Do Women Know How To Be "Good Team Players"?

During the month of September, I’m focusing on teams and featuring my Collaborative Skills for Teams training. The tie between September and teamwork seemed obvious to me. It’s the time of year when, after waiting patiently all summer, thousands of high school and college football fans are rewarded with weekly doses of teamwork in action. If you’re not a football fan, well, just sit tight because basketball isn’t far behind! I love it almost as much, I guess, as the next person, especially since I spent most of my elementary, high school, and college undergrad days playing basketball and supporting the football team either as a team manager or fan. And, when it wasn’t football or basketball season, it was softball time in Tennessee for me. I rarely failed to be involved in a sports team of some kind. So it’s just natural for me, when writing, speaking or training, to use sports analogies. It would actually require effort on my part to not reference sports when talking about any topic related to living with, working with, or leading others. Case in point, here I am featuring a topic and program in September and using a link to the sport calendar to promote it!

In fact, I was all prepared to write this article based on a news story I read recently about the camaraderie and team spirit of the UT football team’s offensive line. Then, suddenly, I remembered the advice I received in 2005 from my writing coach, Tom Bird, when I wrote my book, Teaching Common Sense. Tom reminded me that my book would be categorized in the self-help genre, and that most self-help book readers are women. Women, Tom admonished me, have on average not had personal experience with team sports and are generally not going to get your sports analogies.

Poppycock! That’s what I thought when he said it. (Well, maybe not exactly that, but something like that.) I mean, it actually kind of offended me. It was as if he’d just said, “You don’t really understand women, Rhonda, since you’re not really very feminine yourself!” I was thinking, “What a sexist thing for him to say! And, if I don’t understand women, when I am one, then who does?!”

But, Tom must have been onto something, because I’ve sort of been conducting my own informal research since that time five years ago, and my findings surprised even me. Whenever I’m about to use a sports analogy, I stop and ask, “How many of you have never participated in team sports?” Sure enough, the majority of the women in the room will raise their hands!

My informal research shows that most men in the room will raise their hands as having participated in team sports. Even if it happened at a very young age, they will still identify with it. Or even if they didn’t participate in team sports, there’s a pretty good chance they served at least a few years in the military and have experienced the esprit de corps of it all—a characteristic still more likely to show up in a majority of males rather than females. So men, on average, get the “good team player” analogy. After all, it was in the previously male-dominated workplace that the metaphor of the team player became the reference point for whether a person either was or was not contributing to the group in the manner he or she should.

Now think about this for a minute. We still work in companies and organizations in which most management jobs are held by men—a full two-thirds of leadership positions—despite the fact that now more than 50% of the workforce in America is comprised of women. So here’s the great irony. All those male leaders are running around admonishing their female-dominated workforce to be good team players, when, in reality, only a minority of their employees share or understand that frame of reference! It’s become such a common cliché that, just this very day, when I was conducting a coaching call by phone, my client—a woman—said her problem with her co-worker was that he wasn’t being a “team player.” We throw around the term so commonly, and we just assume that everyone (a) has the same frame of reference, and (b) knows exactly what we mean by it. And yet, the reality is, it couldn’t be more vague or open to interpretation. Quite frankly, in the case of my coaching client, I suspect her co-worker isn’t meeting her standard for a good team player because he not only doesn’t know what it is, but he also doesn’t even know he’s not meeting it.

So, if we actually expect people to be good team players, or we actually hope to be one ourselves, do you think we might need to spend a little time getting more specific about what it means to be a good team player? The number of requests I receive to coach someone through issues with bad team players tells me we do.

I’ll be writing about this topic some more in the coming days, as we lead up to the class at the end of the month. And I promise to use at least one non-sports analogy, so please stay tuned as we work to shatter some more of our misperceptions on this concept of teams.

You can also sign up for the “free taste” tele-seminar I’m conducting on September 9, 4:00-5:00 PM, which will give you advance insight into the material contained in the class, so you can decide what’s in it for you.

Registration is open now for the following training dates:

• Knoxville, TN, UT Federal Credit Union, Friday, September 24, 8:00 AM – 12:00 PM

• Sevierville, TN, Courthouse Plaza Building, Monday, September 27, 8:00 AM – 12:00 PM

Use this link to reserve your spot today!

