Episode 140 - Dr. Don Hamilton - Leaders On Leadership
You can set yourself up for success. Be the leader you're meant to be. Join your host, Dr. Tracey Jones, as she interviews Dr. Don Mark Hamilton about leadership even in the most challenging times. Dr. Don Mark pastored the large and healthy Vibrant Christian Church in Mechanicsburg, PA, for thirty-eight years until his retirement in 2020. Don is now a blogger, author, and public speaker rooted in the charge to Live Inspired! He shares how to deal with loneliness, weariness, and abandonment and still bring out the best version of yourself. You have to choose to deal with the changes because they may affect different aspects of your life. Tune into this episode for growth and success secrets!
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Dr. Don Hamilton - Leaders On Leadership
I am honored and blessed to introduce to you, Dr. Don Mark Hamilton. Dr. Hamilton or Don is the blessed father of 4 beautiful daughters with soon-to-be 3 sons-in-law and 7 awesome grandchildren. Don was married to Gail Hamilton for 38 years until her passing in 2018 of pancreatic cancer. Don pastored the large Vibrant Christian Church in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania for 38 years until his retirement in 2020. Don is a blogger, author and public speaker rooted in the charge to Live Inspired. Don's articles and resources can be found on DonMarkHamilton.com. He is working on three books to be published in 2022. Don, it is tremendous to have you on the show.
Thanks very much, Tracey. I'm honored to be here early in.
You're welcome. For those readers that know this show, Kristin is Don's daughter. I have the joy of getting to work with Kristin. I get the second generation tremendousness. You knew my father, Don.
I knew your dad very well. He was one of my mentors. I met him at a conference somewhere initially. I had a good buddy who was an executive in one of the local companies and he said, “I have to take you over to Charlie's place to meet him.” I did and that started it. He gave me that old big trademark hug of his and that started a friendship. He taught me a lot about leadership and more importantly, about life.
Thank you so much for sharing that. The reason we are here is to talk about one of his most famous speeches, and that is the Price of Leadership. You knew my father and a lot of our readers did. He was very motivated but he was also incredibly pragmatic. He was very much like, “Leadership is going to be joyful but you're going to have to pay a price. It's going to be tough but it's worth it.” What we are going to unpack in the Price of Leadership is the four points he talked about.
The first one my father talked about was that if you're going to be a leader and not just a leader in name only, you're going to encounter times of loneliness. Could you unpack that for us? You have spent decades running a church and dealt with loneliness in your life. What would you say to our readers out there, perhaps if they are in a season of loneliness and what it means for you?
For me, there are a lot of times, especially if you're the sole leader of an organization. In any level of leadership, you realize that the buck does stop there. With that, it leaves you feeling alone sometimes and even a little abandoned in certain circumstances. For me, it was always a matter of having mentors like Charlie and people that I could unload that stuff on, had already been there, done that, walked that path and that I could go whine to. I'm good at whining. When you feel lonely, you usually feel whiny. You go sit in the corner and whine. I did that.
For me, I'm a person of faith and with my relationship with God, I knew he was always there. Sometimes he felt distant in those situations and yet as you read through the record that he gave us from the Scriptures all the way down through history, another thing that was so encouraging to me was to see that he's so honest about the leaders in the Bible. I cannot imagine. I would think to myself, “Moses must have felt terribly lonely working with these stiff-neck people.” He did it a lot better than I could ever do it.
In Joshua's final charge, “You're going to have to be strong and courageous.” He tells him that 3 or 4 times because he knew there were going to be some lonely moments. Also, I was blessed in that somebody, at one point, challenged me to learn about solitude. I've learned about solitude, journaling and journaling my prayers. After I had done that for so long, it was like going to a well. You're thirsty, you go to that well on a regular basis and you're comfortable with yourself, your God and where you are. If you're in the middle of one of those lonely times and it's because some bad things have happened, you're always, “This too shall pass.” It does.
