If you want something in your life to get better, where should you start?
It’s easy to look first at your marriage, finances, career, family, health, or circumstances. But there’s one person involved in every race God has called you to run: you.
That’s why building a Home Run Life starts with personal growth and leadership development. Before you can build stronger structures around everything else, you have to become intentional about the structure you’re building within yourself.
The race God has called you to run requires something from you. It requires growth, discipline, wisdom, and a willingness to change so that when you change for the better, everything connected to you has the opportunity to change for the better.
Change the Lens You’re Looking Through
You don’t experience life only according to what happens to you. You also experience it through the lens you’ve developed.
Past hurts, disappointments, relationships, fears, and other people’s words can influence how you see yourself and your circumstances. You may think you’re seeing something exactly as it is when you’re actually seeing it through a filter.
That’s why personal growth requires you to examine more than your circumstances. You have to examine how you see, how you hear, how you process, and ultimately how you interpret what happens around you.
Those interpretations influence your judgments, and your judgments influence the direction of your life.
Instead of immediately blaming another person when something goes wrong, you can develop the maturity to ask, “Is there something in the way I’m seeing, hearing, or processing this that needs to change?”
Taking ownership gives you something you can actually do something about.
The Quality of Your Life Is Connected to Your Structure
Structure is the manner in which something is built—the arrangement of parts designed to support, strengthen, and accomplish an intended purpose.
Your life already has structure. Your habits are structure. Your schedule is structure. Your relationships are structure. The voices you listen to are structure. Your spiritual disciplines are structure.
And one of the central principles of the Home Run series is this:
The quality of your life is determined by the quality of your structure.
Reading your Bible, praying, attending church, and growing spiritually are important parts of that structure, but information alone doesn’t automatically transform you. You still have to apply what God is showing you to the way you think, make decisions, build relationships, and live.
God can place an incredible vision in your heart, but you need a structure capable of sustaining it.
Build the Bridge Between Vision and Strategy
Most people understand the importance of vision.
You have a picture of what you want your future marriage to look like. You have goals for your finances. You see possibilities for your career, family, health, leadership, or calling.
Once you see that future, it’s natural to immediately ask, “What do I need to do to make this happen?”
That’s strategy.
But there’s something important between vision and strategy: structure.
If you don’t build the right structure, even a great strategy can become inconsistent. Before focusing only on what you’re going to do, ask yourself who you need to become and what needs to be built into your life to sustain where you’re going.
Your future isn’t only about doing something different. It’s about becoming someone different.
First Base: Desire to Be Great
If personal growth is a race, where do you begin?
First base is the desire to be great.
Greatness isn’t about believing you’re better than everyone else. It’s about refusing to settle for a version of yourself that falls short of who God created you to become.
Second Peter 3:18 tells you to grow in the grace and knowledge of Jesus Christ. Growth is something you participate in intentionally.
You can’t outsource it.
Someone can encourage you, teach you, coach you, mentor you, and believe in you, but nobody else can make you want to grow.
You have to decide that average isn’t enough for the life God has given you.
That decision will require discipline because becoming better often means confronting what’s normal for you. If your normal habits aren’t producing the future you want, something has to change.
The question becomes: Do you want to be great enough to fight against what’s normal in you for what could be great about you?
Invest in the Person You’re Becoming
Personal growth doesn’t always produce an immediate reward.
You may be studying something today that doesn’t seem relevant yet. You may be developing a skill without knowing exactly where you’ll use it. You may be building disciplines that nobody notices.
Don’t assume that means your effort is wasted.
What you’re doing today can become part of the structure for what God wants to do through you tomorrow.
You may not see the entire future yet, but you can prepare for it.
Instead of asking only, “What am I getting from this right now?” begin asking, “Who am I becoming because of this?”
Your personal development should be connected to a purpose bigger than the immediate moment.
Second Base: Find a Template for Greatness
Once you’ve decided you want to grow, second base is finding someone who models the kind of greatness you’re pursuing.
You don’t have to figure everything out by yourself.
If you want to build a stronger marriage, learn from people with healthy marriages. If you want to become a better leader, study great leaders. If you want to grow financially, learn from people who demonstrate wisdom and stewardship. If you want to grow spiritually, get around people whose lives produce the spiritual fruit you want to develop.
Find somebody who has already run where you’re trying to run.
Study them. Ask questions. Receive coaching. Pay attention to how they think, not just what they’ve achieved.
Paul expressed this principle in 1 Corinthians 11:1 when he instructed others to imitate him as he imitated Christ. The ultimate standard is always Jesus, but God can use mentors, leaders, coaches, pastors, and other people to model principles that help you grow.
Don’t reject something valuable simply because another person’s thinking challenges yours. If their life is producing better fruit in an area where you want to grow, there may be something you can learn.
Third Base: Learn the Art of Self-Leadership
Eventually, personal growth comes back to one of the hardest leadership assignments you’ll ever receive:
leading yourself.
Nobody else can run your race for you.
You have to learn to lead your thinking, emotions, appetites, habits, time, decisions, and disciplines. First Corinthians 9 compares this kind of intentionality to an athlete disciplining and training their body for competition.
Self-leadership also changes the way you approach relationships.
Instead of making your growth dependent on someone else changing first, you can take responsibility for the person you bring into the relationship. Instead of continually focusing on what your spouse, coworker, friend, or family member should do differently, you can begin with yourself.
Jesus illustrated this by teaching us to deal with the plank in our own eye before focusing on the speck in someone else’s.
That’s self-leadership.
Get Out of the Stands and Into the Game
It’s easy to become a spectator.
Spectators evaluate what everybody else is doing. They cheer when they like something and criticize when they don’t. But they’re not actually on the field.
A Home Run Life requires you to become a player.
You can’t build the life God has called you to build from the stands. You have to take ownership, develop yourself, embrace discipline, learn from people ahead of you, and lead yourself well.
Personal growth isn’t simply about becoming more successful. It’s about becoming a better image-bearer of God and developing the capacity to carry His purpose into your marriage, family, finances, career, health, relationships, and calling.
So start running the bases.
First base: Desire to be great.
Second base: Find a template that models greatness.
Third base: Learn the art of self-leadership.
Then keep growing.
Because when you become better, everything you’re responsible for has the opportunity to become better too.
That’s how you begin building the structure for a Home Run Life.
If you’re looking for a church in Frisco, TX where you can discover God, develop yourself, and grow into the leader God created you to be, we’d love to welcome you to Elevate Life Church.
