How do you train an elephant? It’s pretty simple really. Baby elephants are all trained for the circus in a similar way. They spend the first year of their life tethered by a strong 6-foot rope and a stake in the ground. After that, a trainer can easily control them with a thin nylon cord tied to their leg because the elephant thinks it can’t go any farther than the rope allows…

A friend recently recommended “The Kindness Diaries” on Netflix.  Season 1 is 13 episodes of approximately 20 minutes each.  The shows protagonist operates with a simple belief that despite all the war, pestilence, and hatred in the world, there is the capability of kindness and goodness in everyone.  It can be found anywhere.

For us and many of our more typical clients, bringing someone else onto the team is quite a bit less frequent.  Turns out, the smaller you are, the more crucial “getting it right” becomes.  If you have 50 employees and you hire someone, they immediately represent 2% of your employee base.  A new hire for a team of 4 represents 20% of their new employee base.

I was introducing a client (who has become a very good friend) to a ministry leader.  It was a beautiful collision of gifting and ability with hope and desire.  The three of us were powerfully aligned in many ways. It is what I imagine a war council must feel like. Leaning in.  Map on table.  Our territory was a generation of young people being overwhelmed by a cultural post-Christian tide and some like-hearted kings shoring up their battle plans to re-take some ground.

Greg McKeown’s best selling book “Essentialism” is, in a word, essential.  Who do you know that isn’t struggling with how to determine the essential list of things to lend their focus?  Most leaders I knew were having a hard time managing their priorities even before....

Whether it is in families or companies, the hope that the members tend to carry, emanates from above.  If the parents or company leaders (the protagonists in all our situations) tend to be hopeful with great expectations, everyone they lead tends to feel the same way.  If they are negative and rueful, everyone else is shrouded by a similar perspective.

I’ve mostly been taught that my heart is desperately wicked…even unredeemable this side of heaven.  I’ve been taught that my heart is bad, mostly capable of bad things, and that if I work hard enough to overwhelm the bad with good, I might be able to modify the behavior that all that badness is causing.  I’ve largely been taught to treat the symptoms. 

The heart may be desperately wicked, but the root structure of the redeemed is capable and intended for glory.  How differently do you think a life might look if it had the banner of GLORY hanging over it instead of DESPERATELY WICKED?  For me, focusing and believing in the former…

One of the reasons for this misunderstanding, is that we typically know very little about the people we interact with on a regular basis.  I mean, we know things about some people (age, name, marital status, job, etc.), but we really don’t know them at all.  If you really want to know someone, you need to know the story of the life they lived from the very first day to the last.

Culture cannot be outsourced.  In fact, the highest ranking person in the organization should teach, inspire, and get commitments to that culture as a necessary first step (this meant that CEO Horst trained dishwashers and maids around the world).

The curse of knowledge is typically referenced in educational situations where the teacher knows so much that they have a hard time simplifying the message down to the experience or understanding level of the audience.  They also refer to it as “talking over the heads” of people.

Increasingly, it is being referenced in the marketing space.  A recent Yankelovich study estimates that the average person is exposed to 5,000 marketing messages a day.  That is a pretty confusing and noisy marketplace to try…

There is kind of a general understanding that no one really wants to look at someone else’s slide show of their vacation.  You couldn’t pay most people enough to do that.  Ironically, most Americans spend an increasingly larger amount of their day looking at other people’s highlight reels.  What cool place they went, what they saw, what they ate, how much fun they had, and who they were with.  But we are largely looking at slide shows of the exceptions and not the reality of their day-to-day lives in our social media consumption.

We are all a product of the story we have lived.  We view everything we experience through the interpretive lens of the experiences we have had.  When you meet a person, you meet the cumulative effect of every day they have lived prior.  It all matters, all shapes, and all defines.  Without understanding the past, you will never really understand the present.

Emotionally healthy people don’t feel and react, but try to understand why they are feeling that way and address the issue.  Unhealthy people, see every emotional as justification for their responses, appropriate or not.  Healthy people create space between what they feel and how they respond.  To allow appropriate room before they leap to a response.  

John Ruhlin has a business completely based on helping people give gifts better.  Most of his clients are larger corporations that want to more effectively wield the dollars they spend to honor clients and woo prospective ones.  In his recent book, “Giftology, The Art and Science of Using Gifts to Cut Through the Noise, Increase Referrals, and Strengthen Retention” he tells fantastical tales of extravagant gift giving.

But love in this context, was powerful and ferocious.  It was the necessary force that needed to be applied.  It was the nuclear option, but in a whole different way.  It didn’t end the conversation, it started it.  It was offered as the ultimate weapon…the one that could cut through steel and any other barrier that stood in its’ way.

Another barometer for me, is writing these posts.  They have been posted weekly for over five years and twice-weekly for almost one.  I am often weeks or even months ahead.  So many complete in excess of the posting schedule, that I often can’t remember what a particular post was about when someone references a “current” one that I actually wrote weeks before.

But when I checked the gauge on this barometer this morning, I didn’t like the reading I found.  Not only was I out of posts, the last time I had written anything was a week and a half ago.  

Time to practice what I preach and not only honor the time in my weekly calendar for one-on-one meetings, but for writing as well.  

Yvon Chouinard, founder and sole owner of the private Patagonia company wrote a book about his journey with that company, Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman. He named his company after the beautiful and untamed Patagonia he experienced on an epic journey in the ’70s. His company was actually created to provide him and his friends the requisite gear to experience what he found in Patagonia (in the picture above) and other beautiful places…

But, if they prove to their team that they are most interested in their lives, hopes, and dreams (and they are the right kind of people), they will treat each customer with great interest in their lives, hopes, and dreams.  If we teach them that our primary objective is to serve them (and serving was first our intellectual property as Christians), they will, in kind, serve.  

And if each employee sees that working for their restaurant is helping them become the kind of person they want to be, I bet you can guess what turnover looks like and how nearly impossible it is to get a job there.  There is a long line to get in and no one wants to leave.