Those are some of the ways that I have always worked through my times of loneliness. The other thing is I developed deep friendships through the years. I'm not sure what motivated me to do that but I have deep friendships with a group of fellow leaders and we grew up together. We are all across the country and the world. We get together and chat. When 1 of us is down, the other 3 or 4 of us would pull them up. We meet together with some regularity down through the years. That was helpful because I know some leaders tend to isolate themselves. To me, that is a prescription for disaster. There are too many things that you cannot handle by yourself.
I love that you hit on a nuance that leaders can feel lonely. You touched on that sometimes they feel even abandoned. We are going to talk about abandonment as the third point but in a slightly different thing. That is very transparent of you because we have to watch that bitterness. You will be abandoned as a leader. Jesus was. Even Jesus had his Judas.
I tell people, “I don't care how great you think you are. There is somebody out there in your camp who is not all in.” It's going to leave you feeling abandoned and it's okay. It's par for the course. I love that you talked about having a group of people. I started watching The Chosen. Thanks to your connection. Every day and every episode, Jesus says, “I'm off on my own.” He says, “Where are you going?” Jesus says, “I need to be alone.” It reminds me that we do need to go and be in solitude. There's beautiful loneliness and there's the other part of it that you're going to feel too.
It's very helpful to have a larger picture in mind and to never lose the larger picture of life in general. As a leader, you're going to get to me too undeserved. You're going to get undeserved glory. Something has gone well and you may have initiated it and put some of it together. You know very well you are not responsible for what happened but you get the glory because you're the person at the top. The second undeserved to me is you get undeserved criticism. No matter what way you choose, the old saying, “Damn if you do, damned if you don't,” is true. If you've got a bigger picture of the whole thing, the undeserved glory and criticism don't go to your head. It pulls you through that lonely feeling of being there.
When we are not yanked around by our feelings but just no knowledge of, “This too shall pass,” that there is a bigger picture. We are never walking through this alone. A valley has a bottom and then you start uphill again. I appreciate that because that's going to help our readers go, “This is the season and it's okay.” It keeps you from doing something, walking off a job, firing off an email, falling on your sword, that we all like to do when we're suffering. Thank you for that. I've been there.
Leadership Success: Leadership leaves you feeling alone sometimes, even a little abandoned in certain circumstances. But it was always a matter of having mentors to guide you along the way.
I always did love that saying, “They don't grow crops on mountain tops. They grow them in the valley.”
I have never heard that. I thought I heard everything so I'm getting a lot. Thank you for sharing the feeling of loneliness. You gave our readers some applicable tools and resources to go ahead and be prepared for that. Don't get caught unaware. Whenever I catch a leader saying, “I feel so alone.” It's like, “No kidding. You got to prepare for that.” The next thing my father talked about was weariness. I always think of the parable of the olive tree. You grow something and there is a lot of good and bad that lands in there. How do you stay at the top of your game when a lot of people are depending on you and your vision, touch, prayers and everything?
I would go back to that solitude or quiet. It's developing a good rhythm when times are very demanding and you're on big projects, especially projects that are lengthy. I remember we built a very large playground. Our church had a 53-acre campus. It was a community park and we built a large special needs playground. We were doing it in 2008 during the Recession trying to raise $800,000. Everybody said, “You couldn't do that.” The Lord came through and we built that.
I remember it took us a year to get the whole thing going and then we built it. It was a community built in seven days. At the end of it, a special needs playground has to have a poured rubber floor. That's very expensive and we didn't have the money for that. We had this playground sitting out there that nobody could use, which is the worst possible thing. I got this far and can't close the loop. We were tired by then. We had already been working on it for over a year and had a long way to go.
I had a group of 4 or 5 people. Some were leaders in my church and some were staff members. We would play off of each other. Laurie Cartmell was one person that led me through that. One day, I would be over there whining to her in her office, “I am so tired. I am sick of this crap and I'm done.” She's like, “We are not.” Three days later, she would be in my office doing the same thing. We kept at it.
Right before Christmas at the end of that year, we got a gift of $120,000 that was totally unexpected. It put us over the hump. As soon as spring got there, we could pour the floor and things could go forward. A two-year process on a large project was tiring. It wears you out. Also, on the subject of weariness, something I have learned from Nehemiah is there was a time when Nehemiah was rebuilding those walls. He was perceptive enough to know that you're going to face opposition and it's going to wear not only you out but also the people who are doing the labor.
