Tag: values
Are you using a GPS? (advice to communicators and startups)
We tend to think that we operate out of our values as if it’s like a default setting on a washing machine.
The truth is, at best, we are consistent at that stuff only sometimes. Not because we are horrid cads, but because we get busy.
If you are a person of faith or want to live from a set of important values, you can’t take this modus operandi for granted.
You have to do some groundwork. (I’ll get to specifics in a moment.)
First, the short story of Jackie will help us out.
Jackie is tax consultant. She had worked for a national brand firm in town and was striking it out on her own–almost by accident and not all at once.
It started when she kept noticing that some of her friends and family members didn’t know what they were doing. In a panic, usually at the end of March, they started asking her for help. Most of them didn’t know enough to get the best refund, and she heated the idea of that.
She picked up some side work, and within two tax seasons she had herself completely booked at tax time. About 20% of those clients needed accounting help throughout the year for their small business. She also found a few non profits clients too. She really needed help by the third year and had left her other job by then.
Like you would expect, she hired help and plunged into her work.
I didn’t put too much weight into the particulars of hiring. I was so busy with the details of getting the work done. So, the most important thing got steamrolled by the urgency of my work.
Things started going badly.
Out of the 3 part-time workers, only one of them actually had the same values as she did. She realized this too late and it created friction and a tense working environment. One person left and started bad-mouthing her in her small town. The other position seemed like a revolving door of employee turnover. She almost quit the whole thing. It was keeping her up a lot at night.
Jackie didn’t have Human Resources Training or organizational management training. She just had a bunch of work and she was good at those skills. She needed to clone herself.
It didn’t come to that, of course.
Fortunately, a mentor gave her some great advice. She said,
Back up a bit. Sit down and put your most important values and business aims down with ink on paper. It’ll work like a compass or GSP. It will help with both the route and destination.
It worked. Her commitment statements guided all her business decisions after that. Hiring, training, working with clients, getting new clients, and getting her little company running smoothly needed that solid foundation.
It’s a great lesson. If you aren’t using a GPS you’re going to get lost.
Before you take on side work. Before you hire someone. And most importantly, before you get busy, do the ground work so that your priorities and core guiding principles are something that flow out and throughout all your interactions, not get tacked on afterword.
If you value honesty, joy, compassion, and persistence, for instance, make them the anchor for all the skills you execute and all the projects you take on.
Have you initiated your GPS? Do you have your guiding principles on paper and operate from them?
I hope that was helpful.
Do you know someone who might need this advice?
Please share!
10 Misconceptions Christians have about non believers-part II
This is continued from this 1-5 article.
It’s REALLY helpful to read that part first for context, I assure you!
Now on to the next half:
6. Non believers live in fear and doubt.
It’s interesting that many from inside the Christian bubble will ascribe these attributes to non believers when a simple gaze across the church goers on any Sunday morning will show the very same thing to be true of Christians too. I don’t know anyone who does not live in fear and doubt at least from time-to-time. What some Christians won’t tell you is that the local pharmacists know a lot about their fear and doubt even if those in their small group aren’t privy to the matter. And some people just drink, shop, or puke their fattening meal to cope. What is more true? To be human is to fear and doubt. We may call it worry or concern, or a prayer request, but it’s there for Christians and non believers alike.
7. Non believers are afraid of death.
Some are not. Some Christians are not. Not everyone braves their impending physical demise well. This is not so strange, because imagining not needing or using your body anymore is really odd. Really really odd.
Even a Christian who will tell you they know for absolute sure that they will be in heaven with Jesus at the moment of death, as you probe them further and they get into specifics their ideas about all that there is a shift. Either they will often become full of fantasy (sourced in the poetic and figurative descriptions of the afterlife from the Bible which they have illogically decided to take literally [sic.] Pearly gates, streets of gold, or Jesus riding a gigantic purple horse) or that may dissolve into what becomes rather unsettling admission of mystery. Can you really know the particulars? Of course not.
It’s thoughtful to be challenged by the unknown–which is what death is. It’s important to come to your end of surety. It keeps us humble and growing. For everyone, that portion of life and death is a matter of faith, no matter what we believe will happen once our heart stops and we will soon be lowered underground. It is creepy because we are used to being alive, breathing and such. We hate it when others we love die, and leave us, and the whole thing is strange, if we are going to be honest. But, are we?
8. When they behave properly, non believers unconsciously borrow ethics from Christians.
Oaky, on this one, perhaps I’ll say “Yes and No”. In the U.S. the influence of Christianity in our common society is thick and unavoidable. Yet, unbeknownst to Christians, behaviors we (Christians) consider good Christian values and ethics are also part of a meta ethic known the world over and through the whole span of human history. (Following through and getting it right is a whole different business, of course.) This meta-ethic, which many secular anthropologists downplay, or quickly chalk up to darwinian processes, (ad hoc mind you) actually seem to point toward the transcendent. The philosophers get into this quite a bit. So, the part of us that is involved with consciousness is ever-present and point to a place off our seen “map” if you will. Call it the “Devine Spark”, “God”, Yahweh, the Universe (if something impersonal could somehow also be personal, by whatever), the “higher self” (a la Alcoholics Anonymous), or what-have-you…we are essentially speaking of the same big thing… that incidentally is no thing. The Other, the great I AM, the life force, and really when we split hair on that big point, we miss the forrest for the trees.
9. Non believers discredit the unseen world.
This is hardly ever true. Yes, there are a few full blown materialists, but like the unicorn, they are rarely seen and then, only for a few fleeting moments in the perfect circumstances like when painted on velvet or when Harry Potter is nearby.
