“You saved my life,” she said. I moved a little closer to hear.

I was eavesdropping on a conversation between my friend Tyler and a listener (hereafter referred to as a P1) who had heard Tyler share on the air about getting a mammogram. The listener, er-P1, was prompted to do likewise and discovered the early stage of breast cancer. Tyler had, in fact, played a role in saving her life.

That listener, er- P1, could have told Tyler that she really loved “This Day in History” at 7:35 every morning (“National Belly Button Lent Day”, dontcha know), or that she enjoyed the no-repeat workday marathon with no talk, or that she really enjoyed the talk over bed on the new weather jingle. But what this listener, er-P1, was reacting to was not some programming tactic (although there is nothing wrong with that to quote the great philosopher Seinfeld), but rather to Tyler sharing something meaningful and relevant to that listener’s life.

In our PPM navel-gazing we allow ourselves to be lured into assuming our listeners’ life choices are driven almost exclusively by what we do in our tiny 12 x 12 studio. We lose our perspective of listeners as real people, their humanness diminished to nothing more than a statistic. They become a P1; nothing more. Which reminds me of a recent grocery store run where I saw the stock boy so focused on loading shelves that he didn’t notice he was blocking people’s way. In other words, he was so busy with the task at hand that he lost perspective of why the customers were there in the first place.

How’s this for a humbling statistic?

Nielsen data indicates heavy radio listeners, er-P1s, only spend 6% of their waking time with their favorite station. Six percent, gulp. And those are the heavy listeners.

It is impossible to finagle your way into that 6% of waking hours by becoming less meaningful. The hand-wringing effort we make to strip down our radio stations in an effort to imprint one additional data point can only result in becoming what my friend Mark Ramsey refers to as “no one’s favorite I-Pod”.

Play lots of music? Of course! Be efficient with talk? Certainly! Discipline is imperative.

But consider this:

The impact of our format could be transformed if we paid more attention to being a part of saving lives than saving quarter hours.

I’ve met people who know how to do both!

Remember becoming a parent for the first time?  You likely reacted to everything your child did.  I remember standing over my daughter’s crib to make sure she was breathing.  Her baby book included the first everything, from baby shower to bath tub to bicycle.  By the time the second child comes along we’ve figured some things out.  We didn’t wake up at every sound. Some of the little things we fretted over with the first child didn’t seem quite as big a deal.

I’m the youngest of four kids.  By the time I came along my mom and dad had seen it all.  I don’t even have a baby book!

My travels take me into a variety of situations and personalities.  I work with some of the best of the best, and I’m also invited in to mentor those who are just beginning their journey.  I see the behavior of those who’ve been through it before and those who are facing a situation for the first time.

Experience gives us maturity.  Maturity develops perspective.  Perspective leads to wise decisions. 

A recent plane ride was unusually turbulent.  After several nasty bumps I turned to the young lady sitting next to me and asked if she was scared.  She just smiled at me and said,

“My dad is the pilot.  He does this all the time.”

What signals are we sending as leaders?   Do we react to every challenge as though it’s an unforeseen emergency, a time to panic, and a reason to “do SOMETHING” with READY-FIRE-AIM?  Or we do we respond with the experience and calm of a pilot who is trained at navigating the inevitable turbulence, who has been through it before, and who instills confidence to those entrusted to him?

Now don’t take this the wrong way.  I’m not against strong leadership.  I worked for Bud Paxson for many years, one of the most aggressive leaders I’ve ever seen.  But his actions were not RE-actions that sent the troops on an unpredictable tangent, they were pro-actions that motivated the team in a direction the team already understood.

Turbulence will come.  Your team is watching how you will lead.

Jose’s portable beachside mercado in the Dominican Republic was overflowing with one-legged pink flamingos, hand painted maracas (“you no buy, you no shake”), and a framed velvet Elvis or two; just the kind of high quality merchandise to tempt even the choosiest vacationing American. Jose was nice enough to stop me and point out his selection of genuine Cuban cigars. “You pay three hundred,” he says, “but I give you at one twenty five.” A steal of a deal, I thought, after using my high school Spanish to wrestle him down to only $50 per box.

Back in the good ole USA my friend Mike opened his new box of cigars and immediately sensed something was wrong. The cigar paper was wrapped haphazardly. The aroma was dull. A strand of straw was sticking out the end of one.

I had been had. Como se dice “ripped off”?

Had I sought counsel from someone experienced in buying cigars I would have been saved from making a rather simple mistake. But because I don’t smoke and had never purchased cigars before I lacked basic understanding of what to look for, or even what questions to ask. My inexperience led me to make assumptions, and those assumptions left me vulnerable to Jose’s beachside salesmanship.

What assumptions do you make about your listeners? If you want your station to grow what assumptions do you make of those tuning in for the first time?

Do you assume they know the music and have a favorite artist? Do you assume that they know the secret handshake, understand the lingo, and want a four-pack of tickets to the show?

“To move and audience, especially a diverse audience, from where they are to where you want them to be requires common ground. If you want me to follow you on a journey, you have to come get me. The journey must begin where I am, not where you are or where you think I should be.

…If the journey begins with the assumption that everybody here knows what we are doing, you will eventually have an audience of people who already know what you are doing. If your journey begins with the assumption that everybody in the audience is a believer, then eventually your audience will be full of believers. Who shows up for Third Day concerts? Primarily people who know and are expecting Third Day music.

Where you consistently begin and what you consistently assume determine who consistently shows up. Why? Because your assumptions create the common ground for the journey.” Andy Stanley, “Deep and Wide”

Now, about that velvet Elvis…

I hadn’t brushed my teeth with tap water in a week.  There’s nothing like being in a third world country to make one aware of the blessings we have in the good ole’ U.S.A.

I was one of 50 to recently travel to the Dominican Republic to lift shovel and rock to build a community center, to tend to 308 Dominicans and Haitians in a make-shift medical clinic, and to use the common language of sports to build bridges to hundreds of kids that couldn’t speak English.

My friend Christian Santiago is El Hombre in an organization God is using to transform a poverty-stricken Dominican community.  That organization’s focus to their vision – to educate and develop leaders in their own community to share the Gospel – has allowed them to avoid the pitfalls of trying to do too many things that take away time and resources from the main thing.  The result?  A thriving ministry!

As you can imagine, a benevolent organization like theirs, and maybe a radio station like yours, is bombarded with random, sometimes cock-eyed ideas from well-intended bystanders.  A Saturday night rock show for the teens? A Sunday night Southern Gospel show?  How ’bout some children’s programming?

Christian has a very simple way of filtering out the clutter.   Every suggestion comes with a donation.  He’s learned it’s easy for someone to throw out a random idea, but the meaningful ones come from those who are willing to back it up.

I’m not suggesting that your station’s strategy should be dictated by those on the sidelines with deep pockets.   But it is helpful to have an objective filter to help discern the good ideas from ones that will simply eat up your time and resources.

It’s been said that if you can’t say ‘no’ to the things that don’t matter then you won’t have room to say ‘yes’ to the things that do.