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7 Practical Ideas to Recharge Your Soul 

Recharge Your Soul
photo credit: steheap - stock.adobe.com

How are you? Need a break? Do you need to recharge your soul? What level is your “leadership battery” at?

    • Fully charged.
    • Good, but drained.
    • Weak, probably needs a jump start.
    • Very little left; may need a new battery.

Recharging your battery these days seems like a different prospect than last summer.

So much has changed over the last fifteen months or so, and you have absorbed the pressure and stress that came with all the change. How are you dealing with it?

From many conversations with church leaders it’s obvious there is great hope, enthusiasm, and positive anticipation about the future, but equally, there is overwhelming discouragement and lack of confidence.

It’s important to have a tipping point to keep you on the positive side of this post-pandemic ledger. Are you intentional about the need to recharge your soul?

The church doesn’t stop during the summer, but it’s a good time to lean into the different life rhythm it carries, to catch your breath and recharge your leadership battery. A recharge for you is so important because the church never stops.

This isn’t a complaint; lots of people work hard inside challenging careers, but it’s an acknowledgment of the need to refuel and recharge your soul. It’s an acknowledgment of the unique weight of serving people on a spiritual level.

7 Practical Ideas to Recharge Your Soul

1. Change of Pace

Recharging your leadership battery and to recharge your soul is rarely about doing nothing; it’s about a change of pace. So, what does a change of pace look like? There are lots of possibilities.

For example, if you are with people all the time, you could dive into some deep thought work of R&D to improve a ministry, write, or prepare to launch something new.

If you typically run at a very fast pace, slow down for a couple of weeks. Take your mornings for more thoughtful work.

2. Gain Closure

It’s surprising how much is gained even at a soul level from closure.

So, many leaders live with a nagging, peace-stealing, low-grade anxiety from things as simple as unfinished projects, hard conversations that have never happened and being honest about what they’re not going to do.

Take action and gain closure.

*About projects you have never finished, finish them, or get honest about the fact that you are not going to do it. Take it off your list. Literally, delete all of it. Be done. Move on. Closure is like oxygen to your soul.

The same is true with your relationships. Don’t leave the hard stuff dangling, have the difficult conversations and bring fresh definition to the relationship.

3. Unclutter

Often uncluttering your life helps to recharge your soul, gain emotional margin, and lets you breath deeper. Since I’ve used work-related illustrations for the first two ideas, let’s take this one home.

Your closet, garage, basement, or desk probably has stuff in it that you’ll never use again. It’s amazing what accumulates.

Clutter robs your soul of peace. It’s not just about certain personalities; it impacts everyone but just to differing levels for each individual. For some, it’s a nagging distraction; for others, it’s a powerful thief of peace and productivity.

The surprising thing is how much you can do about it in one afternoon.

Let’s go deeper, and with something not so easy.

Unclutter your thought life.

It’s about focused thinking, and that can be very challenging considering your long to-do list and the bombardment from social media along with your favorite websites.