When we were getting certified as E-Myth coaches, we learned a new and robust understanding of vision. For many, vision is simply a more generous or aspirational version of their purpose or mission statement. In fact, when we encounter companies that have a mission, purpose, and vision statement created in a traditional format, it is often hard for us to distinguish between the three.

When I was a portfolio manager…of a national bank portfolio…that was FDIC insured…with a stock that was traded on the NYSE…with very conservative management…that also had a trading floor of brokers we managed…we were highly regulated. It felt like some kind of auditor, examiner, or regulator, was looking through every detail of the things we did in the investment division.

Initially, I thought we had the same objective. We were working hard to navigate the complexity of the financial markets and the vagaries of so many different auditing bodies. They were there to help us. Or so I thought…

How did we get so far off track? How did we come to the understanding that delegation was the minimizing of our power and our control? That the limits of what was possible in our organizations were limited to what we can do or the extent of our foreseeable will to work even harder?

The water was running dangerously fast. That meant that the penultimate day of our five-day raft trip through the Royal Gorge had to be relocated. In fact, several parts of the river were closed due to the incredible flow of melted snow. I was there with five graduates from the youth group I had helped lead over the last year. The snow on the ground around our tents and the water that raised our voices a full octave explained why coming this early in the season was so much cheaper.

Spending a lot of time alone throughout my childhood made me a pretty keen observer of life. It made me really curious. I didn’t have much first-person knowledge of people and the way most people did life. I developed an almost empirical curiosity about people and how life worked for them…

Nobody could have known. The children were well-behaved. Their blonde hair, perfect posture, with prominent bows in each of the girl’s hair. They didn’t misbehave like the other children we often saw in church. But the appearance of their perfection, even that of my wife, was mandated. Coerced with shame and disappointment. The appearance of the perfect family felt like my life depended on it…because it did…

A very good friend and client of many years asked for advice about a predicament. As a coach, I try not to give advice, but I do ask questions that lead to discovery, which produces ownership/engagement. The solutions emerge from within the other person at the end of a line of curated questions. Then I will often confirm, refine, or suggest things in that direction…

Almost a decade and a half ago, our eldest got invited to go on a mission trip to China. He was mid-teens at the time. He was almost six and a half feet tall and really stood out in a crowd. It was a very different country then. He received a lot of training about how to represent what he believed without endangering himself or others. It felt important and moderately dangerous there in all the best ways possible…

If you asked me where I had most experienced a sense of the garden of Eden, I would have, until recently, said Kauai. But while it offers some of the breathtaking beauty I have seen in South Africa, I haven’t experienced all the rest of those things there. And maybe this is the way that everybody feels about the things that they are deeply called to, but it feels like the hope of the world rests on this small southern portion of that great continent…

One of my good friends is an author, coach, missionary, pastor, home church leader and father of a beautiful tribe. Oh yeah, he also runs a successful business but is needing to spend less and less of his time there. The leadership he groomed at his company is handling most of that. In fact, that is still true despite the fact the company is doubling due to the awarding of a very large contract…

A young leader was venting his frustration. He had been telling those that lead him that they should do something for years and no one seemed to listen. And now some new hire had suggested the same thing and they were taking their advice. I’ve heard this so many times that I know precisely how I should respond. I said, “Great news, right?” And I always get the same incredulous look…

There is some pretty important information contained in that first sentence describing the “gospels”. Beyond that essential information that everything else rests on for Christians, there are a lot of great stories with a lot of good news in them. And while the “old” testament often reads more like a prescriptive rule book or an accounting of the journey of disenfranchised people trying to find their way back to God, the “new” testament was a great collection of stories of what it looks like to live life in union with that God….

We were sharing our revised Vision Statement with our South African partners. There was something poetic about the five of us here in the states and their five stakeholders meeting over Zoom to agree on a vision statement that was created by us here and contains a lot about serving them there…

I asked the business owner about a new employee I had observed in a team meeting I attended. Everything about him, including his contribution in the meeting, told me that he carried a pretty significant story. I found out that he had recently moved here from a great distance to work for this company…

I was talking with another coach who was very anxious. She felt her client was making a terrible mistake and she needed to do something about it…now. She felt the passion to make something happen, the immediacy of the situation Her heart was so well-intentioned in fighting for what she thought was best for them, but she had a check in her spirit. Something didn’t seem quite right about the way she was feeling. Or maybe better said, the severity of her emotional reaction felt a little too much…

A group of leaders was recently celebrating one of the coaches on our team. She joined us almost five years ago and they were all remarking on the progress they had seen in her over the last few years. They said too many nice things to rewrite in this short blog, but one of them said something really funny when they marked her process.

We had some plumbers over to the house a couple of weeks ago. The team consisted of a confident, experienced plumber and another guy who was clearly new to the job. I was asking him how long he had been on the job, why he chose to work there, and how he liked it so far…

We were sitting around tables of leaders this week. We were talking about what we deeply valued in each of the other people around the table. Having a dozen people tell you what they value about you and how you affect their life will keep your tank filled for a pretty good length of time…