For one year, I organized my work through Tony Robbins’s RPM model. I appreciated its insistence that activity should serve a larger purpose. It helped me identify the results I wanted, connect them to reasons that mattered, and turn intention into action. The structure brought order to work that might otherwise have scattered across too many concerns.
Then I would sense a quiet pull toward something I had not planned.
Sometimes it was a question that would not leave me alone. Sometimes it was a conversation, an emerging need, or an idea whose purpose was not yet clear. Responding meant setting aside part of the plan and giving time to work whose outcome I could not explain. Again and again, those departures led somewhere important.
I would revise the RPM plan to include what had emerged. Then another interruption would come. After repeating this cycle several times, I began to see that the problem was not poor execution. The model assumed that I could identify the destination first. My experience of the Spirit did not.
When the Outcome Comes First
Self-optimization begins with desired outcomes. These may be shaped by spiritual practices and reflection on the person we hope to become. We clarify goals, strengthen habits, monitor progress, and try to use our time well in order to become the person we imagine. Planning protects us from distraction and keeps our priorities from disappearing beneath immediate demands.
Trouble begins when the intended result determines what deserves our attention.
Once I had named an outcome, I judged new possibilities by whether they advanced it. An interruption could be accommodated if it still served the larger plan. Work that did not fit appeared less important, even when it carried a persistent sense that I should follow it.
The same habit can shape identity. We decide that we are becoming a certain kind of leader, developing a particular ministry, or preparing for a specific future. Choices that reinforce that direction feel responsible. Anything that unsettles it must overcome the weight of a story already in place.
Prayer can continue inside that arrangement. We may ask for wisdom, courage, or endurance. Yet we are often asking God to help us reach a destination we have already selected.
The Identity Behind the Plan
A plan may protect more than a schedule. It may protect the person we believe we need to be.
A leader who is known for competence may resist asking for help. A dependable volunteer keeps saying yes because refusal would feel like a failure of character. A pastor praised for innovation may assume that each season requires a new initiative. Someone whose usefulness has been affirmed for years may not know how to interpret a period in which less is being asked of them.
These pressures become visible in decisions. A program continues because ending it would raise uncomfortable questions. A leader fills an opening in the calendar rather than allowing the congregation to rest. A person accepts another responsibility while already knowing that existing commitments are receiving less attention.
Our identity begins before any of these judgments are made. We are received by God before our usefulness is established and before our future becomes clear. Growth still matters, but it is no longer a way of proving that we are becoming worthy of the life we have been given.
That changes how a person can respond when faithfulness requires relinquishment. Leaving a role, reducing a ministry, or admitting that a strategy no longer fits may look like retreat. Sometimes it is the honest response to what has changed.
When Progress Becomes the Measure
Outcome-centered work gives us evidence that our effort is producing something. Completed goals, increased participation, greater capacity, and visible influence reassure us that the work is moving.
Discernment does not always offer that reassurance.
A pastor may need to spend months repairing trust rather than launching the initiative the congregation expected. A leader may remain with an unresolved vocational question instead of making a decision simply to escape uncertainty. A ministry may need to become smaller before anyone can tell whether it has found a more faithful shape.
Such seasons are difficult partly because other people are watching. Boards ask what has been accomplished. Colleagues want to know what comes next. Annual reports make room for numbers more easily than for a decision to stop, wait, or begin again.
Visible progress can tell us something about our work. It cannot tell us everything about its faithfulness.
What Leaders Bring into the Church
The way leaders relate to outcomes enters the systems they oversee.
Imagine a pastor beginning the year with a carefully developed ministry plan. The congregation intends to strengthen participation, improve communication, and prepare new leaders. Staff responsibilities have been assigned, funding approved, and progress measures established.
Several months later, a number of people begin caring for spouses or parents with dementia. They ask for practical guidance and somewhere to speak honestly about fatigue, grief, and the changes happening in their homes. The need was not anticipated. Responding would require staff time and volunteer energy already assigned elsewhere. It would produce little that the congregation normally counts.
The pastor cannot simply declare the new need more spiritual than the approved plan. Commitments have already been made, and the church’s capacity is limited. Yet dismissing the requests as unrelated to the year’s priorities would allow the plan to settle the question before anyone has listened.
A conversation with caregivers may reveal that they are carrying similar burdens in isolation. Local agencies may already provide information but offer little sustained companionship. The church might begin with a monthly gathering led by two members who understand caregiving. To make room, leaders may postpone another activity rather than add more work to an already full calendar.
No dramatic program is required. What matters is that people affected by the decision are heard, capacity is examined honestly, and an emerging responsibility is allowed to alter what the congregation gives its time to.
The pastor’s personal need to fulfill the plan could easily become a structural pressure on everyone else. Staff members would keep pursuing goals that no longer describe the whole field of ministry. Caregivers would receive sympathy while remaining outside the church’s real priorities. A document written months earlier would quietly determine whose needs counted.
Learning to Work Differently
When I realized that continual revision would not solve the conflict, I began writing a different kind of plan for myself. I needed a way to hold purpose, responsibility, and action while leaving room for guidance I could not anticipate.
That work eventually contributed to Called Together, which developed the process communally for ministry settings, and Sacred Listening, which offered others a way to discern their own path. Neither was an outcome I had identified at the beginning of that year. Their significance became visible only after I had followed the work for some distance.
I still set deadlines and define results. Some work cannot be done responsibly without them. A publication needs to be completed. A budget needs numbers. People deserve clarity about what has been promised.
The change concerned what happened when something outside the plan kept returning.
Instead of immediately labeling it a distraction, I learned to examine it. Following a new direction might neglect a responsibility already received, so existing commitments had to be considered. I also had to ask whether I was avoiding difficult work or chasing novelty. When the pull remained, I spoke about it with people I trusted and watched what happened as I gave it limited attention.
This did not produce certainty. It gave me more information than the plan alone could provide.
What Has Not Yet Been Heard
A culture of self-optimization trains us to approach the future as something we should define, build, and measure. That expectation can follow us into prayer. We arrive carrying a preferred direction and listen for help moving toward it.
The calendar may still need to be written. The goals may be reasonable. The work may require sustained discipline. Yet some part of the page has to remain open to what could not have been known when the plan was made.
I do not know what would have happened if I had insisted on completing that original RPM plan. I know only that the work that followed required me to leave it more than once.
The next invitation may begin with a person who needs more time than we intended to give, a concern that keeps returning after the meeting has ended, or a piece of work with no obvious place among our priorities. We may not yet know whether it deserves an afternoon or several years.
Before that can become clear, it has to be heard without being required to serve the future we have already written.