You've got to plan for that in any project. It seems to me that if it lasts very long at all, you're going to have the initial excitement. Everybody is going to be on board and ready to rock and roll. People came out, 1,400 of them worked for that week and then they went back home and sat down. You're not done. You've got this long project, have opposition during that and then come all the way to the very end of it.
What does charge you up? What helps you to get through this weariness? I always had an illustration that I used. I saw it somewhere back through the years of the three buckets. As a leader, you have things that fill and empty your bucket and your bucket is going to be leaky no matter what. You’ve got to keep your bucket full enough because you're pouring into other people's lives constantly.
Sometimes, in the midst of constantly doing and working at things, you get to a point where you don't realize your bucket is getting emptier. At some point, it can become dangerously empty and you have not given attention. Sometimes people don't even know what does fill your bucket because you're going to need that or what that is in those times. That is what gets you through the weariness of it.
Another thing, especially in the business world but even in the church world is there is the biblical concept of the Sabbath. As leaders and I did this for years, you feel like you can go 24/7, 365 and you can't. Your bucket gets empty. You get worn out. You finally come up against a project that you don't have the personal resources to do. You get tired and weary.
It's a rhythm on a daily basis then weekly and then yearly where you have to have the self-discipline. Develop that to pull away and say, “I need one day this month where I'm not doing anything.” Whatever it is for you, like hiking or longer periods of time as you're out of place. I don't think the human body and certainly the human mind, God did not design us to go 24/7, 365. He made a serious point that, “You take a day of rest and I mean business about it.”
That is serious business. You look at what is going on in the world and see the effects of this and of running even if you're not a believer. We are not coded for this and meant to do this.
It's easy as a leader to get an inflated view of your worth. The last four years of my ministry were the hardest of the entire 38 years. By that time you think, “I'm going to slide those last few years.” It didn't turn out that way. Our church was growing tremendously. We went through a name change and structural changes. The people in my older board, there were 9 of us, 7 of us had serious cancer illnesses in the family.
One of our elders died suddenly in a car crash. My wife got pancreatic cancer and that was a 22-month ordeal. A guy who is my son-in-law was my campus pastor at the time. His wife at the time was 34 years old, a young woman. He went downstairs one day, came back up and she was gone. She had died. It went on and on. At the same time, I was trying to do a capital campaign. We were designing a new building and it was a lot.
Leadership Success: If you're in the middle of one of those lonely times, always say, “This too shall pass,” and it will.
By the time I got to the end of it, I realized, “You are worn out a lot more than what you ever thought you were and you need to figure it out.” Number one, at my particular juncture at the time, I was like, “You need a new season. It's time for you to turn a chapter.” That was hard to do but God said, “Over a period of months, I'm taking you somewhere else. I want you to prepare your organization as best you know how and I'll help you for the future.” We did a two-year succession plan and that turned out well. People around me realized but I didn't realize I was utterly worn out.
We never see it. We think we're keeping it together. When the trauma has passed, I have had people say to me, “I'm glad that was over because you became something different.” I'm like, “What?” It has to. I also appreciate you sharing with leaders that there is this thing that we think, “I'm going to get it all dialed in like a finely tuned fighter jet.” God can call you.
I love that your ending was the hardest part of the race because you might think once you got things cooking and the team is there, you can sit on the beach and drink non-alcoholic Mai Tais all day long. That is not possibly God's calling. I love that you brought that up at the end because sometimes when finishing the race, you may even think, “Am I going to even make it across it?” It doesn't mean you're doing anything wrong. It is what it is. It's how God orchestrates it all.
It's back to that original point of it's easy to get an inflated view of you're important to the organization. Somewhere along the line somebody said, “They will have forgotten your name in six weeks.” It's the nature of it. I have a very close friend of mine who is a leadership trainer in a Fortune 500 company. Concerning my successor, he says, “They always say they all want your advice but I don't want your advice. They could care less what you’ve got to say.” It turned out that way and it's not bad. It's the nature of things. The organization will go on without you and do quite well. When you get that in your mind, it's much easier to move on.