Knoxville Event Location Registration Link: http://collaborativeteamskillsknoxville.eventbrite.com/

Sevierville Event Location Registration Link: http://collaborativeteamskillssevierville.eventbrite.com/

Participants in Collaborative Skills for Teams training will:

• Complete a self-assessment to identify their primary and secondary team strengths based up the Team Talents™ Learning Model,
• Look at the differences between team members’ priorities and how they affect their ability to work together effectively,
• Explore how these differences can lead to miscommunication and conflict,
• Discover how these priorities affect team responsibilities such as managing time, conducting meetings, and guiding projects,
• Create an action plan for reconciling inherent differences between team members to become a strong contributor and help create engaged, collaborative teams.

If you’d like to arrange a public offering in your area, or an in-house session for you and your staff, contact us today.

Email me for group discounts or repeat attendee discount codes: rhonda@rjsleadershipcoaching.com

Making the Most of Your Time

Cindy Lynn White was 48-years-old, and she was my friend.

They buried her in Greeneville this past Friday, August 6, 2010.

To know Cindy was to love her. I can say that with no fear of it being disputed, if for no other reason than the droves of people who came to the funeral home to pay their last respects. But I have even more evidence than that.

I met Cindy in high school. She was a city girl, and I was a farm girl from the county, which normally would have meant that we lived in separate universes, and, I have to admit, should have meant that she felt and acted better than me. But nothing could have been farther from the truth with Cindy. She had an openness about her that immediately communicated how receptive she was to everyone. I don’t think she ever met a stranger, as they say where I come from, and, if Cindy knew you, you were her friend. Simple as that. No standards to meet. No hurdles to get over. No stumbling blocks. Just fun, and smiles, and friendship. Cindy cared. That’s all there was to it. And the literally hundreds for whom she cared showed up in full force to bid her farewell.

It happened much too soon.

They used Cindy’s high school graduation photo in her obituary, which was surprisingly appropriate, because the last time I saw Cindy, she really hadn’t changed all that much. We’d played softball and basketball against one another in high school, which ironically led to us being in medical rehab together, both of us for knee injuries. Even more irony is that her injury sort of came at my hands during a softball game, but that’s another story. She forgave me. Of course. She was Cindy.

We went on from there to work together, while I was in college, at Mickey D’s, where Cindy was a shift manager. Despite only being five foot nothing, she was a fireball of energy. When I sang a few years later at her wedding to Kevin, her diminutive size may have paled in comparison to his height, but there was never anything diminutive about Cindy’s presence. Cindy was strong and she knew it.

She still seemed exactly the same the last time I saw her on October 20, 2009. Our friend Jean’s mom had passed away unexpectedly. We’d all entered that phase of life. You know, the one in which grandparents and maybe parents are beginning to pass, so we typically only saw one another at the funeral home. That’s where I saw Cindy. She sat right beside me during the funeral. Never would I have imagined that this picture of health, who looked just like her high school graduation photo, would receive a stage 4 cancer diagnosis 5 short months later. And never in a million years could I have anticipated she would be gone in just 5 more short months after that.

Yet there I stood on Thursday night, one of the hundreds who waited patiently in line for over two hours to reach her family. It gave me a lot of time to think. And I wondered; what was it about Cindy that obviously touched so many lives? Do I even have it…whatever it is? And have I even begun to impact a fraction of people in the way Cindy did? These are difficult questions for anyone to ask and answer. Maybe none of us will ever bring to bear the unique combination of what made Cindy Cindy. So I won’t ask you to hold yourself to that standard anymore than I’m going to beat myself up about it. But I do want to ask you to think about one thing.

If Cindy’s life teaches us anything, it’s that we don’t know how much time we have.

How many times have you caught yourself thinking, “One of these days, I’m going to…” or “Someday, when I have time, I would like to…” or “When I retire, I am definitely going to…”?

Please don’t wait to live. Whatever it is, don’t put it off. LIVE your dreams NOW.

Perhaps an even greater weakness we all suffer is not worrying about the time we waste. We waste it on the unimportant, the inconsequential, the distractions. We don’t think about how we might use this time differently, if we knew it was all we had left.

But we should. Today is all you know for certain that you have. Each hour. Each minute. Make it count.

Last week I wrote about redeeming your time. One of the other translations of that phrase was making the most of every opportunity. I think Cindy redeemed her time. I don’t think she ever missed a single opportunity to do what she did best—reach out to others, build relationships, show compassion, offer help, and make every single person she encountered feel special.

What would it look like to redeem your time? Have you identified your priorities? Do you know what’s most important to you? Do you know what it would look like, if you were making every minute count?

