Promises We Make
Filed under: Core Values, Family Ministry, Personal Development
This is the forth in a series of ten posts on promises we should be willing to make to the people that matter the most in our lives. A promise goes beyond a mere commitment to do something it carries the clear expectation that we are going to pay the price to do what we said we would do.
The first promise was I will sincerely listen to what you have to say. Really listening to someone without a personal agenda communicates to them that they have value in your life and that you sincerely care.
The second promise was I will always tell you the truth. Without this there can be no basis of trust, just ask Elizabeth Edwards how painful that can be.
The third promise is I will apologize when I am wrong. When someone sincerely and genuinely apologizes we know two things. They are willing to humble themselves and they want to restore their relationship with us because we still matter to them.
The forth promise is I will forgive you when you hurt me. There can be no lasting peace in any relationship without the power of forgiveness. This is even more critical when someone has come to us and sincerely apologized they are asking without saying it will you please forgive me?
Forgiveness does not mean that we have the ability to forget what has happened to us but it does mean that we no longer hold that offense against the other person. This will allow us to learn from the past and not force us to continue to live in it will all its negative memories.
The key thing about giving someone else forgiveness is that you must first have received it yourself. You may only see your percentage of the responsibility at twenty percent but you must assume responsibility to seek forgiveness for your part before you can move on and release the other person.
This is a promise worth making to the people you care about the most in your life.
The Importance of Knowing Life Purpose
Filed under: Core Values, Family Ministry, Leadership Callling, Life Balance, Marriage, Personal Development, Time Management
In a day when our calendars are beyond full and yet our lives seem to be empty something has gone wrong. We in many cases have assumed because we are busy the things we are doing must be important.
We clearly have shifted the focus from being as a person to doing and what we are able to accomplish. Technology has helped us in many cases simply to do the wrong things faster.
The great paradoxes of our time have been summed up well by the Dalai Lama:
“We have more conveniences, but less time.
We have more degrees, but less sense…more knowledge but less judgment.
More experts, but more problems.
More medicines, but less healthiness.
We have been all the way to the moon and back but have trouble crossing the street to meet the new neighbor.
We build more computers to hold more information that produce more copies than ever before, but have less communication.
We have become long on quantity, but short on quality.
These are the times of fast foods but weak digestion.
It is a time when there is much in the window but nothing in the room.”
For many of us we have been living the script for our lives that were given to us by someone else; parents, peers, friends or the culture we live in. The time has come for us to have the courage to say no and the passion to write our own.
Promises We Make
Filed under: Core Values, Family Ministry, Personal Development
This is the third in a series of ten posts on promises we should be willing to make to the people that matter the most in our lives. A promise goes beyond a mere commitment to do something it carries the clear expectation that we are going to pay the price to do what we said we would do.
The first promise was I will sincerely listen to what you have to say. Really listening to someone without a personal agenda communicates to them that they have value in your life and that you sincerely care.
The second promise was I will always tell you the truth. Without this there can be no basis of trust, just ask Elizabeth Edwards how painful that can be.
The third promise is I will apologize when I am wrong. When people hurt us there is genuine pain involved and when they refuse to acknowledge they were wrong then the pain grows deeper and last longer.
When someone sincerely and genuinely apologizes we know two things. They are willing to humble themselves and they want to restore their relationship with us because we still matter to them.
On the other hand when someone says I am sorry and you know in your heart they don’t really mean it the situation only gets worse. They are simply trying to end the conversation and not take personal responsibility for what they did.
Sometimes in relationships the other person may own eighty percent of the blame. Our responsibility is to take ownership of our twenty percent and do the right thing and apologize regardless of how they respond.
How Much Is Enough?
Filed under: Core Values, Financial Stewardship, Life Balance, Personal Development
The one incredibly good thing about a down cycle is that it always forces us to separate what is important in life from what is not.
This is a very opportune time for you to be incredibly honest with yourself and ask the hard question How Much Is Enough? What do I really need to be fulfilled and content in my life? Take some time on this and make sure you cover every area of your life, personal, family, career, friends, faith and community.
For most of us as Americans we have never had to answer this question before. We have been told the sky is the limit and if you work hard enough you can accomplish anything you want.
I am in no way condoning anything less than your personal best in every area of your life. However, I am bringing into question a consumer driven philosophy of life that is more concerned with quantity of things than quality of relationships.
For too many of us we have been living out the script that someone else has written for us. It could be a parent, peers, corporate culture or society in general. Now is the time to write our own script that includes our own definition of success in life.
Contentment and gratitude are two incredibly important core values in life. If you do not know the answer to How Much Is Enough, then I am afraid you will never truly experience them.
Promises We Make
Filed under: Core Values, Family Ministry, Personal Development
This is the second in a series of posts that I want to make about what I think is a very important subject, our most important relationships. For the people we care about the most we should be willing to make a few critical promises to demonstrate our level of commitment to them.
The first promise in the series was I will carefully listen to what you have to say. When we sincerely want to understand what the other person is feeling and thinking we acknowledge their value as a person.
The second promise is that I will always tell you the truth. The foundation of any relationship is the trust that is shared when I know what you are telling me is the truth.
Obviously, I am not talking about saying that Susan Boyle should become a model. If you meet her tell her she looks good and really mean it. However, she does have a beautiful voice and she reminded us all not to judge the character of a person by their outward appearance.
