Elemental Leaders
The Elemental Leaders Podcast is designed to help you become more effective in your leadership! From inspiring stories to practical tips and strategies, we explore various aspects of church leadership and provide insights that you can apply in your own life and work. Whether you're a seasoned leader or just starting out, our podcast offers valuable information and resources to help you achieve your goals and lead with confidence. To stay updated on our latest episodes and news, follow us on social media or visit our website at www.elementalgroup.org.
Elemental Leaders
Expanding Imagination: Unlocking Innovation in Churches and Nonprofits
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In this episode, we are diving into the fourth and final installment of our series on the values of the Elemental Group. We're exploring the value of imagination and how it plays a crucial role in the health and growth of organizations.
If you're looking to expand your collective imagination and lead your organization to new heights, this episode is a must-listen. So grab your headphones, tune in, and get ready to embrace the power of imagination!
The Elemental Leaders Podcast is designed to help you become more effective in your leadership!
From inspiring stories to practical tips and strategies, we explore various aspects of church leadership and provide insights that you can apply in your own life and work. Whether you're a seasoned leader or just starting out, our podcast offers valuable information and resources to help you achieve your goals and lead with confidence.
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To stay updated on our latest episodes and news, you can follow us on social media or visit our website at www.elementalgroup.org
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I mean I got I was gonna say we're talking to. All right. Go ahead. Love them. I was just going to say that anything I know that's really messes up your day right now. You get married. Welcome to the Elemental Leaders Podcast, designed to help you grow more effective in your leadership. Visit us at Elemental Group dot org for more resources and free downloads.
My name is Paul. I'm the host of the Elemental Podcast. I'm here with Dave Workman and Mike Steele. Our illustrious panel. We are actually on the fourth week of a four week series where we are exploring the values of the elemental group. It turns out that they're not just the values because you need values in an organization. They're actually values that we believe are essential to every organization's healthful well-being.
If you want to be a healthy organization, you really need to explore these four values of integrity, passion, servant, hood and imagination. And so if you're just joining us, it might be a great idea to go back and check out the last four podcast episodes. Just really been a lot of fun to talk through. And I think you will find that it'll be a fun conversation to talk through with your people.
Today, we're going to talk about imagination. And the core idea is this the ability of a church or an organization, nonprofit to think bigger, imagine larger, asking God, what can we do to think beyond our capacity? Essentially asking God to dream bigger. So that's where we want to go, because it's not as easy as you might think. And so we're hoping to give you some tips, techniques, some thoughts to process through so that whatever context you're leading in, you can lead your people to dream a little bit bigger and expand your collective imagination.
So, Dave, I want to start with you again, as we did last time. Can you define what it is that we're talking about when it comes to organizational imagination? And then you actually use the elements of air to illustrate your point. Can you talk about why you use air and then just kind of give us a fly by on imagination?
Yeah. And I might even back up a little bit by saying that these values, we actually call them elements, these four elements. And we're using the kind of the Greek schema for what they believed. The foundation of everything was earth, fire, water and air. In our context, we use air for imagination. It's the ability of leaders and organizations to kind of blue sky to, as you said, Paul, just to imagine more and we don't mean bigger necessarily by a larger building or more people or whatever.
Right. Right. Influence, it could be impact can be all sorts of different things. But it is the ability to innovate in imagine things differently. What's a preferred future? It also has to do with with the organizations capacity for change. What's their ability to accept change or to nurture change, to make movement towards change, whatever that is. Do they have a very high change capacity?
When we study churches, that's what we do in trying to help churches get more effective in nonprofits. The faith based nonprofits get more effective and and just do things better. These four elements, this fourth one is the one that I see most lacking in churches. And it could be just because so much of church life is routinized. That's the same thing that happens week in and week out, month after month, year after year, and so forth.
And so, taking the time to step back and imagine things a little differently, what could it look like at every different level? That's really hard for churches to do. Yeah, well, you know, and and I think as people, we crave predictable patterns. So it's not that liturgy is wrong or whatever rhythm in your particular context is, is wrong.
Mike, maybe let me throw this to you kind of on the heels of what Dave is saying. Where do you see that as challenging in your context? My context currently is in a denominational setting. I work at a church that's been around for 70 plus years. So there's a lot of history and history is great, but it's also a barrier when looking at how do you move your church forward.
I know a lot of what Dave has worked on, what you have worked on is church planning and things like that. And the grass is never greener. It's tough either way. But when you're working in a denominational setting where the church has been around for a long time, that history turns into bureaucracy, which really slows every decision down.
