One of my best friends from college, Scot, used to talk about how he wished he had a soundtrack for his life that would play as he meandered through. Before digital music, that was a bit of an impossibility, but now, you could almost cobble together some version of that if you liked…
We are working with a company on the back end of cleaning up an incredible mess. Unknown to them, two key employees seem to have “quiet quit” many months before they actually left. Like a college student going through the motions for an entire semester, fooling everyone but themselves, the report card at the end of the term was a sobering reality to those who didn’t know…
I met with a leader of a large company before their annual offsite. We were scripting the event, and I wanted to help him create an introductory statement of where he felt they were and how he thought they were doing. He struggled mightily to say much good…
Sometimes when we work with a senior leader with a struggling area of their business, they are forced to make a leadership change. They level all their efforts on getting a proper replacement. But rather than hastily making the new hire, we often ask them to embody the role of the exiting leader for a season as a first step…
We’re working with two businesses with the intention of combining them. We’re early in the process, but we are off to an extraordinary start. The deeper we enter into the process, the more we realize how uncommon this is for two owners to move from the autocratic outright of sole proprietorship to the joint and several of partnership.
We’re helping them guard their hearts and urging that they protect the preciousness of this process from swine looking to gobble up their enthusiasm…
Every relationship, whether business or personal, needs to matriculate through three key stages:
First, something has to capture your attention. Develop some level of curiosity. And by the way, you are having to compete with 33,000 messages a day assaulting the average person’s attention in order for you to arouse curiosity about you, your company, or your product.
For this reason, you better have something…
I encountered a man about a half-dozen or so years ago. Soon after, I purchased a journal to accompany him to one of the men’s retreat I help lead with my Band of Brothers. Like most men who attend those weekends, he had never journaled before or really kept any account of his faith or relationship with God. I told him that whether or not he had ever “heard” from the Father, he certainly would on this weekend and that it was imperative that he write down every word that was spoken.
“And once you live a good story, you get a taste for a kind of meaning in life, and you can't go back to being normal; you can't go back to meaningless scenes stitched together by the forgettable thread of wasted time.” - Donald Miller
This quote, from Donald Miller’s book A Million Miles in a Thousand Years was a revolution in my life. It was the headwaters of the river that took me from…
We’re intentional about celebrating birthdays, holidays, accomplishments, and milestones - but how often do we take time to celebrate the people right around us just for being who they are? Encouragement is something that everyone desperately needs, but few of us freely offer without some sort of “reason.”
Well, here is your reason:
I was at a non-fiction writing conference a few years ago. We had a writing exercise that required we describe the same scenario through a decreasing word count. As the word count shrunk, I just started using bigger words so that I could pack more information into the tinier space. When I read my most condensed statement with all the big words, the exasperated instructor said…
The last thing we need to be worried about in this country at this time in history is abundance, right? We’ve got it pretty good:
Median household income of $59k when the world average is $9k.
A national median home price of just under $200k.
An almost 50 year low of 3.7% jobless rate.
A national health system making care available for all.
It doesn’t exactly feel that way, does it?
Scripture tells how we are uniquely created and wonderfully made. C.S. Lewis points out that each one of us uniquely offers one particular aspect of the Divine that no one else can. We are told that we are the crown of His creation and were placed here specifically to rule and subdue all that exists. Clearly we are here for a particular reason.
We met a couple during our trip to Colorado. They’ve recently acquired a guest ranch that has been in existence for decades. The story about how this all happened is too beautiful and extensive for me to try and share in the 500 words of this post, but I might give that a try on another day.
Among all the inspiring things we talked about during the long afternoon we shared, the career path he took to this vocational stint was particularly interesting. He had been…
I grew up as a beach rat. Hanging out at the shore and dunes of a small back bay that was reachable by foot or bike as a young boy and then to a much larger beach and National seashore by car as a teenager. My time on the shores was largely unfettered and unsupervised. That led to all kinds of great boyhood stuff early and all kinds of destructive behavior as I aged.
One of the things a coastal community of South Texas didn’t provide for much of was a traditional change of seasons…
The last few organizations I got involved with heard a similar refrain from me…
“I’m not interested in leading or being in charge of anything.”
I am not joining your organization or board. I am not taking an officer position or signing up to chair anything. I mean, I feel like I lead or am in charge in every other arena of my life. Decisions don’t seem to get made and nothing seems to happen unless I am driving it. Can you relate?
That’s a problem right?
When the religious were trying to overcomplicate things, even confuse things, Jesus really made it clear. Almost as if he were establishing a hierarchy of things. As if he was telling them that all their rules, prohibitions, laws, judgements, tips and techniques are pretty much worthless if you aren’t first accomplishing these two simple (but not easy) things:
I think the lack of this…the lack of the reciprocal of this…is all our deepest longing. When the bible talks about all creation groaning for the coming Kingdom and the restoration of all things, I think this is one of the things we are groaning for most deeply.
When we surveyed local leaders, one of the things they mentioned struggling with was maintaining a healthy life/work balance. The demands of their work not only kept them at the office more than they liked, it tended to follow them home as well.
As a result we spend a lot of time studying Jesus’ way of doing things with the leaders with whom we work. Despite the incredible mission he came to accomplish and contrary to our Western culture sensibility; he lived a slow, steady…
Interestingly enough, I am regularly challenged on most of the measures I have taken to quiet things. Not by the menacing growl of all those beasts fighting for my attention, but by people who regularly partake in them and seem bothered by the fact that I am not.
I recently wrote about the need for soul care in “Attendance” a few months ago. It turns out that ordering my life with “soul care” as one of the top priorities has been as disruptive to my life as it has been for others.
Disruptive for good, but disruptive nonetheless.
I am privileged to spend my vocational life in very close alignment with my calling, God’s particular intention for my life. And while calling is…
As a man who felt like life had taught him that he would always be alone, examining life is something that I spent a lot of time doing. But I wasn’t examining my own, I was just being critical of everyone else’s. Doing life on my own meant that I was constantly surveying the landscape for anything I could find about others’ lives to criticize as a way to momentarily feel better about my own.
In the award-winning documentary, Won’t You Be My Neighbor, they celebrate the life of a similar subversive. He took everything you were supposed to do to create a successful children’s show and did the complete opposite. Low production values, very slow moving pace, poor acting, and no slapstick energy or comedy.
As an ordained Presbyterian minister, he approached the work with a missional fervor that television has likely ever seen or probably even understood. When the race…
It was always intended that we would lead. Over our families, businesses, organizations, and pretty much everything, according to Moses. We were all born to lead. That taking charge, initiating, and trying to negotiate everything going on around us, is actually holy. Or at least rooted in something holy.
At the heart of every great story is a…
….hero who decides to use their power for good and not evil.
….villain who decides to use their power for evil and not good.
Opposite sides of the same coin. Both emanating from power, desire, and the interest in having things go their way. The origin stories…
Not good. Bad.
The early Jazz musicians would say that a guy could really "Blow" if he had a good sound when playing the horn. If he couldn't play very well then they would say that he was "Sucking" on that horn. That's where the term "Suck" as being something bad came from.
If you suck, it generally means you have no skill and/or talent.
A good friend of mine is reading a book that was foundational to completely re-orienting my faith about 15 years…
If the primary question you are asking has to do with how to have a good retirement, that is going to lead you in one direction.
If the primary question you are asking has to do with how do you make the world a better place, that will likely lead you in another.
Turns out that the questions we are asking others can have a similar defining effect. One of the things we regularly challenge the leaders…