I'm glad you said that because a lot of other people that we have interviewed have said it was shocking because when they were done, they were done. It's time. People have to continue to move on. You have made your mark and hope you will stay in touch with a couple of people. That is the nature of what it is. People are too concerned. In other words, don't keep drawing it out. You always want to leave strong and not all the things you should have checked out a couple of years ago.
When you have been in an organization for a long time that is harder to realize than if you're in a short-term situation. You're so used to it. It's your life. When you walk in my situation as a “pastor of a church,” that becomes your identity whether you consciously do that or not. You subconsciously assume that, “This is always going to be my dead-end.” In fact, it's not. I'm not a pastor, at least in the same way. It's a very different way and I'm enjoying it.
We did loneliness and weariness. The next thing my dad talked about was abandonment and you had hit on that. His point of abandonment was that we need to stop thinking about what we like and want to think about in favor of what we ought and need to think about. It was very much focused. You've said the discipline word many times throughout this. How do you stay abandoned? You've got your flock and a million things, three books, blogs, this and that. How do you stay abandoned every moment to what you need to focus on?
I know I keep coming back to this but for me, at least, people that do that well slowly over time usually develop a rhythm that is productive. It helps you to say, “I'm not going to spend four hours in front of the TV tonight. I'm going to spend an hour and a half.” For the other ones, “I'm going to go work out, read, write, spend time with my family and do the things that should be up high on the priority list.” You can get this entitlement mentality even that, “I have worked ten hours. I deserve to sit in front of the TV with a very large bowl of popcorn.” What you end up doing is developing that as a pattern like Pavlov's dog and that pattern is counterproductive. It's the same thing for me in the morning. I like to get the morning started right.
One of my favorite books is Make Your Bed. It's that little book. I can't remember if the guy was an Admiral McRaven but he wrote the book. He makes a point that in the military, the first thing you do is make your bed. It equates to a win and a pattern that you're developing on a daily basis that brings out your best self and abilities. That's the first thing I do. I make my bed. I've got my little routine and all that. I've got a chair in my living room that I have sat in for years. I'm on the second one wearing it out. I'm going to read, write and journal.
Leadership a lot is about what you say no to and those two little ladders are so powerful. Everybody's got to learn, if you're a leader especially, what you are going to say no to. There are always bazillion things to occupy your time and even more than your time, your mental energy. Leadership is so much about mental and emotional energy.
In the rhythm you talked about, you don't write the whole opus. It's one beat at a time. I love the fact when you talked about making your bed equates to a win. What my dad would say with abandonment is, “Tracey, when you get down billable hours at the end of the day, how many things you did contribute to your success and failure?” When you look at it, you can go, “This is why it's not happening for me.”
Incrementally, little thing. I'm not saying you have to throw all the TVs out of the house like he did when we were growing up. If you have to do it, you have to do it. Discipline and that rhythm, even if it's for an hour a day as you did before and then incrementally, is how you get a lot more clarity. You can deflect them a lot easier because you're so dialed in.
There are a couple of books on the power of habits. One is Atomic Habits. A guy named Duhigg wrote one called The Power of Habit. The whole point is that very minimal changes make a big difference. What those changes are that you choose to make also are so important because some changes have a domino effect. This good thing that I'm developing is going to have a domino effect in my leadership and life, whereas I might make another choice that might even be a good choice but it's not one that's necessarily going to have a domino effect on other areas of my life.
Either way, the point is very small and incremental changes make such a huge difference. That is about abandoning some stuff that I want to do or that is impulsive. I'm an impulsive guy. I go to the store, see something and I’m like, “I need that. Do you have to lure the disc? I don't think you do need that, Hamilton.” You can live that way, impulsively and it doesn't add up to strong leadership.
Sometimes, it's that one little thing like a ball falling when you're playing pool that may make it over. There's loneliness, weariness, abandonment and lastly, vision. My father would say that vision is not some esoteric, mythical thing that the greats, the Zuckerbergs, the Oprah Winfreys or the brilliant people see. Vision is seeing what needs to be done. You're doing it and executing it because if you don't execute it, it's this thing floating around. How do you get vision clarity? You went through this big transition where you got the calling or the pivot point. Unpack for our readers what they should be looking for if there are vision blockers or how you're honing this next stage of your life.
