Leadership, Legacy, Personal Vision

Leading well and leaving a legacy are connected. They have much more to do with personal vision than we think.

__

We drop into an abridged conversation between Matt Hogg and Katrina Douglas recorded at Stronger 2021. Listen to insights from Katrina who is a marketer, entrepreneur and launch strategist and author. Hear about responding to your calling, leaving a legacy, turning vision into reality and more:

Introducing Katrina

Matt: It’s a pleasure to welcome Katrina Douglas on here as we spend a bit of time with her, gleaning some fresh insights and learnings from Katrina's enormous experience in entrepreneurship and business Katrina is a wife, a mother, launch strategist, an experienced marketer and has been helping people and organisations launch and build legacy driven projects for the last 14 years. She's an author and a speaker and I know I've gained a lot from spending time with Katrina. So welcome, Katrina. It's great to see you today.

Katrina: Thank you so much for having me, Matt. It's an absolute pleasure to be here.

1.Vocation and direction

Matt: Okay, so thinking about calling and direction. I know there'll be people that have been thinking about the things that maybe God is leading them into, maybe they've been aware of a fresh passion, or maybe a passion that's been buried due to just busyness of life. How did you know that God was leading you into the work that you're doing now, and are there any lessons that people can learn?

Katrina: When you have that unction, you'll know it, you feel the pull, I would say lean into it, but don't rush it. So often, we feel this sense that there's a shift, but we want to get there quickly. And I would say lean into it. God never reveals the whole staircase, he always reveals the next step. So go with it, even if you don't see the full staircase and trust him. And I think that this is an opportunity.

If you are in that space, it's an opportunity for you to really trust God and his direction. And if I speak about my journey. I think five years ago, I think I always knew that I would leave the corporate space after a decade. I just knew I can't tell you how I knew. But I just knew. And when that time came, I was offered redundancy and I was like, ‘Oh God, right on time’ type thing. And I thought I had it all planned out, and it was going to be amazing. I was just going to be this amazing entrepreneur overnight because of course I built a career over a decade. And God completely flipped the script on me. 

Number one I felt a real sense of bereavement over the career that I had left. So often we're so in a hurry to get to the next step that you don't realise that we have to give ourselves a minute to breathe. 

And the second thing where God blew my mind is I thought, of course, I've been a marketer for however many years, and of course that's what I'm going to do when I leave, and God was like, ‘…actually, no’, and he showed me that there was a calling also on my life to help people birth their visions, that actually, my identity wasn't just in marketing. And it wasn't just a job title.  

When God is shifting you there's this question about identity, especially if you've done one thing for a long period of time, we don't realise how much of our identity is in that thing. And then when that thing goes, we're in this place of, ‘Okay, well, who am I?’ And ‘God, what do you want me to do?’, ‘What is the title?’, and so there's a space where you just have to get free of all that, and just the only title I had was ‘child of God’. I didn't have any job title, I think you just lean into that, and just completely trust God.  

I think that this is a real opportunity for us to freefall into the will of God and just say ‘God’, because it's so crazy out there nobody actually knows what's happening. So use this as an opportunity to really trust God like you never have, and seek Him for direction because honestly, in the times we find ourselves in he really is the only anchor, the only foundation there is. So trust him. He's known you from the beginning of time, you know, you're in safe hands.

2.Responding to your calling

Matt: Do you have any guidance for people thinking about calling because calling can be quite a loaded term, and so can sort of cause people to, you know, get a little bit paralysed, and they may feel like they're not quite hitting what God's calling them into. Have you got any ideas or comments on that?

Katrina: I think just start. Sometimes we over spiritualize things and who we are meant to be, and what we're called to do is in our DNA. An apple doesn't have to try to be an apple, it just is. So I think that you just play to your strengths. 

Look at what you enjoy. Where are your natural strengths? What do people say about you? In terms of when they think of you, what would they say your strengths are, and where you excel. So I think the first thing to do when trying to find your calling is to really understand yourself, sometimes we don't take the time to really face ourselves and really unpack who we are. What do we like? What do we enjoy? What are our strengths? What are the cues and ideas God has given us over the years. So I think sometimes we think that calling is something out there. And actually it's already in us. It's been with us since the day we were born. And it's just a case of an uncovering, so enjoy the process.   

3.Working on a personal vision statement

Matt: Okay, thinking about personal vision statement, and I just wondered if you had any insights into your own experience with clarifying your own direction, maybe even a personal vision statement?