Life truly is short, and some lives are even shorter than others. Whatever time you have, don’t waste it. Make it count.

With all my best and deepest love and condolences to Cindy’s family,

                                                                                          Rhonda

Redeeming Your Time

Okay, for all you young women out there reading this, I’m about to really date myself. But here goes.

Who can remember the days when we redeemed our glass soft drink bottles at the store for cash?

I do, I do!

I grew up on a farm out in the country . . . apparently a long, long time ago . . . and we were a good ten miles from the city limits . . . even farther from town. But at the center of our little farming community we had Colyer & Inscore General Merchandise, known simply and affectionately as The Store. And I remember well into my adulthood putting our glass Pepsi bottles back into the cardboard cartons and stashing them on the back porch, until it we found the time to take them to the store and cash them in.

It was common practice. On the long planked porch that stretched the length of the storefront any number of wooden crates stood ready to receive the returned bottles. You could find them leaned against the back wall, or stacked neatly in one corner, or sometimes even snuck up under someone’s axle that had been jacked up by some mischievous boys just enough to prevent the tires from touching down. The wooden boxes, sized to hold a couple dozen, had lots of unofficial uses, but they were constant reminders to return the bottles when we finished with the contents. I don’t think I ever heard the word redeem used to describe it, but, of course, that’s what we were doing.

Someone else talked about redeeming. The Apostle Paul, in his letters to the Ephesians, urged them to redeem their time: “See then that you walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise; redeeming the time, because the days are evil.” Ephesians 5:15-16 KJV

Other translations of the phrase, “redeem the time,” use even more enlightening words: make good use of time, make the best use of the time, make the most of your time, make the very most of the time [buying up each opportunity], make the most of every opportunity, make every minute count.

It’s pretty easy to see why we redeemed our glass soft drink bottles. There was a cash reward. But why should we care about redeeming our time?

I’ll let The Message version’s paraphrase of this passage from Paul’s letter answer that question.

"Don't waste your time on useless work, mere busywork, the barren pursuits of darkness. Expose these things for the sham they are… Rip the cover off those frauds…Wake up from your sleep, Climb out of your coffins…watch your step. Use your head. Make the most of every chance you get…”

Is there a reward for redeeming our time? You better believe there is, the same way there’s a consequence if we don’t.

There was no consequence associated with never returning our soda bottles. Well, there were the longer and broader consequences: those bottles ended up in the garbage and eventually filled up the ground somewhere, instead of filling up our pockets with change. Still, the bottle police didn’t come haul us in for our lax redemption practices.

No one will ever drag us in front of a judge for how we redeem our time either. But the consequence of not redeeming our time? It screams at me from that passage in The Message: waste, useless, barren, sham, and fraud. If we’re not redeeming our time —investing it—in the things that matter, we’re already dead in our coffins. We’re fooling ourselves into thinking that we’re living, when all the while, we haven’t redeemed even a small percentage of the time we have.

How do we redeem our time? The same way we redeemed those drink bottles . . . we take the time to do it. We make it a priority to spend time identifying our priorities, analyzing our habits, learning our weaknesses and ways to manage ourselves better, and intentionally planning how we’re going to go about redeeming our time tomorrow . . . next week . . . next month . . . next year.

Redeeming our time doesn’t just happen accidently. It takes intentional effort. So I’m devoting the month of August to intentionally helping you learn about and become intentional about redeeming your time . . . making the very most of the time you’re given. . . making every minute count. And, only during the month of August, I’ll be discounting this program between 25-50% below normal prices.

I hope I’ll see you in one of my upcoming Time Mastery sessions:

KNOXVILLE, TN

August 27, 8:00AM-12:00PM, UT Federal Credit Union, White Ave., Knoxville, TN

Register Now – Make Time! – Email info@rjsleadershipcoaching.com

OTHER TENNESSEE LOCATIONS:

August 30, 8:00AM-12:00PM, LOCATION & CLASS PENDING REGISTRATIONS, Sevierville, TN

August 31, 8:00AM-12:00PM, LOCATION & CLASS PENDING REGISTRATIONS, Athens, TN

Register now, if you want this class offered in the Sevierville or Athens area. Email TODAY at: info@rjsleadershipcoaching.com

If you’d like to arrange a public offering in your area, or an in-house session for you and your staff, contact me today. Group discounts are available.

