Communication Leadership

Using Our Hearts

Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day once again.

There are those who decry this day as a made up, commercialized holiday designed to sell cards, candy, flowers, jewelry and formal dinner dates. For those folks I remind them of the legitimate historical roots of love and truth in the life of the real man who inspires bold romantic actions today. St. Valentine did exist and can be researched in any way you choose.

I also suggest some context:

The Super Bowl started out as a nice little season-ending game between the National Football League and its rival, the upstart American Football League. My Green Bay Packers won; and my mother is still miffed that the game ended and the network cut directly to regular programming. We clearly take this a little more seriously in these modern times. We may even be calling this national event St. Doritos’ Day in a few hundred years. Think about it.

All this said, I would also suggest a reframing of Valentine’s Day as a chance to reinvent our hearts as a tool of our own trade, whatever our trade happens to be. Much conversation in the business community, particularly in entrepreneurial circles, focuses on “heart-centered” or “soul-inspired” practices and goals. Withdrawing from the need to participate in competitive business models, heart-centered business owners work from a creation-based model, one in which generous cooperation is the name of the game. The idea is simple: we are each here to make a specific contribution to the world, live our purpose, and no one else has what we have to offer. Competing with others for anything, from raw materials to market share, literally defeats one’s own purpose.

Warren Sautebin, my minister growing up, as well as a tremendous influence in my life, called this servant leadership. Generous cooperation, the hallmark of heart-centered business, is exemplified in working together, helping one another identify and manifest the gifts we have to share, however we choose to do that. Unlike business management, which is achieving results based in telling others what to do, servant leadership is about helping people grow themselves in forward movement to more life for all and less for none. In helping others grow, we also grow; hence, it really is more blessed to give than to receive.

Using our hearts as the central tool of our trade, whether it is as coaches, consultants or corporate executives, means we know our gifts and talents have a valid place in the personal and economic development of the world. It also means we are already an inspiration for those we serve, whether we have met them or not. Using our hearts is also a balance of immense power with the rich resource of our minds. Thinking and feeling, united and directed with conscious choice through the actions that grow our businesses, build the strongest of foundations from which we may reach and help even more people attain their own success.

St. Valentine is remembered in traditional ways for encouraging relationships to blossom and grow from heart-centered actions. We talk a lot about building relationships in business today. Perhaps we can carry this sense of service forward and remember St. Valentine as an inspiration in a new way this year.

Community Value

There’s an old church camp song that’s been dancing its way through my head the last few days. Loosely based on the parable Jesus told about a wedding feast for which many of the invited guests found excuses not to attend, it is a fun, lively song we used to sing around the campfire, very loudly.

What caught my attention and drew me down this path was a Facebook reply from a woman I went to camp with who described her life as a “full plate,” and she liked everything on that plate very much.

This is when the song came on in my head like a top forty favorite from the easy listening seventies: “I cannot come . . . I cannot come to the wedding don’t bother me now. I have married a wife; I have bought me a cow. I have fields and commitments that cost a pretty sum. Pray hold me excused I cannot come.”

Also sitting around those campfires was my childhood minister.

After he served my home congregation he moved on to become a church administrator who, at his retirement, shared three important lessons he had learned over his forty years as a minister: in the church we are about a servant, not a slave, leadership; community matters; and what we do in the church must have a theological basis.

It is his perspective on community that informed my life from very early on and still does. The simple truth is that each one of us has purpose and value, and our desires are the leading force in how we are designed to contribute to our community.

Back up with me for a moment to that full plate.

It’s a common phrase, an effective phrase for letting others know we are busy, unable to say no directly and still feel a little self righteous. How can anybody question or argue having a full plate?

Perhaps because the full plate is being used as a shield of obligation and responsibility it is easy to miss that a full plate is really about abundance, pleasure, and gratitude. But saying we have a full plate doesn’t mean we have accepted the invitation that God extends through Jesus’ parable to come to the wedding feast as an honored, welcomed guest.

Have you ever planned a wedding? Most often the people invited know the bride, groom or their families. The connection may be personal, professional or “for old time’s sake,” but always intentional. In that same way we are all a part of Spirit’s community, all intentionally invited to come to the feast that is life. Our place at the table is set for us so that we may give to the whole of the community exactly what we have to offer simply by being ourselves.

So how can we not come to the wedding feast? How can we turn down the invitation that is life itself?

Apparently Jesus was clear that life’s obligations take a lot of our attention. Personal commitments, business ventures and property maintenance do require follow through.

But they don’t rate as excuses for not accepting the invitation to the feast of life and our necessary presence to make that feast a success for ourselves and the community. Our attendance means we are living our life purpose, our desires, contributing our personal value to the community as a whole. If we don’t give what we came to life to give, our purpose, whatever it is, will not be realized.

No one else is on the planet to be us; therefore there are no excuses for not attending, even already having a full plate.

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I also suggest some context:

I also suggest some context:

I also suggest some context: