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How to Begin Putting Others First

I hope by now you recognize the importance of putting other people first as a leader. But knowing what you should do doesn’t always tell you how to accomplish it. If you want help looking beyond yourself so that you start thinking of others first, I want to give you some practical advice about how to do it. But before I do, I want to be open about what made the difference for me. It was my faith, so if that offends you, just skip ahead to my first point.

As a person of faith, I am most inspired to put others first by looking at the life of Jesus. He once asked His disciples, who were bickering over position and titles, “Who would you rather be: the one who eats the dinner or the one who serves the dinner? You’d rather eat and be served, right? But I’ve taken my place among you as the one who serves.”² Jesus always valued others and always put them and their needs first.

Putting others first is at the heart of my Christian faith. Having said the Lord’s Prayer more times than I can count, I have realized that the prayer is very community centered. It took me years to understand that when I said the Lord’s Prayer, it wasn’t about me. The focus is on us. Yes, if we say the Lord’s Prayer, we do pray for ourselves. But we also pray for others. It’s a very inclusive prayer. It is a prayer that promotes a life that matters, that leads to significance. If you’ve prayed the prayer, think about how it starts. It says “Our Father,” and it says “give us” not “give me.”

But you don’t have to be a person of faith to begin putting others first. No matter what you believe, you probably sense that putting others first is the right thing to do, don’t you?

Five Ways to Put Others First

If you want help taking steps away from self-centeredness and toward significance, then try doing the following:

1. Develop a Greater Appreciation for Other People

Recently I spoke at a conference for ATB Financial in Edmonton, Canada. Their top three hundred leaders had gathered for a day of leadership training, and I was their keynote speaker. They had a banner draped across the stage that read, WHY WE LEAD—TO BRING OUT THE VERY BEST IN OTHERS FOR OUTSTANDING RESULTS! I loved that.

During the conference, Lorne Rubis, the organization’s chief people officer, instructed the attendees to ask themselves this question: “Who brings out the best of me?” Right alongside the others, I took his advice. For the next thirty minutes I reflected and I wrote down the names of people who have continually added value to my life. Each time I added another name to this gratitude list, I would smile and remember something each person had said or done for me that added value to my life. My list could be endless. There isn’t a week that goes by that I don’t take action on something related to what was given to me by one of these people. One of my greatest motivations to add value to others is to do for others what so many have done for me.

Making such a list reminds me that I am not a self-made man. None of us can really claim to have done anything alone, can we? We need others. And we should value them.

2. Ask to Hear Other People’s Stories

In chapter 1, I talked about the importance of stories and I encouraged you to recognize that your life can be a great story of significance. I hope you share in that belief, and I hope it motivates you personally. But does it motivate you to connect with others and learn their stories?

It should, because everyone you meet has a story. We can easily lose sight of this as we go about our busy days trying to get things done. So how do we counteract this? By asking people to tell us their stories. We have to slow down and take our attention off ourselves to do that.

Do you know the stories of the people in your life? Do you know where they’ve come from? Are you acquainted with their struggles, their defining moments? Do you know about their hopes and dreams? Have you asked what they aspire to, and what motivates them?

It’s hard to remain self-centered when your focus is on others. Hearing people’s stories is a great way to get outside of yourself. Not only will their stories inspire you to help them, they will show you ways you can help them.

3. Put Yourself in Other People’s Shoes

I read a wonderful story in the news about a couple who were in a restaurant in Iowa celebrating their anniversary. But they didn’t experience the romantic evening they were hoping for. Their waiter was overwhelmed, and the service was awful. It took twenty minutes to get water, forty minutes for an appetizer, and over an hour for their entrées to arrive.

People all around them were making fun of the restaurant and how bad the service was. After taking a look around, the couple noticed their server was working twelve tables by himself. The restaurant was clearly understaffed, and he was doing the best job he could under the circumstances. Despite the slow timing, the couple realized that the waiter remained upbeat, pleasant, and apologetic throughout the meal. He was absolutely delightful.

The husband and wife, who had both been servers earlier in life, recognized that the waiter had been set up to fail, and he was trying to do his best despite that. So they left him a one-hundred-dollar tip on a sixty-six-dollar tab, along with a note that simply read, “We’ve been in your shoes… paying it forward.”

Because this couple had done similar work to the waiter’s, they had a relatively easy time putting themselves into his shoes. But you don’t need to have worked a person’s job to understand where he or she is coming from. You just need to make the effort to see from that person’s point of view.

How often do you intentionally put yourself in other people’s shoes? Do you continually try to see the world from the point of view of others? You’ll be amazed by what it can do to your perspective and your attitude.

4. Place Other People’s Interests at the Top of Your List of Priorities

If you get to know people, appreciate them for who they are, learn their stories, and put yourself in their shoes, then you begin to understand what their interests are. What will you do with that information? Store it away hoping to use it for leverage one day? Or put it at the forefront of your thinking every day and use it to serve them?