It really slows really kind of halts that air element, that imagination element, because you ask a question, you come up with idea and it gets questioned to death rather than someone saying, Let's just try it. So what we've done in our church is instead of ready, aim, fire, we just say, Ready, fire. Then we aim. We see if it was effective.
So it's a culture change that we're trying to instill because we kept running into brick wall after brick wall of, well, have you really thought this out? Have you planned it out? We get lost in this planning mindset, and we spent two years on a planning document that's never implemented. There's a lot of struggles there, and I was thinking about it as I was processing, getting ready for to be on this podcast.
How do we assess how do you assess if you're listening to this and you're part of a church nonprofit, how do you assess if you're being innovative, you're imagining the future? I guess what I go to is does your church, does your organization look different than it did before COVID? If nothing has changed for all, you've added as a livestream, but nothing else has changed.
This is probably an area you need to dove in to, to say We need to imagine what a church in this neighborhood, in this community should look like in 50 plus years. Rather than saying we're going to do what we did back in the seventies because that's still going to work today. One of the things that I looked at in the book was maybe we have physiological problems with change.
Neuropsychologists talk about how the brain is wired to create neural pathways so that it can do certain functions without having to kind of think about them. For instance, have you ever driven somewhere and all of a sudden you're there and you don't even remember the process of driving? You were maybe thinking about other things, but those neural pathways, how you drive, are just kind of built in.
And so the problem with neural pathways, so while they're really helpful to allow the brain to function another areas and maybe more creative areas, the problem is they can become neural ruts. That's scary. There was this weird experiment done with mice where they actually injected young mice as blood in Old Mice podcast. They got really weird right now.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they discovered they discovered that these older mice that had been injected with these young mice blood did everything faster, quicker, more efficiently. They ran mazes better. They just operated at a at a higher just a higher effectiveness, higher speed. The thinking is there's a some sort of protein may be built into the blood that affects that area of our the way our our brains are wired.
So I'm thinking all I need at my age is a transfusion from Mike. And man, I'm going to be amazing during one of those hoses over to my arm as well that they're going to do. Maybe we should do that on a podcast. There's a lot of correlations with that, and I think this is where you're going with the age thing, too.
I could look at a lot of the church boards, the elders, the session, whatever you want to call it, the ages. It's pretty high. Yeah. And the older we get, the harder it is to change. Yeah. You've got more history, you know? And you remember what? When you were that age, it works. And think about it from an organizational, abstract deal.
Yeah. An organization that's been around for 75 years or 100 or we worked with a church in downtown Cincinnati that was 245 years old. The bell on their bell tower was cast by Paul Revere's company. Think about the difficulty of change for something that has that kind of history. It's really, really hard. I'm living in Charleston, South Carolina, now, and I'm starting to talk to some church leaders of churches that are 400 years old.
You remember Charleston is one of the first cities that was established. And they've you actually talk about some barriers to imagination. And, guys, I'd love to talk through some of those barriers. There's actually six of them. Let's dove into that and let's just see where the conversation goes. The first one was just fear of change. And I think that, Dave, you started talking about that idea, that fear change.
In fact, you've said over and over again, as we've been working in Elemental, you've said that you can't have growth without change. It just doesn't happen. Yeah. And so can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah. Yeah. You can't grow without change. But there's a corollary to that in that change equals letting go of the past. You can't have change without letting go of something.
Pastors use the thing of an open hand. You can't put anything in a closed fist. Well, likewise with change. If you don't let go of something, it's not going to happen. You can't reach for the new without letting go of the old. And the problem is, any time you let go of something, something of the past or whatever methodology or whatever it is, any time you let go of something, there's a loss.
And any time there's a loss, there's going to be grief involved. And most of us will avoid grief as much as will avoid conflict. So the greater the sense of loss, the greater the grief, and therefore making more important, the actual process of grieving. So in organizations make major changes they should recognize there is the chance that some people will need to grieve.
Whatever was let go of as you were talking, there's a tension there that says, well, if I've got to let go of the past, inevitably at some level, I'm telling myself a story that whatever was happening in the past was wrong or not good enough or that sort of thing. Do people think that way? Yeah, I think so.
What I would equate it to would be your personal life. At some point. Becoming a teenager was a big deal, and I remember I couldn't wait until I could get a driver's license. I was so excited. But that meant letting go of the way that I had traveled before that Schwinn ten speed had to go because, man, if I can get my dad's car, I'm out of this town.