Summertime Priorities

Well, June is finally here, and school’s out for summer. I have to use that phrase loosely, however, since summer breaks have become so brief even Alice Cooper can’t find much to sing about. The mad rush parents now experience, as they try to fit some semblance of vacation into this wisp of time, is one I might easily overlook were it not for my sister’s experiences, since I was never blessed with children.

Okay, I’ll admit, I’m using the word blessed a little loosely, too. I often feel blessed that I didn’t reproduce. Aside from the obvious cliché, the world is better off without another one like me; I’m really not sure what kind of parent I would have been. It’s such a challenge for me just to take care of myself the way I should. Heaven knows how I would have nurtured a child.

I did get a brief glimpse on one beautiful June day years ago, when my now 16-year-old nephew was only a 2-year-old toddler, and my sister asked me to watch him for her. I thought we had a marvelous day, until my sister showed up and asked what I had fed him.

"Uh, fed him?" I stammered. "He . . . he didn’t say anything about being hungry."

Come on. Give me a break. We were running and playing all day, and I didn’t get hungry. I go without eating all the time, especially when it’s June and summer bathing suit season! Am I right, ladies? Back me up here!

I actually thought I was going to be off the hook for it with my sister, but then she pulled out all the stops and asked what I had given him to drink. The look on my face obviously spoke volumes. “You did give him a drink, didn’t you?!” She exclaimed. “Did YOU go all day without a drink?!”

Busted! She had me there, although I do have to confess that I now realize, even though I’ve never gone completely without fluids, I’ve probably never consumed enough water in any given day. I'm probably not alone in this. We really don't take the best care, not even, of ourselves.

I share all this, not only to ensure no one will ever ask me to babysit, but also to confess to you that the Leadership Coaching work I now do comes not from a smug place of conceited perfectionism, but rather from a place of humility and learning from my own mistakes. In order to coach women and men alike to make better choices, both personally and professionally, I’ve had to first learn to do that myself. In fact, I’m still learning.

Every day I’m still working to overcome some obstacle, either real or imagined, that might prevent me from fulfilling all my potential, attracting abundance, experiencing joy, and spreading peace. We are the leaders of our own lives, personally and professionally, and if we’re not intentionally working to improve our leadership skills in that regard, we can be quite sure we’re not creating optimal results.

But, trust me, I’ve come a long way from the days I starved myself and my dehydrated nephew. And so can you. I’d love to help you begin that journey. In order to continually enhance my ability to do so, I’m developing a new program. I call it PE2 (pronounced P-E-squared), which is shorthand for Prioritize, Economize, Exercise.

I’ll be writing and blogging about it regularly from this point forward, and I sincerely hope you’ll be able to benefit from that effort. I especially hope you’ll respond to my blogs or email me through the contact page of my website to let me know how this helps you and what specific obstacles you face.

One thing I've learned is that our greatest ministry (or means of helping others) often comes out of our greatest struggles. I’m so pleased to see my own struggles redeemed in this new program. I eagerly look forward to helping you redeem yours, too!

Solving Problems in Government

Earlier this month we had a local primary election in Knox County, and people are still talking and writing about how the results were part of the fallout from Knox County Commission's Black Wednesday when the Sunshine Law was violated. I decided this might also be a good time to share some of my thoughts regarding common challenges in government, what causes them, and what might be done about it. Enjoy!

Not too long after I’d conducted training in a global Fortune 500 corporation, I received an email from one of the participants. He wrote to tell me about some controversy within the municipal government of his city and to ask me to contact his city’s mayor.

“The Mayor and City Council in my town really needs your training,” he said, “I’m not sure they’re ever going to be able to work effectively together without it.”

I politely thanked him for his vote of confidence, while diplomatically explaining to him that his mayor and councilmen and women would need to first recognize they could benefit from my help, before I or anyone else could ever be of any use to them. I could only assist them, if they want me to.

The training to which he was referring had been part of a broader initiative in his organization, which I had helped design and facilitate, to transform the organization’s culture into one that was “principle-centered.”

Similar to the nature of his city’s government, which is to serve its constituents, his organization was a service organization, which existed to provide service to the consumers of its products. The corporation’s philosophy was that, in order to treat its consumers the way they should be treated, thereby ensuring long term buy-in, everyone in the service organization needed to be operating with a solid set of moral principles.

Principles are defined as natural laws that operate in the world. These principles of which I speak span all cultures, religions and social strata. They are universally true, whether we align ourselves with them or not. The degree to which we do or do not align our behavior with these natural laws generates a constant stream of positive and negative consequences in our lives. For instance, gravity is a natural law of physics. I may say, “I choose not to observe gravity,” but if I climb up on the roof and jump off, the natural principle of gravity is still going to operate, and I am going to experience the negative consequences of choosing to behave as if it won’t.

