Fortuitous Leadership

I remember years ago when I decided to go into leadership. I just graduated from high school and decided attend APU for the next season of my life. I was pretty excited, but my parents thought that I sold myself short because of all of the other opportunities that I had. I did not know exactly why I was doing what I was doing, but I knew that ministry was going to be a big part of my life from this point forward. And, even though APU was the only school without a pool facility (which is bad if you want to be on the college swim team), somehow I needed to be there. I knew that leadership was an important piece of the puzzle, and I ended up working with the church that I just left as a highschooler. At that point, Kevin Cobb was a huge influence in my life and I knew that he needed to continue to be so. I knew little about formal mentorship, but for some reason I understood it.

Kevin did not expect me to do very much in terms of actually starting leadership. Lucky for me I had him to watch day in and day out. However, I did feel that I needed to do more. So, I took it upon myself to find John Maxwell. Now, understand that at this point I did not really know John Maxwell was, nor did anybody else. It's easy to look back today and say that I was following the biggest leadership guru of all time, but at that point he was not that guru. He was just a guy that put out some leadership books and the leadership trend had not caught on yet. It was probably a little bit unintended the way that I fell into leadership and training. I started reading his 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership and instantly fell in love with it. Over the next several years I realized that the decision to make leadership an important part of my growth, concerning reading and listening to audio recordings.  I still do my best to live by those prinicples today.