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.