Likewise, there are moral principles—such as Integrity, Honesty, and Respect—which, if we choose to ignore in our behavior, will eventually generate equally negative consequences. Apparently, the mayor and city council of this man’s town were right smack in the middle of experiencing the negative consequences of their previous, unprincipled behavior.

The important fact to understand is that these moral principles are inexplicably linked to the level of trust we’re able to build in all our relationships. Stephen Covey, author of the book, “Principle-Centered Leadership,” says trust (or the lack of it) is the root of success or failure in relationships and in the bottom-line results of business, industry, education and government. The key to dealing with the challenges that face us today, he says, is the ability to build trust, which becomes achievable once we recognize a principle-centered core within both ourselves and our organizations.

Covey’s philosophy—and the philosophy upon which we based the culture change in the corporation I worked with—is to align ourselves with these universally-true principles to bring true power, focus, energy, and integrity to our work and our lives.

The focus of the corporation’s culture-change initiative, and the focus of my training, had been on teaching men and women how to be principle-centered leaders of character who work on the basis of natural principles and build those principles into the center of their lives, into the center of their relationships with others, into the center of their agreements and contracts, and into the center of their management and work practices.

Anyone who has read any of Covey's other books, such as “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” and “First Things First,” is familiar with his belief that the four basic needs of all people is "to live, to love, to learn and to leave a legacy.” Many leaders from all different sectors struggle with the second point, “to love.” So I was fascinated when I heard former mayor of New York City and former Republican senate and presidential candidate, Rudy Giuliani, speak at a conference on this very topic. Giuliani, who, beginning on September 11, 2001, skillfully led New York City through the greatest tragedy in American history, was speaking at the conference about his philosophy of leadership. He had made several points and cited specific examples from his own lengthy public service career, first as U.S. Attorney and then a two-term mayor in one of the country’s largest cities. When Giuliani finally reached his concluding point, I listened intently as he prefaced it by explaining that nothing he’d described up to that point in his speech mattered unless you got this last one right. “You have to love people,” he said matter-of-factly, placing great emphasis on the L-word when he spoke it. He then proceeded to explain. A public servant, if he or she is to be effective in the long term, must be operating from a core commitment to compassion for others and an overriding desire to do what is right for those they serve, even if it is unpopular in some circles or could be detrimental to you personally.

How can any of us hope to do that? I believe, and those who have been part of these kinds of initiatives agree, it’s by operating from that principle-centered core. That certainly was what my former student was expressing to me, when he asked me to contact his city mayor.

Covey says this has to be practiced from the "inside out" on four levels:
1. Personal trustworthiness - our relationship to ourselves.
2. Interpersonal trust - our relationships with others.
3. Managerial empowerment - our responsibility to get a job done by working with others.
4. Organizational alignment - our need to organize people: recruit them, train them, compensate them, build teams, create aligned structures, develop strategies, form systems, and solve problems.

Each one of these levels is necessary but doesn't work well individually on its own. The four levels must work together in a comprehensive way.

Nowhere are those more critical, as pointed out by Rudy Giuliani, than in the government sector. Those are the levels on which government administrations can be helped . . . but only if the people who comprise those administrations want help.

Reflections on Recent Tragedies

January has already been an interesting month for me, although not for the reasons I ever expected. Normally January of every year is consumed with activities related to resolution-making and goal-setting and then trying to keep those oft ill-fated resolutions and goals. In that regard, this January has been no exception. But in today’s world of unrest, it’s been impossible, I imagine, for even the most self-absorbed individuals to ignore happenings out in the world and maintain a completely inward focus. Try though we might, our focus continues to be drawn outward. And, I’d have to say, I don’t think that’s a bad thing. But, sadly, some of what’s attracting our attention is very bad indeed.

I know what you’re thinking. You think I’m referring to the tragic earthquake in Haiti, the indiscriminate devastation, the horrendous loss of life, the woefully inadequate medical and humanitarian response, the continuing disintegration of a country and its people, and the prospect of continued suffering and death. Yes, there’s no denying, this is a very, very bad situation that’s consuming a great deal of our thoughts and energies.

But that’s not exactly what I’m talking about.