What people always told me is, “Your strongest thing is you're a visionary and you, secondly, are able to inspire people towards that vision. You're very good at that. You're a strategic planner.” You're taking the history that you developed based on this abandonment and the other points of leadership and developing a process whereby you can visualize and see.
Vision is what I call a picture of a preferred future. You've developed the knack and the ability to learn how to pursue something when you do see it. To me, it's like when you went to high school and college and everybody always complains that there are all these classes that, “I don't need to learn that. Why would I want to learn about psychology? I'm going to be an accountant.” All of us complained about that stuff but the bigger principle of education is you got to teach yourself how to be educated because the ultimate goal is for you to educate yourself.
It's like in Christianity. To me, if you have been a Christian for fifteen years and you still have to be spoonfed by a pastor or a church something is not right. Adult people feed themselves and they do that because they have learned how to do that. The best discipline in life is learning. Solomon says, “Where do you get wisdom? Where do you learn to fear God?” You'll get it and see it coming into your life or get an understanding of that thing. I've been writing a little bit about this in Nehemiah. Leaders do tend to see things that sometimes other people don't see or they see the same things that another person sees but the distinguishing characteristic is exactly what you're saying. They want to do something about it.
I have a good friend that ran an Upward Basketball program for years. It was a great program. About 220 people were kids in our church and from the community play. He would always go to the parents. I know if you've had kids in sports, parents are notorious for being jerks. “You ought to be doing this, that and so on.” He would get them all together. At the beginning of the year, he would have his speech. He'd say, “I'm going to do things that are not the best here. I'm sure I will do things that could be done better and so forth. You're going to see some of those things.”
Leadership Success: As a leader, you have things that fill and empty your bucket, and your bucket is going to be leaky no matter what. You got to keep your bucket full enough because you're pouring into other people's lives constantly.
He says, “I'm glad for you to come to me with, ‘We ought to be doing this way.’” Then he would always tell him the second step, “You come to me with the thing that you see wrong, with a solution and with the willingness to be part of the solution. If you don't, don't come to me.” That often is the difference. You have to develop an aptitude towards, I'm a doer rather than a listener of whatever it is I'm pursuing.”
For me, writing is a very different discipline than leading a large organization, preaching and so forth. There are so many different aspects to that whereas writing is very focused. I tended to like to do everything. If you're a leader like me, I had trouble saying no because I liked everything about the church and loved everything about leadership. I love public speaking and liked cleaning the church. I would clean the church and you get to a point where, “Don, you don't need to be spending 2 or 3 hours cleaning the church at this particular stage.”
In becoming a writer, I have this vision of, “I want to start to write.” One thing my nephew, who has written a couple of very successful books says, “I'll tell you one thing, Uncle Don. Writers have to write.” A lot of writers are supposedly writers but they are just talking about it. I've read a number of books since I have been trying to pursue this and talked to you some. It all comes down to this, “You set your rear end down in that chair and start writing and do it every day. You will slowly but surely become a writer.” Any vision is like that. It ends up being, “I need to do something about this.”
I love that you brought on the obvious and the non-obvious because my focus is followership. Where leaders can avoid burnout is by bringing the followers that can see the obvious. You don't need to tell them, “This is not Mother May I? You do it.” In the military, you do it if you see something wrong. That is good for leaders. You need to focus on seeing the vision that is not obvious. You're going to get the call, not because you're smarter than everybody but for whatever reason God chose to give it to you.
It's like in The Chosen when Peter was like, “Why did you pick me? Andrew, why do you think he picked you?” He says, “I don't know. He just did.” It's a mystery for leaders to dial into people. That will help you with the other things too like the weariness and loneliness. You want followers that don't have to sit there and wait for permission to do what needs to be done. I tell them 80% of business is intuitively obvious to the most casual observer. You can say, “That is no vision.” It is vision, discipline, seeing what needs to be done and doing it.