When we lie to someone it says more about us than it does about them. Not telling the truth is our way of deflecting blame and not assuming personal responsibility.
If someone tells me something that really hurts but I know in my heart it is the truth then I can still respect and trust them. When they make it up and tell me what is convenient for the moment I am the one who is ultimately hurt and they just burned a bridge that sometimes cannot be rebuilt.
The Window and The Mirror
Filed under: Core Values, Leadership Callling, Personal Development, Servant Leader
I have always been an Alabama football fan since the days of Coach Bryant. One of the things I always appreciated about him was when we lost a game he always took the responsibility in the press conference and never cast blame toward the players or officials.
According to Jim Collins in his best seller Good to Great all great leaders do the very same thing. His team noticed this pattern in all of the very successful leaders and they called it the window and the mirror effect.
All great leaders would look out the window and give credit to other people and not themselves when things were going well. At the same time, they would look in the mirror to assume responsibility for failure and never blame bad luck or someone else when things went poorly.
The comparison companies did just the opposite. These leaders would look out the window to blame someone or something when they experienced negative results. When they did get it right they would look admiringly in the mirror and take all the credit with great fanfare.
We all need to apply this lesson on a personal level. It is always easy to justify our bad behavior when we can use what someone else said or did to hurt us as an excuse. Assuming personal responsibility for our attitudes, words and actions is the first major step in becoming a leader who is driven by character and not by the fading recognition of the crowd.
Goals vs. Desires
Filed under: Core Values, Leadership Callling, Personal Development
Many times we put a tremendous amount of emotional energy and effort into something only to realize that nothing has changed. We are worn out with all the work and feel very empty because we are not getting any positive results.
The core problem most of the time when this happens in my life is when I confuse goals and desires. A desire is something I want to happen but in the end have no control over the outcome. On the other hand a goal is something I want or need and do have direct control over the outcome.
For example you could have a relationship that you care about deeply but no matter how hard you try the other person seems to be unresponsive. Even though my motives may be right when my methods center around trying to change the other person I have taken a desire and turned it into a goal.
In relationships the only goal that I should ever have is to change myself. In doing that it may indeed have a positive impact on the other person but that must remain a desire and never become a goal.
We hit the wall when we are working on things over which we have no control and that drains us. Even worse it keeps us from doing the very things we can control and that discourages us.
This principle applies both to our personal and professional lives. None of us has the responsibility to solve the global recession but we do have control over our own character.
The old axiom of do what you can with what you have right where you are is a great place to start.
Promises We Make
Filed under: Core Values, Family Ministry, Leadership Callling, Personal Development
We all struggle with the commitments we make either to ourselves about eating a healthier diet or to someone else about something we said we would do and simply forgot. When we want to take our commitment to the next level we start making promises.
A promise is defined as a declaration that something will or will not be done and there is assurance given and an expectation created. Promises should be reserved for the top priorities and the people we care about the most.
One promise we should all be willing to make to the people that matter is that I will carefully listen to what you have to say. As Stephen Covey said in Seven Habits of Highly Effective People we should first seek to understand the other person before we ask to be understood.
Our motives are no longer to show how smart we are, win the argument or avoid pain. We sincerely want to understand what the other person is thinking and feeling to the point we acknowledge their value as a person.
Listening involves time and a willingness to be patient until we have embraced all that the other person wanted to share. Think of at least one person in your life today that you really care about and make a promise that I will lay down my agenda for the benefit of someone else.
Are you listening?
Walk The Talk
Ultimately everything we do outwardly is driven by all of our inner attitudes about what is important and what is not. If our actions are not what they should be we must first change what we believe to be true before we can see bad habits broken and new good ones take their place.
I think the most important attitude you must draw from everyday is gratitude. The media is almost totally focused on all that we are losing in this down cycle. The pain is real and there are significant problems that must be solved. However, almost all of us still have plenty to eat, a nice place to sleep and friends and family that care about us. Think about what is really important today and be grateful.
The second important thing to me is hope. As we deal with the reality of lost jobs and endless bad news we must have a picture of a better day ahead. Hope fuels a positive attitude about life when the majority of people are negative. We may not be able to change the global economy or Wall Street but we can change ourselves.
Finally we must be people who are committed. Your passion about life is what will move you beyond the pain of the present. The promises we make and keep to ourselves and the people we care about the most is the sum total of who you really are as a person. If what say you believe is not moving you to act everyday then you really did not believe it after all.
Remember the old saying, what you do speaks so loudly I cannot hear what you say.
Attitude of Gratitude
I was reading again Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff by Richard Carlson and he talked about his tendency to start thinking negative thoughts with all the bad news that is out there today. I fight this as well especially when you are going through a hard time personally or when there is this slight issue of a global recession.
It is important to build into your life the daily discipline of thinking about all the good things that you have in your life. We all should be grateful just to be alive and the basics of life including food, clean water and shelter. There are multiplied millions of people who struggle just to make it through one more day.
Beyond that we have families and friends and hopefully we are fulfilled by doing something with our life that we know will make a difference. Through our faith we can have forgiveness for our failures and hope for the future.
The power of gratitude though is released when we go beyond thinking about it and personally telling someone else how thankful we are for what they mean to us. This sets off a chain reaction of them passing on their gratitude to someone else in their life and the cycle continues.
So as we all are waiting today for the new evil conflicker virus to start spreading through our computers lets start spreading something positive in our lives by telling just one person thanks.