So, maybe you think, if I’m not talking about that attention-grabber, perhaps I’m referring to something else. Maybe you think I’m referring to the two wars on foreign soil in which we continue to sacrifice young American men and women. It’s true, most of us are directly touched by this situation. I have a brother-in-law preparing to return to Iraq in just days, leaving behind a nine- and fifteen-year-old son to worry about what the rest of their lives might be like, God forbid, without a father. And we have a young man from our church who’s on the frontlines in Afghanistan. I read his Facebook entries, and, although I can literally hear this war shaping him into a man with each passing day, I can still hear the hopes and fears of a boy. Relatively speaking, he is just a boy, really. Only a little more than a year out of high school, and now he is protecting me and my freedom? I understand that’s just the way it works. But, I’m sorry, as far as I’m concerned, the fact that we live in a world where that is just the way it works is something I consider very, very bad.

Nevertheless, when I say in this blog that there are very bad situations in the world that are drawing an inordinate amount of our attention, that’s not even what I’m referring to.

Okay, I’ll give you one last chance. If I’m not talking about a devastating earthquake or never-ending wars and rumors of wars, maybe you think I’m referring to this divisive presidency we now have. Not that every other presidency we’ve ever had in this country hasn’t eventually grown into an increasingly divisive situation, but, with the exception of anti-war demonstrations, this is the first time in my lifetime that I can recall actual public demonstrations, innocuously named “Tea Parties,” although there was no tea and, if you ask me, it wasn’t much of a party. And let’s not forget the near brawls when various congressmen and senators conducted district meetings regarding new healthcare legislation. Given those scenes and the visceral emotions displayed, I know how dangerous it is for me to even get near the subject of politics, so please graciously accept my admission to you here and now that I simply hate partisan politics. And it’s not just politics. I hate partisan anything. The irrational, ugly, and sometimes downright mean-spirited behavior we’ve seen lately, especially when it comes to taxes and healthcare, in my humble opinion, is not how an effective democracy would operate. To me, it’s a very, very bad situation in our country today.

However, that’s also not exactly what I’m referring to when I say there are bad situations getting too much attention…but it’s getting close. It’s a good segue. Let me illustrate the point I want to make today with another story.

My sister’s husband (the one who’s going to Iraq and is as red-white-and-blue-blooded American Republican as they come) drives over one-hundred miles round-trip from their home to Fort Campbell every day, and recently decided to purchase a Honda Hybrid in order to save on gas and money. Shortly thereafter, my nine-year-old nephew’s best friend, Tyler, came over to play. Upon returning home, Tyler, who has been my nephew’s BFF since kindergarten, stared up at his mom with a deer-in-the-headlights look in his eyes and said, “Mom, I’m not sure I can be Dane’s friend anymore!”

“What on earth are you talking about, Tyler?” inquired his shocked mom, who is also one of my sister’s closest friends.

“I’m not sure I can be friends with him,” he explained, “because his dad is a Democrat!”

“A Democrat!” she exclaimed, “He’s not a Democrat! What makes you think he’s a Democrat?”

“Well,” he said, “because he drives a hybrid!”

Okay, excuse me for just a second while I get this off my chest….oh, puh-leeeeze! This child is nine-years-old! Don’t get me wrong, I love his mother. She’s a wonderful first-grade teacher, plus she’s a hoot to be around and just an all-around wonderful person. So I’m not throwing stones at her. But do we really think this is okay…for even our children—the few left among us that we could once point to as being the last humans who were completely accepting and loving of all—to have become partisan?! Where are they learning this behavior, if not from us?

But then, should we really expect anything else? When we have a so-called spiritual leader spouting off in the national and international media that the Haitians brought this earthquake on themselves…that somehow they deserved it…thus turning this tragedy into another partisan issue.

We have a so-called republican leader saying that our president is only pretending to care about the Haitians, because it will make him look good, and urging people not to help him by contributing aid…thus turning our nation’s efforts to help a suffering people into yet another partisan issue.

And what I think is probably worst of all is that one side of the partisan divide has now laid claim to Christianity and morality. It seems to have snuck up on us, but now we’re into it up to our necks—Republicans have claimed ownership of faith. If you’re not Republican, well, I hope you like warm weather because I hear it’s pretty hot in hell.

Stop and think, people! What are we doing? Faith is now a partisan issue in this country. War is a partisan issue. Healthcare is partisan. What kind of car you drive is partisan. Even my nine-year-old nephew’s friends has become a partisan issue. There is absolutely nothing left in this country on which we have not drawn the battle lines. And we’re ruining our children.

