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!

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.