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…
The folks at Praxis warned us last March (you remember life before the pandemic took hold, right?) that we were entering an ice age, and nothing would ever be the same again. We thankfully read that article when it was released and took it very seriously. I remember the uncertainty, fear, and hope we all had that this would all be over by Summer. This article was a cold slap in the face for us and the dozens of business leaders we gathered with on Zoom calls…
Ian Morgan Cron, a popular author and speaker says that the single highest indicator of a leader's success is their level of self-awareness. Not giftedness, not experience, not intelligence, but instead knowing oneself and how you affect the world around you.
One aspect of self-awareness is realizing that we all have learned patterns (typically from our families growing up) about dealing with stress.
Knowing your enneagram number is a helpful way to become more aware of your patterned responses to stress. Still, Brene Brown talks about more general categories that she learned…
We've all heard the adage that despite what kind of company we have or industry we operate in, we are all essentially in the "people business." I initially heard it in the context of valuing the desire and interest of the people that make up all our client bases, but more recently, it seems like employees are the "people" to whom all are referring. All of our employees, after all, are people…
We just finished our most recent quarterly meeting and it was other-worldly. Our quarterly meetings follow a similar pattern. They are offsite, at least half a day, and carry similar agenda. We connect deeply as a team, do a deep dive on the cultural anchors of core values and purpose, and then review our vision. We are reminding ourselves of who we are at the deepest and most definitional level. We are looking at the inspirational…
When all hope is lost, the unexpected appearance of goodness is at the heart of the meaning of eucatastrophe. It is also at the heart of every great story and the beautiful and poignant way the Divine often shows up in our story. This is one of the hallmarks of living a life with God. Oswald Chambers says that living this way is an obvious “tell” to whether we are living this way…
I was having coffee and working on a project ahead of a lunch meeting. A younger man I used to coach came into the shop, noticed me, and joined me at my table for two. There was a lightness and ease with him that surprised me. He was expressing the joy he was experiencing in this season and giving me updates on how well his professional and personal life was trending…
The first movie I remember being captivated by was Breaking Away. The story of a young man trapped in a small town in Indiana who begins to dream of a world beyond his own through the lens of biking and the European world, where biking was king. He becomes a vicarious world traveler. Realizing that his mother kept an updated passport for years without a single stamp only strengthened his resolve…
I arrived at this conclusion over a decade ago. I had a friend in a problem marriage. We were meeting to discuss how to deal with things and possibly solve some of the challenges they were facing. It became very clear that he didn’t feel like any of the problems they were facing were related to him. He said it was 100% due to his wife. I asked him if he could identify even 1% of the problem as being his. He said, “No.”…
There is a woman in one of our leadership classes that I'm especially drawn to. She is a brilliant and successful leader who can take charge and "get things done." When she came to her first meeting several years ago, she had this authentic beauty about her, but it was buried under years of pain and heartache that gave rise to a defensive posture and unattainable perfectionism. The tenderness in her eyes didn't match the clinching of her jaws, but it was there.
We strongly encourage all the entrepreneurs we work with to go through our LifePlan retreat. Getting clear on the life they are intended to live is a crucial first step in having the clarity and conviction it takes to get their business working for them. Once they have their ideal life in clear focus, doing the work it takes to re-engineer their business to support that life becomes a foregone conclusion…
There are many things I don’t miss about my banking career, but there is one thing that I really loved: I never had to work a single night or a day on a weekend. The financial markets opened early and closed early, five days a week. There wasn’t any trading or processing of trades I could get done at night or on the weekend. I would sometimes, by choice, work on spreadsheets around investment strategies, but it was never required that I work after hours.
I was listening to an interview with an alcoholic in recovery. He was describing all the rhythms and practices he put in place to help him maintain his sobriety. Sleep schedules, places, and even ways of interacting/responding all had to change. As a successful businessman, he is a person of high intensity, a problem solver, and used to reacting quickly to whatever problem arises…
I recently had a meeting with a man who attended a Lifeplan retreat. A beautiful man with a big heart and a mission that got clarified and elevated through his experience at Lifeplan. God had wildly confirmed his purpose and he was feeling the invitation to take this work deeper, wider, and dramatically increase the impact of what he had given his heart to for 20 years…
I somehow missed the “whole” part of the “whole and holy” in these verses. I went full force after the “holy” part with pretty miserable results. Recommitting to doing better and doubling down on trying harder to deal with the unholy parts of my life left me feeling discouraged and failing miserably. And I was working really hard…
Okay, let’s skip past the baby in the manger with the kings, the livestock, etc.
Where Jesus really shows up in the gospel narrative is when he announces his arrival. He is a young man, likely early teens, and he is brought to the front of the synagogue to read from the ancient texts. He “found” Isaiah 61 and reads…
It is hard to describe how much my life has changed in the almost twenty years since I made that declaration. From feeling like I was doing life completely on my own to being flanked on every side by dozens of like-hearted kings and queens living in the same direction. It was never been more obvious than during a recent hospital visit…
The hobbits from the shire are tapping into some ancient wisdom that Paul offered the church in Corinth. Despite our circumstances, we cannot lose hope. We cannot lose heart. We have to carry and offer the expectation of a brighter day.
A recent survey from the U.S. Census department yielded the following results of how small businesses were faring as a result of the COVID crisis…