I'm making some movement. It doesn't take away from the significance or the memories or the the special ness of any experience that you had on your Schwinn. Absolutely. It didn't mean that the Schwinn was bad. Didn't mean that my elementary school years were a bad thing. As a matter of fact, it's just part of growth. And again, you can't grow without some kind of change.
Mike, where have you seen the fear of change? You started to talk about it and I know you said you're a bit more conservative context, but I would venture to say that most people listening probably are in tribes or in churches or organizations that are probably a bit more conservative, a bit more liturgical, a bit more formal. And so the idea of change could potentially provoke a lot of fear.
Yeah, I think there's a ton of fear of change. I think there's a ton of fear when it comes to not knowing the why behind the change. So if you're just making changes and you're not over communicating the Y, I think that's where you lose trust. That's a great point. Excellent point. Yeah. And I've seen that and we've done that.
On the flip side of things, you also have a lot of chances to make change where you leverage different events, you leverage covert, right. And there's a lot of bad that happened with COVID, but it was also an opportunity for organizations to say it's time to make change. We have no other choice but to make change. So there's some people listening right now there.
Churches just decided to continue doing what they were doing before COVID. There's different things throughout the year that happen that you can leverage to make change, whether it's a physical change in your building or a culture change that you want to start, or, you know, a staff member who is retiring, that's the chance to make change across your whole entire staff and the responsibilities that each staff person has.
So I would encourage just leaders listening to leverage every opportunity for change, change or die. If you don't adapt, you're going to die. And you just have to continue to adapt to the culture that we live in, the world that we live in. You know how people operate. If your church, your organization wants to be here in 50 plus years.
I remember before I was a part of the Elemental Group as an executive pastor, we had a couple of change conversations that we were having. We picked up the phone, we talked to David. You know, we were already in relationship with him. We just said, Hey, can you coach us through this? We want to handle this well. And sometimes having that outside perspective is exactly what you need.
Let's dove into the other barrier to imagination or culture. The second one is just no personal time investment. The idea here is just carving time to engage. You've got to make time for imagination. Am I getting that right, Dave? Yeah, you sure are. And we've talked about this before. Just the unrelenting calendar that church work is. It's constant.
You're writing a term paper every weekend. You have a pastoral care stuff that's come. I mean, it's there's a lot that just gets crammed in there. And so carving out time personally as a leader and then as an organization is really hard. And you can especially see it, for instance, in early church planting or think of it during financial strains and churches.
The first thing to get cut out in in corporate world is R&D, any kind of research and development. Well, that's really what imagination is. It's about taking time to think about what we could do differently to be more effective. And that's really hard when you're in survival mode as a church planter or when your finances are really tight and you're just trying to figure out, you know, how are you going to make it from week to week?
I had heard a rumor that back in the day, Google gave their employees 20% of their time. They said, you can work on whatever you want. So if they work 40 hours or 50 hours a week, 20% of that time was dedicated to imagination. And I actually saw in Ink Magazine Intercom that not only does Google still do it, it was actually an article encouraging leaders to make sure you give your people time to think.
Time to imagine. And it doesn't have to be 20%. But there needs to be some kind of time in your rhythms, in your day, where you just think and dream. I know what people are thinking. I have no time for that. Maybe that's an exercise. Do you get together with your team and you just think through, Hey, how could we make space for this?
Maybe it's a maybe it's a quarterly imagination meeting. Maybe it's a weekly thing. If you've got time. Yeah, we try. I mean, super intentional with this because that tyranny of the urgent, it never stops like Dave was saying and you were saying, especially in churches. It's crazy. It's crazy. So you have to be extremely intentional. So we have every other week a three hour period on Tuesdays from 9 to 12.
Set aside for myself and the senior pastor we call it our long term strategy time. So that's where we're looking at problems as we're looking at where we're going. But if we don't do that, we'll go months without talking about it. Yeah, yeah. I'll be thinking about it and I'm not happy on the process. So we said we just got to put it on the calendar.
Like you said, whether it's quarterly, I'd encourage you to do it more. I mean, if you want your church to continue to move forward, if you want your organization to continue to move forward, it takes intention. But we just do it every other week and it's a standing meeting. We never plan other things overtop of that. That's really helped us to continue to push the church in the right direction.
A lot of leaders, especially pastors, are more visionary. They're dreamers. They've got a lot of ideas. And so what I realized probably about two or three years into my tenure in my last assignment, was that any time my pastor would say something that was aspirational or imaginative, I would just drop it in my notes and I wouldn't try to explore it because I didn't want to derail the conversation we were having at that moment.
