Archive | July, 2009

Redirection, part four

By on July 27, 2009 in Business, Career, Church, Money, Uncategorized

This is the fourth post in a series titled Redirection.  The series is based on a talk I gave recently to a group of Christian business women. You can read Part One here, Part Two here and Part Three here.

If there’s something in you that desires redirection, the question then becomes: from where or whom am I going to receive redirection?

In the Bible, we constantly see God showing up and redirecting lives. Let me give you three easy examples.

Gideon – God calls on Gideon to reclaim Israel from the hands of the Midianites. At first, Gideon refuses to believe that God has chosen him and demands proof that God hasn’t made a mistake. Once he accepts the call to square off against the Midianites, Gideon musters a large army. God shows up and works on Gideon until his army is cut from tens of thousands to just 300.

God shows up, redirects Gideon, and is glorified.

Jonah – God tells Jonah to preach against the wickedness of the Ninevites. Jonah runs as quickly as he can in the opposite direction. Calamity ensues, and after spending a few days in the belly of a whale, Jonah is spit back out onto shore. God shows up again, and Jonah goes to Ninevah.

God shows up, redirects Jonah, and His purpose is fulfilled.

Saul/Paul – As the church began to take shape, Saul persecuted Christians. God comes to Saul, knocks him off his horse and blinds him.  A few days later, Saul regains his sight and begins to preach in the synagogues that Jesus is the son of God.

God shows up, redirects Saul, and is glorified.

I started this series by talking about how our own decision-making is likely to fail us because there are traps, tricks and patterns of thinking that are wired into us.

I see it in my work all the time. People hide their money in cash when they should put it in the market. They give into emotion and buy or sell at the wrong time. They spend so much time analyzing their options that they never do anything to address their problems. The list could go on and on.

But this stuff doesn’t just show up in our financial decisions, so I don’t know how the traps are catching you.

Maybe there’s a relationship that’s dry. Maybe you can’t make any progress at work. Maybe there’s junk that lives in your heart that just won’t go away.

I don’t know what your stuff is. But let’s not get hung up on what was or what is.

Let’s begin to look at what could be. Come back tomorrow and we’ll do just that.

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Redirection, part three

By on July 24, 2009 in Uncategorized

This series of posts, titled Redirection, is built on a talk I gave recently to a group of Christian business women. You can read Part One here and Part Two here.

If we want things to be different, the temptation is to think that we need to do things differently.

I would suggest that if we want things to be different, instead of doing things differently, we’ve got to do different things.

That sounds like it’s just wordplay, but let me show you what I mean.

Let’s say that a boulder blocks the street I take to work everyday. I drive up to the boulder, see that I can’t get around it and go back home.

If I’m doing things differently, then the next day I’m going to ram the boulder as hard as I can with my car. When it doesn’t move, I turn around and drive home. The day after that, I’m going to inch up to the boulder and try to push it out of the way. When it doesn’t move, I turn around and drive home.

That’s what doing things differently looks like.

If I decide to do different things, then I’m going to ride my bike to work since the sidewalk isn’t blocked. Or I’m going to park my car at the boulder and walk the rest of the way to the office.

If we want things to be different, we’ve got to do different things.

If we want things to be different, we need redirection.

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Redirection, part two

By on July 23, 2009 in Career, Church, MC, Money, Uncategorized

The following is the second post in a series titled Redirection. The series is built on a talk I gave recently to a group of Christian business women. If you missed the first post, you can read it here.

Our brains are wired to play tricks on us.

This shows up in a number of areas of our lives, but let’s talk about where it shows up with money since that’s how I spend my days.

There’s more to handling money well or picking the right investments than simply running the numbers and seeing what set of numbers is best.

The fact that the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics was won by a psychologist for his work in the emerging field of behavioral economics should show us that our heads and our hearts are part of the equation also.

There are pages upon pages of tricks and traps that our mind falls for, but here are just a few:

Neglect of Probability – under stress, we tend to ignore probability when making decisions.

To illustrate this, I told the story of how my brother and sister-in-law recently moved from Philadelphia to Celebration.

They sold their house in Philly, sent all of their stuff down the road in a moving van, rented a condo in Celebration sight unseen. And oh yeah, my sister-in-law is pregnant with their first child.

Sound stressful?

Keeping neglect of probability in mind, had their insurance agent in Florida slipped a blizzard insurance policy into their stack of documents, there’s a pretty good chance they would have given it consideration.

