We pray before almost every group meeting with corporate clients and before every scheduled one-on-one.  There is a very specific prayer process that we walk through on our own before we sit down with pretty much anyone.  We learned it through a very mature ministry and it has been immensely helpful.  (Let me know if you are interested and we’ll share it with you). 

It is meant to calm, center, and get ourselves clear enough to be able to offer...

Start-up companies often experience a season they call the “Trough of Sorrow”.  They describe it as being in the place where no matter what they do, the company does not improve.  Adding to the sorrow is the feeling that everyone else around them seems to be succeeding wildly.  All the others seem to be getting acquired, raising huge funding rounds, and announcing...

I had to get a new phone a few months ago.  I tend to disable everything until I am absolutely sure it is necessary.  One of the things that took me a really long time to turn back on was “Location."  I had it disabled for quite some time.  On a regular basis (anytime I tried to map something) I would get the error message above, but I just typed in an address close by to bypass the error message and continued to keep it dormant.

I think if I am really honest, in some weird way it made me feel...

This is one of those passages that keeps coming to mind.  Possibly because that kind of pace, that measure of grace is so uncommon.  

I mean, come on…

Learn the unforced rhythms of grace?

Who doesn’t want that?  

Whose heart doesn’t stir at just the thought of it?

Who even believes that it is possible anymore?

Our Client Experience Coordinator was meeting with one of our clients.  She was going to him for advice and assistance on an event she was helping to coordinate....

A financial advisory firm approached us about becoming referral partners and ended up hiring us to work with their team.  They are fantastic folks who have become good friends.

They do a beautiful job of helping families and businesses transition to a more prosperous and healthy financial future.  Their very comprehensive process not only helps with the management of financial assets but relational. legacy, and physical assets as well.  The “physical asset” part is where they wanted to engage our team.

Much of the wealth of the “greatest generation” was created through...

The biblical narrative begins with the Hebrew scriptures that we call the Old Testament.  We had varying degrees of getting it right, but were mostly unsuccessful in our attempts to follow that law.  Two thousand or so years ago, God took the form of man, made a propitiation for all that “not getting it right” and cleaned the slate.  God decided to show us what it looked like to live the life of God as a man.

Interestingly enough, this left us with more questions than answers.  The Bible records Jesus asking 307 questions...

“Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? ...Get away with me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace…Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly.”

How do you define success?  

Increasingly, the leaders I spend time around are talking about the currency of margin…of having "white space" in their calendars.  They are celebrating the opportunity to have the bandwidth to think strategically about their business and actually “work on them” versus just “working in them”.  Several have even noted the guilt they are feeling at not being overwhelmed and working so many hours.

Good problem to have, right?  

And they aren’t being...

Like virtually every other family I know, we have wrestled with the concept of church (small “c”) and church attendance.  It has been one of the more discouraging journeys over the last decade or so. Several of the people I work with are working through the same challenges in their families.

I am working on the vision for a client’s business.  I met first with him and his wife to get the vision for their family...

We had our first set of three children when we were really young.  As our children began to get married at a relatively young age, we began to get excited about the prospect of being young grandparents.

However, some of the sages in my life have done a great job of teaching me that the posture for approaching my adult children and their spouses should be…

The one we refer to as our “little guy” is now fourteen years old, 6 feet tall, and over 200 pounds.  He is incredibly strong and very quick for his size.  He is also the happiest person I know.  He peppers his stories with bursts of laughter and smiles like the rest of us use punctuation.  I promise you, if I stare at him for more than a few seconds, he first smiles and then laughs.

One of the reasons we moved his education back into our home was because we started to feel like that joy was fading.  The challenges of a dyslexic in the classroom...

Okay, this is going to be a little controversial.

One of the challenges I constantly face in dealing with clients is actually borne of a very noble quality.  The folks we typically work with are operating from a faith-based or very high integrity place.  

They desire to help others and make a real difference in people’s lives.  This is actually the beautiful collision of the world’s greatest need and our greatest opportunity as leaders.  It is also a minefield...

I was listening to an interview of Blake Mycoskie, founder of TOMS shoes, on a podcast.  If you know anything about his story, you know why I am a big fan.  He was a serial entrepreneur that built and sold businesses out of a need he saw that wasn’t being filled.

After immersing himself in the culture of Argentina on a vacation and becoming familiar with the challenges facing villagers there, he decided to address one of the problems.  Foot borne diseases were having a profound effect and getting shoes on the feet of children was...

When we talk about core values and purpose, we are talking about the deep, powerful, and defining foundations of your business.  When talking to a client the other day, the thing that I compared them to was “the law and the prophets”…the thing upon which pretty much everything else rests.

While many of the companies I come into contact with have created both of those things, one employee at a company told me...

Are you hiring?  So, it seems, is everybody else.  Trouble finding the right fit for the position and culture seems like an epidemic.  And while there are some great tools that allow you to post your job opportunity in hundreds of places now, it almost feels like our needle is getting even smaller in an increasingly larger haystack!

And let’s be honest, we’re all doing our best to look away from the mounting pile of evidence of how much these mis-hires are costing us, but it's getting pretty hard to ignore.  And the pressure to get it right continues to increase.

Like many of our clients, the culture of our family is good, but I want it to be great.  And like many of our clients, we have been working hard on developing the kind of culture that will not only make life better, but encourage others to find the same.

Vacations are always disruptive to family rhythm.  While we regularly spend more time together as a family than what I hear others do, we aren’t spending all day, every day, together.  Vacation takes a bit of recalibration.  And as an intentional leader, I am always full of ideas and inspirations about how to push the envelope with them given that proximity.

While we were hiking along a stream in Colorado just outside of a city, we came across a sign.  It read:

COLORADO’S THIN GREEN LINE

Lands along rivers and streams are called riparian areas.  These green ribbons of life comprise less than 5% of Colorado’s total land area, yet 90% of Colorado’s wildlife species use it.

In other words, these are these thin ribbons of life that...

I was talking with a client recently who was clearly in some state of overwhelm.  I asked him about some things that he had decided were most important , but soon realized that he hadn’t made as much progress as we had both hoped.  

I have several tasks in that moment...

There is a mediocre movie called The Astronaut Farmer that has a fantastic trailer.  It is often part of the broad complement of media we employ at our LifePlan retreats.  The trailer does a great job of telling the story, but the few lines it pulls from the movie are extraordinary.

The movie is based on the true story of a man in Texas who builds a rocket with his eyes set on launching himself into space.  Everyone, of course, thinks he has lost his mind.  Government officials express their concern and mobilize the appropriate forces to keep him on the ground, but Jon Farmer is undaunted.

In the circles I run in, we often use the phrase “Aslan is on the move." That is an obvious allusion to the Chronicles of Narnia series where the lion, Aslan, is a clear God and Christ figure.  

Most people understand that expression, but one time when I was telling a guy about our house church and how “Alsan was on the move” there, he actually interpreted that Aslan was the name of our church.  Every time I saw him after that, he asked me how “Aslan” (meaning, our church) was doing.

When my bride goes out of town every summer to a YoungLives camp to “hold babies” for young teen mom’s attending camp, I host DadCamp.  It is way less structured or probably less fun than you might be imagining, but I do try to plan some fun things for us to do.

This year we went to a really nice drive-in movie theatre in New Braunfels, TX.  Three screens each offering a double feature, 365 days of the year.  Not as good an idea in the Summer due to the heat, long days, and really late starting time for a double feature, but pretty fun nonetheless