Katrina: I think, just go in trusting myself. The other thing is actually spending time with God in prayer. Just asking him. The Bible says, ‘my sheep know My voice’, and trusting that actually, you do know His voice, and you can hear him. So along the way God will confirm and he'll send people to confirm in various ways. It might not be an overt prophetic word, but it might be someone says something in conversation and you know, it's God. And God always gives us clues. And he leaves breadcrumbs. And he'll give you confirmation just to reassure you that actually you're on the right path.

4.Steps for turning vision into reality

Matt: Okay, so thinking about vision into reality, this is your expertise in many ways. And just tell us tell us some steps people need to be thinking about when turning an idea into reality.

Katrina: I always say the first thing is, the bigger the impact you feel God is calling you to have, the deeper your foundation has to be. So we live in a very microwave society. Six figures in six months, you can just pop up on Instagram and be a millionaire overnight, we live in a very microwave society. But your calling is a gift is something that we have to steward well. And so when God has given you that gift, and you know what that gift is, we have a responsibility to steward it well. And so we have to lay a solid foundation. 

And so I have developed a framework to help do that. I call it the Six P’s. And again, this is the practical meeting the spiritual so you now know what you need to do. God has told you feel confident, actually, I want to move forward. So there are six areas that you need to look at first is the area of purpose. We should be people of purpose and if it’s not aligned with your purpose we really shouldn’t be doing it.  The next thing is the product or the service. Then the people, because actually, so often, we think that even because God has given us this vision that we have to carry it by ourselves. It’s the very fabric and nature of Christianity, this is unity working together. Number four is promotion, because you can have the greatest idea in the world, but if nobody knows about it, then it's just not going to get the direction it needs. And then processes and I'm very passionate about processes, people see it as the boring part. But actually, it's the very foundation of things that are sustainable, and God calls us to build sustainably. Then finally, profit, and if you're a business, maybe yes, financially, but more than that, how is this going to profit those that God has called you to impact? So you can see that it's quite a holistic framework, and it really causes you to think about the thing thoroughly. So that actually when you do start building, it's built on a really solid foundation. 

5.Leadership and prayer

Matt: You've spoken a lot about prayer. I mean, it's sounds like it's a constant conversation that you're having with God in terms of business and the things you're running. What does that look like? 

Katrina: It depends on the season that I'm in, to be honest. At the moment,  I guess I have a very quite a regimented routine, and so I wake up, and first is a bottle of water, and worship and prayer. But it hasn't always been like that. But in this season, that's what it is. I feel like I need to have that dedicated time because I feel like I'm at a crucial point at where he has me. 

Yeah, I think prayer is multifaceted. It's about listening, it's about speaking, it's about bringing your entire self and facing yourself as well as God. And you know, coming boldly to that throne of grace in time of need, and God can handle it all. So that's what prayer looks like for me.

6.Why should we think about ‘legacy’?

Matt: I love how you talk a lot about legacy. It's a word that you keep coming back to. Why is legacy important? Why should leaders be thinking about legacy?

Katrina: Because I think that was that scripture, that we leave with nothing, you know, we leave this world with nothing other than really what we impart into others. When you die, you just leave nothing. And so for me, it's like life is so precious. It's such a gift. And I think God has given us as gifts to other people as well. And so to me the number one question is, what are you imparting? What are you imparting, and I think as leaders as Christian leaders, it always has to be bigger than just the act of the job, or the practicalities of the business. What are you imparting, and I think that for me, the thing that moves me most about my business is when I work with people and those one to one relationships, and it's like, actually, we're building something that long after you stopped working with me, there's still going to be residue. I think God has given us a seeds too.  

7.Church leaders and entrepreneurs

Matt: I'm a church leader, there may be other churches watching this. And they'll have people who are entrepreneurs, innovators in business in their congregations, what can churches be doing to help Christians in business more or providing space or support? 

Katrina: I think that embracing the fact that the church is more than the four walls and not trying to confine them. Our remit is beyond the church walls. And I think embracing that. You know, being an entrepreneur with a calling outside of the church is no less important than a role within the church. And I think that it's just embracing  the value of entrepreneurs and utilising them within your organisation as well giving them creative licence to help shape your vision. Because I do think that there is a synergy between the Apostolic and entrepreneurship. So just embrace entrepreneurs and give them the freedom to kind of have an impact beyond the four walls.