The desire to discover the mysteries of life are ever-present. Media is a great barometer for this. For instance, witness the many horror genre movies (ghosts, zombies, paranormal stuff, aliens, etc) and all the tv shows groping for answers from the spooky and paranormal night-vision scenes from the many television shows on cable, to the mediums, psychics, and spiritual celebrity gurus and even mega-church personalities (Yes. I’m including everyone from Joel Osteen, (Joyce) Myers, Oprah, Deepak Chopra, and Rick Warren, to Billy Graham, and the Dali Lama). Our gurus and guides are plentiful and that’s because the demand for them is so high. Plus, the prophecy folks of all stripes continue their empires as the masses feeling around in the murkiness for answers.
10. Non believers are going to hell one day.
Okay, this is the one that may get me the hate mail. Just hang on! The reason that this is a misconception is because we can’t know how Grace will or won’t affect a person once they die. We trust in Grace. In the idea of it existing; in the Being that doles it. Can we know another person’s heart that well? I doubt it when our own heart is so unfathomable and fickle for us. Grace is big. As big as you think it is, you are wrong. It’s bigger. I’m always wrong about grace because I cannot fathom it for too long.
Thank you for joining me. If this article made you think, please share it with someone.
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Are you Skipping “Brain Pain” but picking the Plague?
Most of us don’t realize that we spend a bunch of time avoiding a familiar “Brain Pain”.
Just below our radar, but deeply connected with our emotions is an unsettling sense that something isn’t right.
That’s because it isn’t. Though it’s a normal sensation it’s not well-received.
We order and reorder things to avoid this feeling. But, it persists. And, it’ll make us do the strangest things.
Simply put: This “brain pain” happens when we try to hold two or more conflicting ideas together.
It’s officially called cognitive dissonance.
Unidentified, you don’t like it either.
But, in fact most of life and love is full of paradox and contradictions. All the great thinkers and spiritual masters speak of it.
The big problem?
Our cognitions don’t live together in a good jive and comfortable harmony. Our ideas, beliefs, values or emotional reactions have pointy and mismatched edges and we keep wanting things to piece together nicely like a glossy jigsaw puzzle.
Instead of feeling and living with dissonance, we try to avoid it or reduce it. Anything from changing our beliefs to be in keeping with the situation (to make it bearable), to reducing our regret through irrational justification, to reaffirming our bias even if a logical reason is absent. We are very irrational creatures and the more we think we are NOT the more irrational it is.
(It’s dissonant to be a partially rational creature, see?)
In wanting everything to “make sense” we pick fiction and live by figments instead.
You do it. I do it.
What’s worse?
The social pressure to relieve this sort of brain pain will blast toward us from everywhere. Maybe nowhere more powerfully than from our leaders. People in the pulpit, or the podium, power players in the board room or on news and media outlets they let the zingers fly that force you to inconsistently choice a faulty form of consistency. On cable television and radio of all stripes it’s a full-blown-plauge.
Everyone will try to sway you to give up the dissonance and see it their way (which they call “the right way”). It makes them feel better. But, the dissonance is part of reality just like it is part of jazz music. Not every note sounds just right or fits together seamlessly. It’s off-pitch and off-tempo. It’s very hard to predict.
How tricky! How disconcerting.
It is a mark of maturity to accept that reality is chock-a-block with inconsistency and incongruence. (That’s worth reading again.)
Though it can be unnerving, an abiding peace can yet remain in what seems a spongy place. This place is a good and useful tension of balance. It’s very hard to find and even harder to keep.
So, what about you?
Think about the things that create the discomforting feeling of dissonance for you.
• What are they? (relationships, finances, politics, tragedy, redemption?) Narrow it down to one or two big ones, for now.
• Have you been dodging logic or minimizing regret for the fantasy of consonance because you want to avoid the pain (and reality) of dissonance? Let’s be honest.
What could you hold in dissonance and balance that you haven’t been?
(Thank you for reading today. I would love if if you would share this post. Also great? If you would sign up for the next post in the sidebar.)
xo
-Lisa
Learn Transformational Leadership Theory in 15 Seconds
I’m writing the last paper for my class in Leadership and Administration. I’m concentrating on Transformational Leadership Theory.
Here’s the crash course for you!
30 years ago Transformational Leadership got some traction and it focused on something nothing else had: Followers.
What motivates and develops Followers created a paradigm shift in Leadership Studies that continues to be researched and written about quite a bit.
(The image shows 5 factors Transformational Leaders employ.)
The 4 Main Components that define Transformational Leadership
The four key components in play[1]:
- Intellectual Stimulation – In Transformational Leadership the leader challenges the status quo, encourages creative solutions, and leads followers toward exploring new ways of doing things while offering new opportunities to learn and grow.
- Individualized Consideration – In Transformational Leadership the leader offers support and encouragement to individual followers that help to foster supportive relationships among the team, and endeavors to help followers keep the lines of communication open to more easily share ideas. There is also recognition of team members’ unique contributions.
- Inspirational Motivation – In Transformational Leadership the leader has a clear vision that is articulated to the followers. With this clearly articulated vision followers may share and experience similar passion and stay better motivated to see the vision through to completion.
- Idealized Influence – A Transformational leader serves as a role model for her followers. She exemplifies the values she hopes to engender. This builds trust and respect for the leader. (This had been called “charisma” but has grown more nuanced.)
[1] Leadership and Performance Beyond Expectations by Bernard M. Bass (1985)
The Book that started it all:
Updated and expanded in 2005