It's that residual momentum that keeps the day-to-day tactical stuff going. The strategy is more of a creative aspect. I liked that you separated the two. You want people that, going back to Moses, aren't always coming to you saying, “Do you think this is going to work? I don't think this is going to work.” If you're not in with the vision, go to another tribe.
Going back to the point of abandonment, the other things I would say on a much deeper and on a bigger scale would have been you must abandon your pride if you want to be a good leader. Humility, to me is the linchpin of leadership. You have to abandon your insecurity because if you don't, you won't be able to get the vision. An insecure leader will not allow people to make decisions on their own. An insecure leader won't delegate. They are afraid that they are not going to get their due. It doesn't work that way. To me, you get the big picture and figure it out. Most of us are good at 1, 2 and 3 things. That's it. You're probably good at about one thing. You need to figure out what is your one thing and do it. There are very few projects that involve just one thing.
You better find people around you, the better you can find and then let them run with it. I go back to Nehemiah. Nehemiah was not going to build a wall around Jerusalem not even remotely by himself. That is ludicrous. He was going to have to enlist the entire community to get this thing done, especially the leadership in the community. In order to do that, he had to be a humble guy. John Doe comes out of his house every day. There is the sheep gate. The sheep gate is barred. You can't even walk through the crazy thing. It's all torn apart. That guy has got to stare at that gate every day.
A leader comes along and says, “You don't have to stare at that gate being broken down. I'll bet you can fix it.” He says, “I can't fix it. I have been working in the King's court my whole life. I don't know anything about fixing doors but you and your neighbors do so I will get you the resources.” To me, that is another thing that sometimes leaders don't recognize. You can even get good people around you but 1) If you won't let them do their job, and then 2) If you don't resource them properly, you will end up losing your best.
The people didn't have the wherewithal to build that. They didn't have the wood, the hinges and so forth but Nehemiah knew where he could get that. He brought it with him and said, “You got it. Here it is.” They will do the work. To me, it's not just a vision of a wall that was completed. It's, “What resources do these people need that they cannot provide for themselves?” A leader has access usually or knows how to go about getting resources that many times that’s not the role of the followers.
Once you provide those resources then they are going to be able to pursue that vision. The leader is tasked to keep. You got to paint that vision over and over and paint it in fifteen different ways and times. When you're the one hammering the nails, you forget, “Why am I doing this again?” He said, “You are doing this for your kids, Jerusalem and the city.”
I'm sure you've heard about this famous old illustration. I've been reading a book about the great cathedrals of Europe. The story of God that comes up where he sees these three different Masons working on this cathedral. The Masons were a generational thing because cathedrals usually took hundreds of years to build. He walks up to the first guy and says, “What are you doing?” He says, “I'm laying bricks.” He was pretty blunt about it.
He walked up to the next guy. He says, “What are you doing? He says, “I'm building a big, beautiful wall here.” He says, “That's good.” He walks up to the third guy he finds and says, “What are you doing?” He says, “I am building a structure to the almighty god of the universe.” That third guy somewhere had a different vision than what that first guy had. To me, the responsibility of the leader is to get all of them to be the third guy. “We are not just putting bricks on bricks and building a wall here. We are building something great.” That can be a program, a project or the overarching theme of whatever organization it is.
Leadership Success: A leader usually has access or knows how to go about getting resources.
It's hard for people to stay fired up if they lose their vision and lose track of, “What is my part in the play? How does it contribute to the whole?” That is a harder thing to do. A leader needs to address that on a frequent basis because when you're sitting there on the computer and filling out forms, it's pretty easy to lose sight of, “What are these forms? It's for somebody's healthcare. This is important.” Somebody has got to remind everybody of that. It falls with the leadership.
I have heard that cathedral story before. That is so profound. It's how everybody does the same thing and shows up at the same job but some people go and think it's the worst thing in the world. Other people are like, “This is the most brilliant thing.” We have covered quite a lot and you have shared with our readers a ton of great resources, real-world stories and your wisdom, Don. Is there anything else that you would like to share with our readers about leadership? How about some of these books that you're working on? Would you like to share a little bit about that?
