Often, loyalty means telling people things they don't want to hear. It's not being sycophantic, it's not telling them how wonderful they are every day. It's being willing to tell them the days they're not wonderful.
Every minister worthy of the name has to walk the line between prophetic vision and spiritual sustenance, between telling people the comforting things they want to hear and challenging them with the difficult things they need to hear. In Oxford, Daddy began to feel as though all the members wanted him to do was to marry them and bury them and stay away from their souls.
I became a conservative because I believe that caring for people means more than just spending taxpayer money; it means delivering results. It means respecting and challenging our citizens, telling them what they need to hear, not simply what they want to hear.
In the Christian sense, love is not primarily an emotion but an act of the will. When Jesus tells us to love our neighbors, he is not telling us to love them in the sense of responding to them with a cozy emotional feeling. You can as well produce a cozy emotional feeling as you can a cough or sneeze. On the contrary, he is telling us to love our neighbors in the sense of being willing to work for their well-being even if it means sacrificing our well-being to that end.
Experts in ancient Greek culture say that people back then didn't see their thoughts as belonging to them. When ancient Greeks had a thought, it occurred to them as a god or goddess giving an order. Apollo was telling them to be brave. Athena was telling them to fall in love. Now people hear a commercial for sour cream potato chips and rush out to buy, but now they call this free will. At least the ancient Greeks were being honest.
I've produced things myself, I was like telling the producers how to do the show. They really didn't appreciate that, they just wanted a dumb rocker on the show and they got some guy telling them how to do their job. So being too smart can get in the way.
Instead of telling them God has a wonderful plan for their life - tell them who God is.
So you can say, 'Get Big Government out of here, and don't tell me what to eat,' but when kids are going to school, and they're being fed junk, we're pretty much telling them what to eat, and we're telling them junk is OK.
So many people are going to always remember what you do and how you make them feel instead of you telling them this and telling them that. That's why I like to go out and show the work ethic and how I am as a teammate. That's how you become great.
Too often, when you are close to people in power, you're trying to make them happy; you're trying to tell them what they want to hear. But I find that really good leaders don't want that. They want the truth. And you do them a service, and yourself a service, by just being honest and straightforward.
I get people stopping me on the street like twenty times a day, telling me how great it makes them feel and how it just helps them to go about their day and rebuild their lives. It means a tremendous amount.
I'm myself - knowing I'm doing a documentary and speaking with the people, telling them I have a bed, that I can eat every day, but I would like to speak to you. And they really gave me wonderful answers. We got along very well without trying to make me look like I'm what I'm not.
Professional courage is the steel fiber that makes an NCO unafraid and willing to tell it like it is. The concept of professional courage does not always mean being as tough as nails, either. It also suggests a willingness to listen to the soldiers' problems, to go to bat for them in a tough situation and it means knowing just how far they can go. It also means being willing to tell the boss when he is wrong.
[People] don't like the government telling them what to do or telling them how to live their lives.
The way you build trust with your people is by being forthright and clear with them from day one. You may think people are fooled when you tell them what they want to hear. They are not fooled.
To talk about something like prostitution, the other person then becomes the wild card that will have a response, and it may not be the response you want. Sometimes I think saying it would be selfish to tell them is still being under the illusion that you have all the power. You say it would be selfish to tell them, when in fact you're scared that in telling them, it gives them the power to do what they might want to do because once they know, they become somebody who could be reactive.
Goals. There's no telling what you can do when you get inspired by them. There's no telling what you can do when you believe in them. There's no telling what will happen when you act upon them.