But I would bring it up again in our Tuesday lunch meeting. We had a lunch meeting every Tuesday and I would just say, Hey, you mentioned this. How serious were you? I was just dreaming. Well, you know, it'd be great if we could do it. I would say three or four times out of ten, those ideas, those floating thoughts would germinate into an idea that may or may not have seen itself through.
But a lot of our really cool ideas actually came out of those just floating thoughts. Can I just say how rare that is in a church in the fact that you guys program those times with your senior pastor, lead pastor is I'm just telling you, it is really, really rare. That's a huge part of the success that you guys have had, especially, Mike, when I think about your church and the turnaround that has happened there, it's 100%.
No, that's good. That's barrier number two. Barrier number three, fear of making a mistake. And there is a very, very important word that is in this conversation. Dave, Mike, can you guess what that word is? I know what it is for me. It's perfectionism. That's the word I was looking for. Yeah. Let's talk about that, because I think that there's a version of perfectionism in all of us.
I was scared to say the wrong thing. There. Now that they've talked about perfection, because you do talk about that in the book and you've actually mentioned that several times just in conversations over a meal. And so it's something that your have been trying to navigate over your life. So let us learn my this right now. I'm a major perfectionist.
And here's what's really weird. My two daughters, who are, you know, adults now, they both are perfectionists. It's just the weirdest thing in the world. It must be genetic. It has to be. I remember in the fifth grade, I loved to draw and our fifth grade art teacher sent us outside to draw trees. So we all came back in and then he would hold up each picture and talk about it, what he liked and so forth.
He got to mine and I was so careful about drawing every single leaf on a tree that it was not even halfway done. And he just said, I'm into fifth grade now. He says, Workman, you'll never get this tree done. It'll never happen. And that's just that perfectionistic thing of being so afraid of not doing exactly right and making any kind of mistakes.
It's crippling. We all know the story of Edison and how he did a gazillion number of filament experiments trying to make a light bulb. It was absolutely critical to get where he wanted to go was to make as many mistakes as possible. And that's phenomenal. Yeah, I remember talking to a counselor because we were really struggling with our oldest daughter.
She just wasn't finishing homework assignments. The counselor realized that she was a perfectionist and she if she couldn't do it perfectly, she wasn't going to do it at all. And so we had to navigate that as parents and just say, you got to turn in something. You know, you don't want to be 45 years old and still in the seventh grade.
It's a really interesting concept to wrestle through. What are some other ways that fear of making mistake manifest itself? I don't know about the manifestation part, but I love the idea that Mike's Church, for instance, has pivoted to a ready fire aim approach because they're realizing the need to we just need to make some mistakes just to learn how to do some stuff.
I'm telling you, most churches kind of operate on this maxim, ready, aim, aim, aim, aim, aim, aim. And I don't think they ever fire. Then you cannot move forward with that. It doesn't mean you have to sacrifice high quality, doesn't mean you have to sacrifice your values, your goals, all that stuff. Honestly, one of the biggest things we try and do with our outreach, for instance, is relationships.
If you just go in to any of these events, it's not about the event, right? So you can take yourself away from, hey, we have to have everything in order for the movie on the lawn to succeed and it has to be perfect. It's like, let's just go for it. Let's get a company, get some hot dogs, get a couple volunteers and see what happens.
And then 200 people show up and you're like, okay, time to build relationships, but you get better after the second or third time. You do it. I don't think you have to sacrifice the quality that we all want. We want it to be a good event and be marketed right and all those sort of things. But you just got to try something new.
I went to Cal Poly State University, San Luis Obispo. What's up, Mustangs? And they say our mantra was learn by doing. And they actually said, it's okay if you compromise quality a little bit, as long as you have the systems in place, the feedback loops, the process is to get better because the idea there was just as you said, Mike, just get out there and do it and have a plan and get your hands dirty.
And as soon as you get your hands dirty, that internal mechanism in humanity will immediately adjust and want to make it better. I used to have a board member who would just say, Dave, just fail fast. So that's good. Yeah, that's good. Own it and move on. But go ahead, keep trying things. Keep making mistakes in our own marriage, one of our things is asking, what's the worst that can happen?
What's what's the worst that could happen? Because any change, there's going to be some risk calculating risk is just part of the creative process. And nothing comes no idea comes without some risk because inevitably some resources or something, priorities, something is going to shift. Let's take a calculated risk here. What's the worst that can happen? And we've done something with our budget.