Do you need more proof? Here’s another story, coming, ironically, from Tyler’s mom.

She has a little boy in her first-grade class named Wesley. Slight, frail, and freckle-faced, his pale-skin is even more distinct in contrast to his shiny red hair. Wesley is a sweet and, what you might call, nervous child. He’s the type, she explains, who, if he even suspects he might have done something wrong, will just come and confess it, trembling and stuttering all the while…too scared to confess, but too scared not to. This week we celebrated Martin Luther King Jr. Day. So, knowing this Monday off from school was approaching, Wesley’s teacher decided to teach her first-graders about the reasons we now recognize this man with a national holiday. On the preceding Friday, she gathered the children, read to them about MLK, explained that they would not be coming to school on Monday because we would be celebrating the Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday, and then dismissed them to play. Within minutes, she looked up to see nervous little Wesley walking sheepishly toward her desk.

Wringing his hands, his eyes darting all around as if trying to avoid making direct contact with hers, Wesley stammered, “Uh, uh, Miss Terry, uh, I was just wondering, uh, should I just come to school on Monday?”

Surprised, she responded, “Why, no, Wesley! I just explained to you that you don’t come to school on Monday because we’ll be celebrating MLK Day.”

“Uh, yeah, uh, yeah, I know, Miss Terry. I, I know that’s what you said, but, uh, well, uh, in my family, uh, well, uh, well, we don’t actually celebrate that holiday.” He suddenly spit out the final phrase like jerking a band-aid from a wound.

“So…should I just come on to school, Miss Terry?”

It was all she could do to keep from laughing as she tried to further explain.

I’ll admit I laughed, too, at both the story about her nine-year-old son’s reaction to my brother-in-law’s hybrid and her student Wesley’s reaction to the Martin Luther King holiday. But when I stop to reflect on why these types of situations are occurring with our children, it’s no laughing matter. I can’t even begin to imagine what that six-year-old little boy had heard in his house that made him afraid to go home and tell his parents that he was not going to school on Monday because he was celebrating Martin Luther King! In our country, we have gone so far as to even take a human being who sacrificed his life for the fair treatment of others—much like Jesus Christ who gave his life to purchase freedom for everyone—and that, too, we have made into a partisan issue.

Can we please just stop the madness? I’m tired of being afraid that the wrong person will find out and railroad or ostracize me for my politics or my faith…a faith, which, just so you know, is the guiding principle and the foundation for every single position, decision, or action I take…a faith that calls for unconditional love, acceptance, mercy, grace, compassion, and forgiveness…a faith that is open to all. No matter how hard people in our country try to make my faith a partisan issue, it is not one. And, if we’d all just come to our senses, neither would anything else be.

2010 Resolutions

It’s New Year’s Resolution time. So, like many of you, I’m beginning 2010 with some resolutions of my own.

In fact, for the second year now, I’ve been trying to abide, not just by an annual list of resolutions, but by a ten-year strategy with annually updated implementation plans.

No, I’m not kidding, and I realize that means most of you are saying right now, “I could not live with that woman.” But my husband is a planner, too, so he loves it. Just as it is an excellent tool in a business environment, or in a coaching relationship, this approach has also been an excellent tool for getting the two of us aligned on priorities. Plus, because we jointly agreed on those priorities, it’s something we each can use to gently reign in the other, if or when we begin to wander off on a tangent. It’s an approach I wholeheartedly endorse and use often in my leadership coaching.

And, given the year of global economic recession we’ve just weathered, it should come as no surprise that my plan contains some financial goals and resolutions.

However, I’ve discovered a large caution that needs to be issued along with this approach. And, I’ll admit it’s been a very humbling realization, because I’ve learned it the hard way. I made this mistake myself. So let me see if I can use my own new understanding to help you.

As I said, my list of resolutions contains some financial items. To be honest, I'm sad to say I can trace every item on my list back to money, which has been part of my new humbling understanding. Most of my plan involved ways to get more money and what to do with that money once I got my hands on it. You might wonder, “what’s wrong with that?” Here’s what’s wrong with that.

Money is the number one competitor for our hearts. It promises security, freedom, power and significance. But how much more of this recession must we endure before every last one of us learns that it can’t truly deliver any of those desirables. There should not have been any confusion in my mind about this.