There’s absolutely zero probability of a blizzard in Florida, but under stress we’re inclined to disregard that truth.

Zero Risk Bias – this trick makes us prefer reducing a risk to zero over making a reduction in a larger risk.

This is me and Mary Craig with the toothpaste. We’ll completely eliminate the $2 risk while ignoring the massive risk of the tree falling on our house.

Hindsight Bias – we tend to think events were more predictable than they actually were.

When we say, “I knew he was going to cheat” or “I knew she was going to steal from us” or “I knew that mutual fund was going to be a dog” we’re probably fooling ourselves. Hindsight makes us think we saw that stuff coming, when we didn’t really.

So again, our minds will play tricks on us. We do things we shouldn’t. We avoid things we should do. We procrastinate. We keep falling for these traps.

To live the lives that God intended for us, we need to move beyond these traps. We need things to be different.

We need to be different.

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Redirection, part one

By on July 22, 2009 in Career, Church, MC, Money, Parenting

The following series of posts, titled Redirection, are built on a talk I gave to a group of Christian business women on Tuesday.

Mary Craig and have this little ritual we do with our toothpaste.

She does the grocery shopping, and she buys whichever (or everwhich, as people say around here) brand of toothpaste is the best deal.

As the tube of toothpaste starts to get low, we work it to squeeze every last bit of toothpaste out. The tube doesn’t get thrown away until every last bit of toothpaste has been used.

Why do we do that?

We do it because it seems wasteful to toss out a tube of toothpaste that still has something in it. We don’t want to lose any of the $2 or so we spent for the toothpaste.

Hang on to that thought for a minute while I head in a different direction.

Until a month ago, a beautiful old oak tree shaded our house and most of our front yard. The oak was massive, and if the right wind blowing with the right strength in the right direction came along, the tree would have fallen and demolished our house.*

The bedrooms where my children sleep would have been the first rooms to be destroyed.

For a few thousand dollars, a tree company could take the tree down. Doing so would eliminate the risk of personal and financial loss to us from that tree falling on the house.

Okay, now let’s put two images back together.

Inside, Mary Craig and I are squeezing the life out of a tube of toothpaste to minimize the risk of losing $2 while outside, the risk of a personal and financial catastrophe literally hangs over our head.

We continue to work the toothpaste tube and we don’t call the tree service.

It doesn’t make sense.

Do any of you do stuff like that?

My guess is that you do. In fact, I know you do.

Tomorrow we’ll talk about how our minds are wired to play tricks on us and how that shows up in our finances, careers, relationships, etc.

* The tree did fall. The night before our baby was born, as we read bedtime stories to the kids in the room closest to the tree, a storm blew the tree over in the opposite direction of the house. The impact of the tree with the ground shook the house as if a plane had crashed in the front yard.

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A little light reading to end the week

By on July 17, 2009 in Uncategorized

One good thing about having an iPhone is that I can get some reading done during the wee hours of the night while I’m up with the baby. Here’s some good stuff I came across this week:

These posts from Mike Foster challenge us to take another look at Christian accountability:

This post from Drew at The Marketing Minute helped reassure me that I’m not alone in thinking that we’re not necessarily serving people by just smothering them with more choices:

I like a good hamburger. And when you mix good burgers with good writing, I’m all over it. That’s why I’m a fan of this post from Lora Lynn:

Happy reading!

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Being there: an unexpected part two

By on July 16, 2009 in Uncategorized

Earlier tonight I scratched out a post while laying on a tiny sliver of my 5 year old daughter’s bed.

She was upset, and among all the parenting techniques at my disposal, it seemed that just being there with her was best.

Right now it’s about 5:40 a.m. Our 4 week old baby has been sleeping fitfully for the last half of the night. She’s got a belly ache and would benefit greatly from some diaper-filling activity.

Now that we’ve had three kids in 6 years, I feel like I have some highly-developed parenting skills. But making a child poop on demand isn’t one of them.

So just like with the 5 year old earlier tonight, I’m giving the 4 week old what I can: me.

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Being there

By on July 16, 2009 in Uncategorized

I’m pecking this out on my phone from my daughter’s bed.

Earlier today, she and my son hatched a plan to crash in her bed tonight. Now that he’s sound asleep on his side of the bed, she’s changed her mind and wants him out.

Not going to happen.

She’s upset about the whole thing even though MC and I have talked with her about how she needs to think harder next time before she invites her brother down the hall for a sleepover.

I can read my little girl pretty well, so I stopped myself from trying to talk any more sense into her and just said, “Scoot over.”