We have what we call an agility fund. Now, two ideas come up in the middle of a year. Sorry, we didn't plan for it in the budget, so we can't do it. We're like, we need a way to fund some of these ideas. So we, we have an agility fund and if it's an idea that is for our vision, we have money that we can throw at some of these new outreach ideas or new ideas that are going to help build the Kingdom.
That is so good. It's so funny how charismatic my world is because we have the exact same budget. It's called The Winds of the Spirit Agility Fund when those very same idea, you know, Mike, you offer so much good insight to this. You're bringing some good stuff, man. I really appreciate that. All right. Very one is a fear of change very to no personal time investment barrier.
Three, fear of making a mistake. And the antidote to that one is just do it. Take the calculated risk, get after it. The three or four is the fear of changing your mind. So here's another fear, Dave. I'm going to offer a real quick antidote to this one. I don't know who I should be given credit to this because it wasn't my own, but the whole phrase was, Listen, you don't have to marry it, just did it.
There's this idea that just because we make a decision doesn't mean that you're married to this until Jesus comes back. If it doesn't work, you can either adjust it, change it, or throw it out. And so Dave is that what you were getting after when when you talked about fear of change in your mind? Yeah, that's that's certainly part of it.
The other side is kind of the dark side of leadership that some of us leaders are afraid of, looking indecisive, are weak or whatever and changing your mind. Sometimes we think that's going to be some expression of weakness. Personally, I'd be scared to follow a leader who didn't change their mind ever so often. To me, that sounds worse.
I was just going to say there have been a couple of significant leadership moments where the leader in the room, who was clearly the point person, just stops and pauses and say, You know what, guys? I think I'm changing my mind here. I've got a different perspective here, and I appreciate the collective wisdom in the room that speaks to so many levels of leadership that just builds, again, a collective confidence and trust.
The idea behind it is being right is not nearly as important as looking for the right solution. Yeah. And so being willing to change your mind as a leader because maybe someone else has come up with a better solution. Man, I go for it. Why don't we jump right in, then, to the next barrier? I don't know that there's more to say.
We could probably again dedicated the entire podcast to each one of these barriers. But let's jump into barrier five and we talked about a culture of distrust. Again, this is a barrier to cultivating a culture of imagination. And one of those barriers is a culture of distrust. It's probably self-explanatory. But let's unpack that, because I think over the years, each of the three of us have experienced that at some level.
Can we talk about that? Yeah, I'll jump in even back up a little bit in that that it's the leaders responsibility to shape staff culture. Otherwise it'll take a shape of its own. And it may not be a shape that really exemplifies a reflects the values or the mission of the organization. So leaders really have to keep their finger on developing a culture in general.
But a culture of trust is really critical for creativity, because if you're in a meeting where you've got a big issue or a big problem and you're trying to solve it or whatever it is, if someone's idea is just shot down right away, you got problems. The creative type personality has a tough time handling rejection, honestly. And so you really have to be careful with the artist type personalities.
It means that you want to create an environment. Our culture, when you're in those sessions where trust is paramount and people can say things without fear of being shot down or reprimanded or that's a stupid idea. Yeah. And that rejection usually doesn't come out as if that's a stupid idea. That's dumb. It usually comes out as well. I don't know that that'll work.
Yeah, right. And that's a, that's a real polite way of saying I've either tried that before, you know, whatever. I remember Andy Stanley at a conference that I was at. He said, There's two possible responses that can change the culture of your staff. And those responses are Wow, or how? And he said, if you asked how first, that could potentially deflate the person offering the idea or the team that's offering the dream, but just simply change that.
How to wow and encourage the creativity, encourage the imagination. Now, once you unpack it, it may be that, you know, this is not feasible in this season, but at least you are cultivating an environment where people dream and they're not afraid to just give a great idea, you know? And another way to submit it on the other end of the table, I've done this before and I've just said, Hey, guys, this is just a thought.
It may be a lame thought, it may be undoable, but can I just throw this idea out and you've just maybe it's impression management, but you've just basically gave people in the room permission to do the same thing as the leader. You do that. And again, five times out of ten, it might be a brilliant idea. And the other five it might be, you know, I'm just changing my mind.
I don't think that was such a great idea. But at least you gave people permission to dream. Mike. Sounds like you guys do that. Well, this this time every two weeks, it's just you in the pastor, and you guys have space in your staff to do that from time to time. We have a ministry leaders meeting to once a month and staff meetings.
We meet every Monday and we talk about some of the values we want to trust each other. Some of the stuff is confidential. We're going to be given ideas, so we lay that out at the beginning of the meeting just to get people thinking about, you know, how do I want to respond? We're reading a book right now.