While I was still in college, in the mid 1980s, I worked full-time at night in a large consumer electronics manufacturing facility. For my senior advanced management class, for the majority of my final grade I had to write a thesis. Because of my excellent access and firsthand knowledge, I decided to make it a comparison between the theories we were learning about in school and the actual practices in my company. So I scheduled and began conducting interviews of every senior executive, mid-level manager, and front-line supervisor who would talk to me. And one of the obvious questions I would ask was, “What is the company’s mission?” I never expected the answer I received. Across the board, without a single deviation, the response was, “To make money.”

In a desire to remain respectful, I tried to hide my shock. But even as a 21-year-old college student, I knew there was something wrong with that answer. I’m not even sure if I knew exactly why at that point. I simply knew that in school we’d read about meaningful and significant mission statements espoused by some of the world’s greatest companies, and this one paled in comparison. The missions of the companies we’d studied transcended something as superficial as making money. Instead they had a depth that would engage people on a visceral level, whether the promise of money was there or not. And yet the money did follow as a result of their efforts to achieve their meaningful mission.

That factory, which had been in operation for over thirty years when I went to work there, was milked dry and sold in less than ten years after the time of my study, and within another five years it was closed down completely. I wasn’t smart enough or prophetic enough to realize it when I was conducting those interviews, but that time period had actually been the beginning of the end.

I learned this lesson then but, somewhere along the line, I lost sight of it. If our only goal is making money, whatever the endeavor, it cannot be sustained nor will it ever satisfy.

Ecclesiastes 5:10, written by the wise (and extremely wealthy) King Solomon, says, “Whoever loves money never has enough; whoever loves wealth is never satisfied with his income.”

When I’m coaching a client and attempting to help him or her clarify their goals, I always try to get them to think beyond money. I’ve even been bold enough on occasion to caution, “When it becomes about just the money, it’s the beginning of the end,” a conclusion, no doubt, I bring with me from my experiences with that now-closed manufacturing facility.

But why should that surprise me? After all, I did begin this article confessing that my goals are heavily laced with financial implications and that I, myself, have fallen into this same trap. And isn’t that what we’re taught? We want the freedom to work according to our own preferences, so we set goals to apply our money toward getting out of debt and paying off our house. We want long-term security, so we set goals related to our insurance and investment portfolio and we put money away for retirement. We want significance, so we set goals for where we want to live and in what kind of house, what kind of car we want to drive, what kind of toys we want, and we start trying to figure out ways to get money for all that. Inevitably, this leads us to realize that our current income won’t provide it, so we have to set corresponding goals to get a bigger and better job. And once we’re in that better place of employment, we recognize it’s a lot more enjoyable for those who have power, so we want some of that, too. But that takes money…for more education…for better clothes to look the part…and country club memberships to rub elbows with the right people…and so on. And before we know it, even though we never had any negative intentions, nevertheless, it has become all about the money.

When we live a life in this manner, just as with that factory I described, it can become the beginning of the end…the end of meaning…the end of passion…the end of purpose. There has to be more to life than making money, if we’re to be fulfilled.

“Now, wait one minute,” some of you might be thinking, “If I make more money, I can help more people. I can be more charitable and make more of a difference in the world.”

That may be true for some of you; but, on the average, statistics indicate that will not be the outcome. Research shows the average American annually gives 3.1% of their income to charity, not even close to the minimum 10% taught in all types of Protestant and Catholic churches alike. But your argument is that, as our income increases, so does our giving. Well, guess again. This same research shows that so-called wealthy Americans above the $250,000 per year income level give only .07% to charity…less than 1%! In fact, the most charitable Americans are those who live below the poverty level but give 5.2% of their annual income to charity. So much for any theory that getting more makes us more giving.

Money is the number one competitor for our hearts. The more we have the more we want. Its pursuit requires our heart, our energies, our time, our passion, our lives. But its superficial promises are empty. The wholehearted pursuit of it will leave us milked dry and worn out. And we will still never be satisfied. It will never be enough. You don’t have to be operating on the scale of a Bernie Madoff to, nevertheless, lose perspective and fall into this trap.

This has been a hard lesson for me because, I’ll confess to you, I lost sight of it this last year. I began to see the world through that “Mo’ Money” filter. I’ve realized I wasn’t setting goals and pursuing them according to my passion and purpose. I was more worried about the money.

Maybe you have been, too. And maybe it’s excusable, given the financial woes that most everyone has experienced during the last year. But I don’t think that gives us permission to continue blindly down that path. Instead, I think it’s time for a wake-up call.

Let’s be careful in 2010 to not make our lives all about the money. Let’s make this a year of meaning, and passion, and purpose. Money enough will follow.