Admitting You’re Wrong is Easy… It’s the Realizing That’s Hard

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Admitting you’re wrong is easy. Well, not easy if you’re a pride monkey like me. But… saying “I am/was wrong” is actually pretty easy to do, once you’ve realized you’re actually wrong.

Now… realizing you’re wrong is WAY harder. Figuring out all the ways you get it wrong… well, that takes a life time and I’m just getting started on this journey of figuring it out, so I can fix it. Seems like every time I admit to getting something wrong, I’m realizing something else I need to do better.

Today, I’m going to use a very specific instance in my life that has had huge learning ramifications in my life:

I was a pretty successful solo artist traveling full-time like I once was. I thought I was part of the “club”. I sold a buncha records. I wrote more than a handful of hit songs. I thought I was IN.

But after two major label albums, it was all gone. Why?

Let’s dig into my story a little, then we’ll come back around to the leadership issues behind the story.

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The most spiritual narrative for my artist career ending is this: when I was making my second major label record The Anatomy of Broken, my wife and I found out that we were expecting our first baby, Keira. I prayed a very distinct (and some might conclude stupid) prayer soon after finding out: “God, I’m gone too much to raise a family and can’t afford the bus I’d need for my family to come on the road… so break it one way or another: either take it all away, quickly, or make it so big that I’m gonna be able to take my family on the road.”

As I worked on Anatomy, the response I got behind the scenes was that pretty soon I was going to be in the upper echelon of Christian artists. We had three or four singles that my label team thought were easy hits. We had a loosely-tied together concept album on the brokenness of life and Christ’s answer to that brokenness. And the album was my vision from start to finish.

I remember taking the completed album and doing a listening party for my label. and the head of distribution at my label told me that he had not had this feeling about an album since Amy Grant’s Heart in Motion back in the day. Wow. Looked like God was gonna give me the latter part of that prayer: I was gonna be in a bus in no time!

But then, through a list of unexplained coincidences (or as I now count them, God’s blessings), everything went wrong. I won’t go through them all, but within three or four months of the album coming out, we all realized that this record was doing what I had hoped it wouldn’t – it was leading me away from being an artist.

That’s the spiritual narrative: I prayed a prayer; God answered. I’ve told that story on radio shows. I’ve told that story in churches. And people pat me on the back and tell me how awesome I am for trusting God as He took away what mattered most.

But here’s the thing – that side of the story IS truth. That side of the story IS right. But it’s not the whole story. If that’s all I walk away with from this hard time in life, I am simply blaming God for my pain (in a Christian-ese, sweet, spiritual sort of way) and – more importantly – I am shirking my responsibility in the matter. What did I do? What can I learn?

Here’s how I was wrong.

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I’m a smart aleck. I enjoy humor. I enjoy sarcasm. I love making people laugh, but even more so – selfishly – I like to make myself laugh.

Sarcasm is not a fruit of the Spirit. The people who understand and appreciate sarcasm generally had no problem with me. Others didn’t understand and believed things about me that weren’t true.

BUT THAT WASN’T THE PROBLEM. I was the problem.

My attitude was always “you can’t change the idiots’ idiocy”. Assuming, of course, that those who disagreed with me or those who didn’t “get” my sense of humor were completely wrong and I – and those who agreed with me – were completely right.

For that I was completely wrong.

I made people feel as though their opinion was worth less than mine. For that I was wrong. I refused to be “all things to all people” (as Paul commends) and instead assumed everyone should simply come to my “right” side of things. For that, I was wrong. I argued with people on social media to try and change their minds about things they were “wrong” about. For that, I was wrong.

Ultimately, here’s what I’ve realized: I am a prideful man who naturally believes that my opinion is worth more than everyone else’s. And even when I was/am actually right, that attitude doesn’t allow me the influence being “right” should. I failed – and still sometimes fail – to show value to everyone whose opinions could have changed my life. For that, I was wrong. When I still do it – for that – I AM wrong.

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Today, I’m the worship director and video department head at one of the largest churches in the fastest growing city in America. I have nine employees that I lead on a daily basis as we attempt to create excellent content for our screens and a worship experience that will lead our people towards the heart of God every single Sunday.

I have a history now of creative ideas that win. But if I lead my team with ONLY my ideas, then A) my team fails to grow into the leadership I desire for them to grow to; and B) my team eventually will get sick of buying into ideas that they have no say in.

Most of the things I need my team to do (especially in my worship department), I can do (what I think of as) better than the people who work for me. But me doing everything A) leads me to burn out; B) fails to allow my team to grow into the leaders I need them to be for this ministry to do everything it can do; and C) it never allows me to be caught off guard by ideas or processes that might be better than mine.

I’m not a great leader. I feel like I fail at much of what I do as a leader. I’m especially sensitive because I see how I failed so ridiculously to cultivate the 1st career God allowed me to have. I don’t want to be forty-five and look back at my career as a pastor and realize that I threw it all away by failing to learn from my past mistakes.

So… did I lose my artist career because I was a jerk? Or did God simply have lessons I needed to learn, so I could learn and grow towards being the man, the husband, the father, the pastor that I am meant to be? Or did God just simply know that my calling was pastoral and led me back to that?

Or was it all of these things?

Well, I dunno what the answer to that question is. I’d guess it was all of the above. But I do know this: admitting you’ve failed is WAY easier than realizing it. And I’ve realized it. And I’m admitting it. But even more important? Now, I’m changing those patterns of behavior that made me who I was.

So… what about you? What’s keeping you from being the leader you are meant to be? What can you learn from my failure (outside of “don’t be a jerk and steamroll other people’s opinions”)? What do you need to realize today that can revolutionize your leadership and your ministry?

Today, what do YOU need to realize you’re failing at, so you can admit it and move on?