It's called Thanks for the Feedback. You know, how do we give feedback in a way that builds trust, that honors people? All those are going into a culture of trust. When I think about trust from a big organizational standpoint, I don't think you're going to always have every one's trust. And that's just something we have to realize because there's some loud voices and most churches don't see their name right here.
But you could say, you know who you're talking about and they don't always understand what's going on. So I would just encourage leaders out there don't magnify just the loud voices. It's really hard to have an understanding of where your church is when you're trying something new, but most people are on board with you. And there's there could be some loud voices who aren't, but just don't magnify this lot of voices moving forward.
It's good. Yeah, it's funny. At one point I brought on the teaching pastor on our staff who had he was living in L.A. and he was involved in acting. His heart was in ministry, but he was trying to write screenplays and so forth. I think he was a doorman on General Hospital or one of those things, but he had a just a really unique teaching style and teaching gift.
He was a storyteller. What had happened was some years earlier, his wife, because he was kind of down and depressed about how their church plant was going, his wife bought him a course in improv. And the coach of that improv class was actually Jason Sudeikis. Oh, that's interesting. So one of the things that Joe his name's Joe Boyd, who now is the CEO of Leader cast, one of the things that he said was in improv, it's always yes.
And and there has to be such a high degree of trust in the people that you're working with, that if you throw out something, they're going to build on that with you. So if you say, hey, I took my dog to an ice cream shop. Yeah. And da da da da. And the story goes on. It's all working out on tight wire.
But the trust element is so important in improv, just like Mike was saying, to foster ideas, to get the best ideas out of your staff under your crew trust is vital. Now, that's fantastic. That is so good. Let's go on to barrier number six. Barrier number six is problem avoidance. This is probably one that's not as obvious in the titles today.
We're going to ask you to kind of describe that and then we'll we'll chat about it. You guys are familiar with the idea of denial. It's not admitting that you have a problem. I don't have a problem. Yeah. Yeah. So avoiding problems as an organization is crazy because you cannot have an organization without problems. It's when they become chronic that they're real issues.
20, 30 years ago, the phrase was, you hope you're developing learning organizations. So they're organizations that learn from their problems and learn from some best practice and learn from things that didn't work or did work or whatever. But what really pushes this idea of being a learning organization are the problems themselves. The reality is that without problems, I don't think you are going to innovate.
You heard it right here, folks. Create as many problems as possible in the organization. I'm only kidding. And you'll be around forever. No, it's absolutely true. I love this, guys. This has been a great conversation. I was actually reading an article on Kids and Imagination and make believe and I thought this was really interesting. Let me read this.
Research shows a relationship between make believe play and self-regulation. Oral language, social, emotional skills, creative thinking, important cognitive skills in math, literacy and science. Make believe play allows your child to practically think critically and develop social skills such as sharing, turn, taking, communication. It always enables them to express their emotions in a safe and controlled environment. As they play, your child can develop empathy and understand the perspective of others.
As I read that description, I thought about some of the best dream sessions that I've had on staff, and you could apply everything that I just read to your adult context. Just because we grow up doesn't mean we lose our ability to imagine or dream. And how much more in the church should we be dreaming of God's heart for bigger things?
You've said this before, Paul, but if we're made in the image of God, if we are image bearers and the first thing we learn about God at the very beginning of the book is his creativity is just massive. It's just amazes me that we don't tap into that more as followers of Jesus. No, that's a fantastic word to finish on.
So I would just want to encourage we just want to encourage anyone who's listening, whether you're leading a church, leading an organization, leading a business for that matter. We know we have several business leaders that are following along on this podcast. Give your team, give yourself space to just dream. If you've got to go for a walk, get up a little bit earlier, go for a run and just think and dream.
Let's pray that God would give his heart of imagination and replant that in us. And I think that it'll go a long, long way. And of course, again, I'll invite anyone listening. You are welcome to call us. You can jump online elemental group dot org. We've got a lot of free resources on there and then of course we would love for you to review this podcast.
We would love for you to share this podcast. If this is bringing value to you, pass it along. It could be a nice leadership move for you to do that, but for all of us at the Elemental Group, we're looking forward to meeting with you next time as we've got some pretty fantastic content we're going to reveal to you.
How's that for a teaser? You like that teaser? I'm going to leave it there. I felt teased. I don't even know what it is. We'll see you all next time. You've been listening to the Elemental Leader's podcast, visit us at Elemental Group dot org for more great resources.