I have mentioned Nehemiah several times. That is where my world is. You and I have had the chance to talk about this. Many years ago, I found an interest and I don't know if it was a class or something in Nehemiah. It was one of the greatest leadership books that have ever been written. You have to perceive that and look at it from a leader's bird's-eye view.
I'm writing a shorter book on Nehemiah and then a longer one. It's based on this study I did years ago that I called The Six E’s of Success that you Examine, Evaluate, Envision, Encourage, Equip and Enjoy. This is going to play out a little bit differently than that. I'm writing a short one and then I'm writing a longer book, which is going to be a 40-day leadership devotional with 40 lessons from Nehemiah. I'm working on that. I'm working on another book called Just Go on Anyway.
I had this saying throughout my life that served me well. There are those times where you're weary and you've done it but you failed. It is that you just did. Sometimes, it was your own fault and sometimes it was the circumstances beyond your control. A lot of people failed in business and there wasn't anything they could do about it. Nobody's buying.
There are a number of times in your life. Your wife gets sick and passes. You got to look at yourself in the mirror every once in a while and say, “I'm going to go on anyway.” It's not a stoic thing. It's, “I am going to go on anyway.” I'm writing a book called Just Go on Anyway and it covers a number of like, “Just go on anyway when your business went under, when the divorce papers were signed and when you got outsourced.” There is a myriad of subjects that we all go through. I'm picking out 40 or 50 of those. I'm thinking of doing a series of books on, “Just go on anyway.” I have been working on that as well. I do my weekly blog, which is usually around 1,000 words or so and a 6 to 7-minute read. I'm enjoying it.
Where can people find you? Where can they read this tremendous blog of yours? How can they connect with you? I know a lot of our readers are going to want to reach out to you.
DonMarkHamilton.com is my website. There is some other information that I will continue to place on there and some other resources. As a matter of fact, there is that article. I titled it Why Your Life Sucks and What You Can Do About It? It is a study of the Book of Nehemiah. You can download that for free. You'll see the blog button there. You can click on the blog and subscribe to that. You'll get a weekly email with that and once in a while some other things. I'll keep everybody up through that on where I'm at with the books or other projects.
I'm doing some speaking. I've done some development for some nonprofit groups and their leadership teams. I'll do that and I'm available to do those things. I did one for My Cerebral Palsy, a group down in Baltimore as well. I'm doing and enjoying doing that. You can get a hold of me at DonMarkHamilton@Gmail.com. If you approach me on the website, you can put contact and it will be a different email address from my website. Either one of those is fine.
Don, thank you for pouring out your wisdom to us. For our readers out there, please make sure and reach out to Don. He is a tremendous resource and has seen a thing or two as you have heard. He is a very seasoned, connected and grounded leader. That's who we need to surround ourselves with so take advantage of this. Don, thank you for being a part of this and for the joy you are.
You're more than welcome. Thank you, Tracey. I'm honored to get to chat with you.
You are so welcome. For our readers out there, if you liked what you read, please be sure and subscribe. Give us a like. The joy and blessing of a five-star rating would be so appreciated. Wherever you listen to this podcast, we are everywhere across all the different platforms. Leave us a comment. We answer all the different ones that we get from people. We would love to know what you're reading and what thoughts you were inspired by on your leadership journey. To all our tremendous leaders out there, you keep on paying the price of leadership. We are so thankful for you. Be sure and go over to TremendousLeadership.com and sign up for your two free eBooks to get you on your tremendous journey. Keep it up, Tremendous Tribe. We love you. We're thankful for you.
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About Dr. Don Hamilton
Dr. Don Mark Hamilton is the blessed father of four beautiful daughters, soon-to-be three sons-in-law, and seven awesome grandchildren. Don was married to Gail Hamilton for thirty-eight years until her passing in 2018 from Pancreatic Cancer. Don pastored the large and healthy Vibrant Christian Church in Mechanicsburg, Pa for thirty-eight years until his retirement in 2020. Don is now a blogger, author, and public speaker rooted in the charge to Live Inspired! Don's articles and resources can be found on DonMarkHamilton.com. He is presently working on three books to be published in the coming year.