Sometimes all they want is for you to be there.

So Daughter, I’m here. And this is right where I’ll be until you’re sound asleep just like your handsome little brother next to you.

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It’s hard to see it unless you know what it looks like

By on July 14, 2009 in Church, MC, Son

At the end of our vacation in March, we loaded our rented van with our bags and piled in for the short trip to the airport.

We pulled up to the white zone, which was for immediate loading and unloading of passengers only (or was it the red zone?), yanked out our bags and shuttled the kids toward the check-in lines.

Once our bags were jostled into the right line, MC and I exhaled and settled in for a long wait. Then in an instant the color drained from MC’s face.

“Where’s Son?” she said.

We looked all around. He was nowhere near us.

She bolted for the door while I grabbed Daughter’s collar to make sure she didn’t wander off. All of the bad scenarios ran through my mind while MC was looking.

A moment later, MC walked in with Son in her arms. He had stopped at the sliding doors, lost track of us, and decided to wait there.

This brief panic came back into my mind as I studied Proverbs 1 for last week’s Sunday School lesson. Verse 28 says:

28 “Then they will call to me but I will not answer;
they will look for me but will not find me.

As I thought back to that episode at the airport, I thought: How could we have begun to look for our son if we didn’t know what he looked like?

If I’m to seek God in my life, what chance do I have of finding him if I don’t have a clue what He looks like?

To see Him, I’ve got to know about his nature, how he moves, how he speaks, and where he shows up.

Until I know what’s distinctively Him, I’m bound to either search forever in vain or face the repetitive disappointment of finding what I think is Him but isn’t.

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Kindness keeps showing up in casserole dishes

By on July 10, 2009 in Baby, Food, Parenting

One thing that happens in the South when you have a baby is that people show up at your house with food.

I’m not sure what the rationale behind bringing food is, but maybe it’s one of these:

  • people assume you’re too tired to cook
  • people assume you’re too stressed to cook
  • people assume you’re too broke to cook

So for nearly three weeks now, almost every dinner has been made and delivered by someone else’s hands. We’ve had chicken casseroles, spaghetti and salad, chicken pot pie, enchiladas, and much much more.

After three weeks of eating this food, I want to go on record with this statement:

I DON’T EVER WANT THIS TO END.

In fact, I tweeted the other night that this care and comfort ritual may be enough to keep us in the baby business. This gravy train (mmm…gravy)  may just propel us from Mom, Dad and Three Kids all the way to Why Can’t They Stop Having Children?

Alright, so maybe I shouldn’t go that far, but the barrage of food has definitely left its mark on us. We’ve been fed physically and spiritually by the kindness of our friends and family. It’s been a huge blessing.

If someone in your life has a new baby, or is about to have one, or would just appreciate a kind gesture, do this: Give ‘em a call and say, “I’m bringing you dinner. What night do you want it?”

I guarantee it’ll make an impression.

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It’s been a big week on the worldnetoverse

By on July 9, 2009 in Uncategorized

Here are a few good things from around the interwebosphere this week:

Purpose behind obstacles

A few months ago, a got a follow on Twitter from a guy named Michael Hyatt. I bounced over to look at his profile and saw that he’s CEO of a company called Thomas Nelson Publishers.

I thought my big break had arrived.

“A book publisher wants to follow me,” I thought. “I’m finally going to get to write a book!”

Then I looked a little further and concluded that Michael wasn’t after me to pen their next bestseller. He’s just really good with social media. Not to mention a great thinker and writer.

This week, he published these two posts that I think you’ll enjoy:

 

Dropping some leadership wisdom

For a few years now I’ve wanted to attend Catalyst in Atlanta. The timing hasn’t worked out, so I keep up with Catalyst online. The Catalyst blog offered this piece of wisdom:

Key Leadership Principle for Young Leaders

 

It’s funny and it’s true

A while back, I ran across Stuff Christians Like. I read it a time or two, but never added it to my Google Reader.

I went back to SCL and fell in love with the blog after reading this spot-on post about Jon & Kate.

This line from the post sealed the deal for me:

I don’t know the devil, but I have to assume that when he hears a Christian judgmentally proclaim, “That could never happen to me,” he does what I do when I hear the Black Eyed Peas song, “Boom, Boom, Pow,” and that is the robot.

Anyhow, Jon put up some awesome stuff Wednesday morning about dealing with the “in-between” seasons:

#575. Refusing the gift of the desert road.

I hope you’ll go check this stuff out!

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