When we get up every day, we have one of two mind-sets. As you start your day, are you wondering what you will reap, or are you wondering what you will sow? Are you waiting for others to do something for you, or are you busy looking for something to do for others? Leaders who get outside of themselves and make a difference are looking for ways to sow. They put other people’s interests at the top of their list of priorities every day.

5. Make Winning a Group Activity

When I started my career, I thought life was an individual hundred-yard dash. But life is really more of a relay race. While winning an individual race may feel great, crossing the finish line with your team is better. Not only is it more fun, but it’s also more significant.

John Wooden, who mentored me for many years, said, “Selfishness is the greatest challenge for a coach. Most players are more concerned with making themselves better than the team.” The result? Seldom do the best players make the best team. Wooden described an unselfish player as one who “showed an eagerness to lose himself to the group for the goal of the team.” Not only does that describe a good team member and a good leader, but it also describes an intentional person who lives a life that matters by making a difference.

Change Yourself before Expecting Change in Others

Before we leave the subject of getting outside of yourself and putting others first, I feel that I should caution you about a potential pitfall you may face as you make this shift—the desire to change other people.

When I first started out in my career, I thought that helping people meant trying to change them. So I made that my goal. I wanted to teach messages that would take people to a higher place in their lives. I gave lots of advice. I was young and idealistic. I didn’t yet understand that people don’t change because you want them to. They change because they want to, and it happens only when they’re ready to.

What I missed was that the first person we need to change is ourselves. Self-leadership always comes first. It is the prerequisite for leading others. If we want to change the world, then we must change. People can’t be agents of change unless they’ve gone through positive change themselves. I learned that I had to travel within before I traveled without. In other words, I had to make some changes in myself before I could expect to effect change in others. I could not give what I did not have. If I wanted to see others transformed, I had to be transformed. I had to do the hard work myself.

This ultimately contributed to my shift from teacher to leader. I realized that if I changed, then put others’ needs above my own and cared more about their wants than my own, I could make an impact. I could speak as a friend, as one who had been in the trenches, who had been where they are.

It is also one of the reasons that when I speak today I use so many personal illustrations. I know it’s the most effective way to connect with people. All of my conviction and confidence comes from talking about things that happened to me. When I speak about my experiences, people relate mine to how their own experiences have affected them.

The power of personal transformation to help others can be seen in Global Teen Challenge, an organization that helps kids get off drugs. I serve on an advisory board to them, and when I hear the stories of transformation, it amazes and inspires me. Their organization’s success rate is nearly 70 percent, while that of others trying to do the same things is closer to 18 percent.

Curious about the staggering difference, I asked the president of Global Teen Challenge about it at one of our meetings. He responded, “Almost all the people that do the teaching for Global Teen Challenge are former drug addicts. We don’t bring in people who have studied the drug issue. We don’t bring in educators to talk to people. There’s tremendous change that happens in someone’s life when the person who’s trying to help them out of the ditch had to get out of the ditch him- or herself.”

There is an amazing amount of motivation, hope, and credibility when someone has been there, done that, and gone on to become successful. If the person telling you to get off drugs hasn’t been through the experience, there’s no common ground—or credibility. If they have done drugs, yet kicked the habit, they stand on higher ground saying, “Come up to where I am standing.” We lead better when it’s from experience.

But the key change is not just in our experiences or our decisions. What really needs to change are our hearts. What must transform are our attitudes. What must be purified are our motives. We can’t allow our lives to be all about us. That’s not the way to do something that makes a difference. It’s not the way to lead others. If we want to choose significance, to be effective leaders, we must put other people first.

Making It a Priority to Put Others First

After I served in my second leadership role in Lancaster, I spent almost two years working in Indiana, which I’ll talk about in chapter 6, and then I became the senior pastor at Skyline, a church in the San Diego area. I spent fourteen years there, and I loved it. We made a positive impact on our community. We donated significant amounts of money to the county for projects every year. And we led many people to lives of significance. In addition, people came from all over to visit the church, attend services, and worship among the thousands of congregants. Wherever I traveled, people would say, “This is one of the most influential pastors in the country.” In the eyes of many, I had reached the pinnacle of success as a pastor.

While I was appreciative of the opportunities I’d been given throughout the years, and was grateful to be included in the company of leaders I viewed as better, faster, and smarter than I was, I had a sense that I could make an even greater impact. I felt I could be more significant by serving and adding value to people outside the church than I could if I remained in the pastorate.

I recognized I could no longer hold on to all I had if I wanted to move on, serve more people, and do bigger things. I knew it would be impossible to keep leading Skyline and help even more people outside the church at the same time. I couldn’t do both with excellence.

