I remember from this last week when we were together is I put on my new Carhartt replant.
And, you know, I was wearing that. So you can go to go to replant merch.com cuz we do work for the North American Mission Board and for the replant team. And if you’re, if you want winter vest carhart, uh, replant vest is awesome, but I put it on and like half my collar was underneath the collar of the Carhartt vest.
And you just looked at me while we were talking, and you reached over Jimbo, and you reached inside my vest and I didn’t know if you were gonna heal me or like punch my heart or take it out with your hand. But you know what you were doing, Jimbo, you were pulling my shirt out from under the co Cause it needed to be pulled out.
I was unaware when I put it on that was the case, right? So I’m that many years old. You know, I, it’s just, it happens when you get old. You just don’t know those things, right? You just, you can’t, you can’t see it. But all that, let’s, let’s pull that back to Selfa. We need the presence and the impact and the input of others to become completely self-aware cuz we can’t do it on our own.
JimBo Stewart: Yeah, [00:19:00] absolutely it. Look, we’ve done a few episodes on this as well, episode 39. We talked about the importance of self-awareness. I typed in self-awareness in the search box. This is one of the great things you can do with our, our website. You can type in whatever, amen. There’s so many. great podcast episodes that reference self-awareness, but particularly that one, that’s about it.
and we go into those, things. But there’s three pages of results if you type in self-awareness. so, all right. The next one would be integrity, which I’ve already referenced a little bit. One, you just gotta be honest. you know, if you want to grow in an area, it’s gonna require honesty.
There’s a temptation, I think. To avoid the pain of not doing as good as you thought you wanted to do, or be as good as you wanted to be, to just not be honest and, sugarcoat what’s going on or create excuses and just know that when we create excuses, you know, reasons and ex explanations are different than excuses, right?
you know, covid was a real thing, right? That, that’s an explanation of why almost every single church’s, attendance chart [00:20:00] dropped in 2020, right? it’s not an excuse, it’s a reality. It’s an exp It was an explanation. But when we use excuse. and we hide behind excuses. That’s actually a lack of integrity and I, I’m a big believer in integrity and I think when we fail to have integrity, I don’t know that the Lord’s gonna honor our pursuits, to get the result that we’re trying to get for him.
And so you have to have integrity. You gotta be honest about how you’re doing and what you’re doing. Yeah. You know, if you said if you’re trying to lose weight and you got somebody holding you accountable and you, you know, you told ’em that you exercised for 30 minutes, but really what you did is, you know, you slowly walked on the treadmill for 30 minutes while you watched the news and your heart rate didn’t even increase.
Right. you know, you could say, well, I was on the treadmill for 30 minutes, and that’s technically true, but you know that you’re not being a hundred percent honest. And so with any development, we have to be honest about what we’re doing and where.
Bob Bickford: Yeah, just own it, man. own it. Like that’s, that is so [00:21:00] key, you know? And I think the times in my own, you know, vocational ministry when I’ve, when I’ve forgotten something, when I’ve messed up, when I’ve underperformed, when I have not, I’ve over promised and I’ve underdelivered. Or if I just made a mistake, right?
I think when you own it and you, you’re, clear with that and you take responsibility. That does demonstrate integrity. And I think people, people believe in you even though you’ve made a mistake. They’ll trust you and they believe you cuz they realize, Hey, hey, every leader makes a mistake.
Every leader doesn’t perform at at a hundred percent capacity. And so when they own it, it actually endears the leader even more.
JimBo Stewart: Absolutely. Then lastly is initiative. and this one is just as simple as this. You, it’s gonna require work and no one else can do that work for you. If you want to grow in any area in your life, it will require you putting in some work. You’re gonna have to take the initiative to do something. So you could be humble and you could be teachable, and you could be self-aware, and you could [00:22:00] be honest about where you’re at.
But if you don’t take any action, then you’re not gonna grow. And so it’s why it’s one of the necessary ingredients for personal development in, in any area of your life is you. You gotta be willing to take the.
Bob Bickford: Yeah, make stuff happen. Don’t wait around for people to, uh, ask you to do things or demand that you do things right. So this, this initiative is super key and I think this is a great separator between, you know, below average leaders and the average leaders and the high performing leaders like. Leaders and pastors and re planters or revitalizes man, get ahold of this one.
And, uh, again, we, you know, we’ve talked about tactical patients. It doesn’t, it doesn’t mean that you get credit for just like producing a sheer volume of activity and doing stuff, right. You gotta be doing the right things, but you gotta take initiative rather than, having to be prodded into action.
JimBo Stewart: Yeah. And if, look, if you want help on developing, you know, habits and self-control, there’s a great book called, your Future Self Will. Thank You, [00:23:00] by Drew Dick. There’s, the Power of Habits, there’s atomic Habits, there’s so many things out there that can help you in that, but, you know, grit by Angela Duckworth.
We’ll talk about the perseverance and, you, if you want to grow, if you want leadership opportunities and you’ve not been getting them, then maybe it’s cuz you need to grow and maybe that growth is gonna require humility, teachability, self-awareness, integrity, and initiative.
assessment, development, humility, Initiative, integrity, lifelong learner, personal development, Self-awareness, self-control, survey, teachability