This wouldn’t be an easy decision. All my life I had been able to point to something tangible as a symbol of my success. I worried that if I left the church, I would no longer have that, and the loss of this aspect of my personal identity gave me great hesitancy about resigning. However, I knew that I wanted to go toward my higher calling, where I knew I could serve others and make a difference. So I tendered my resignation at Skyline, and I started to focus my attention on putting others first by training leaders across the country.

I had been leading leadership conferences for fourteen years by that time, and I noticed that more and more businesspeople had begun showing up to learn from me, even though the conferences were designed primarily for church leaders. So I knew I would continue teaching leadership, but I started to make it more inclusive.

At this time I also put more focus on writing books. I wanted to make a difference in the lives of people I would never get to meet or who would not attend my conferences. I began partnering with Charlie Wetzel as my writer. Since then, he and I have written nearly ninety books together.

The second area where I put more energy was in helping other church leaders raise money for building projects. One of the things I had done not only at Skyline but also in Lancaster and Hillham was raise money to construct new buildings and relocate our growing congregations. I remember thinking to myself, If I can raise millions of dollars for my church, what would happen if I started a company that could help churches and pastors all over America to do that? I started another company and hired some good leaders I knew to become consultants to churches. Those consultants served many pastors and their churches. Together, we helped churches to raise $3 billion.

But perhaps the most significant change I made came when my brother Larry and I founded the nonprofit organization EQUIP. The seed for the idea was planted in 1985, when I was thirty-eight years old. I was coming home from a trip to Peru, where I had spent a week speaking to a group of American translators. They were a group of very smart and talented people, but they were consumed with their work. They were in leadership positions, and I spoke to them about improving their leadership skills, but they weren’t especially responsive to my message, and, frankly, I was frustrated by their lack of interest in the help I was trying to offer them. They couldn’t see beyond their pressing responsibilities to learn something new that would help them improve their leadership skills.

On the flight home, I turned to Margaret and said, “I don’t want to speak in other countries anymore. In America I can use all of my tools to impart what I’ve learned. I can fall back on my sense of humor to teach my leadership principles and get a response from nearly any audience. Whenever I speak internationally, the response is slow at best because there are cultural differences. It’s hard work. I don’t need to work that hard! I think I’ll stay home.”

Margaret responded by asking, “Is there a need to raise up solid leaders around the world?”

“Of course,” I replied.

“Do you believe that you can help them become better leaders?”

“Yes,” I answered, “but it’s a slow, laborious process and it’s not what I like to do.”

“John, God didn’t give you your gifts for you to please yourself. He gave them to you to help others.”

Wow! Those words hit me in the gut. The moment she said it, I knew she was right. I needed to put other people’s needs ahead of my own.

I dropped the subject in our conversation, but I could not get rid of it in my mind. For the next several days I mentally and spiritually wrestled with the selfishness of my heart. I knew what I should do, and boy, was it at odds with what I wanted to do.

This wasn’t going to be a situation where I could make a list of pros and cons and act on whichever column had more items listed. I knew the importance of the individual pros would have greater weight than the sheer number of cons. No matter how much I wanted to stay in my comfort zone, stay away from unfamiliar food, rely on my American humor, and stick with the relative ease of traveling within my own country, I had to face a decision.

When I did sit down with a legal pad in my favorite thinking chair, I listed more than a dozen reasons why I didn’t want to teach internationally on my con side of the list. On the pro side, there were only two:

1. It was the right thing to do.

2. I couldn’t ignore my true calling.

In the end, I knew that if I didn’t follow through, the loser would be me. Why? Because I wouldn’t be doing the one thing I had committed myself to—adding value to the lives of others. I had never put conditions on where people had to live when I made that commitment. If I wanted to reach my significance potential, I needed to be willing to put others first.

From that time, I began to accept more invitations to teach leadership outside the United States. But my commitment to serving others outside the United States didn’t go to the next level until Larry and I founded EQUIP, a nonprofit dedicated to training leadership internationally.

Now, two decades later, I can look back and say that it’s been an amazing journey. We have trained five million leaders from every country in the world. And today we’re making efforts to put others first by teaching values, which we hope will transform nations.

Remember, Everyone Starts Small

One of my worries about telling you my story is that it might sound bigger and better than it really is. Don’t forget that I started out in Hillham, and I spent twenty-six years working to add value to people before Larry and I started EQUIP. Is it true that EQUIP has trained more than five million people? Yes. Do Larry and I deserve the credit for that? No. It is the result of hundreds of volunteers and thousands of donors. We owe a lot to the original board of directors who bankrolled the entire organization, and to subsequent board members who supported the vision mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and financially. Because they put others first and provided leadership to make a difference, we have been able to serve many people.

You don’t have to have an organization to put others first. And you don’t have to want to do big things. Doing something for one person is big. The point is to get started and serve others. You can do that, and you can start today.