what we can see.

Someone wanted a picture of Nancy.

She works for the Fort Wayne Children’s Choir but if you look at the website, you can’t find her picture. At least not by name. You can’t see most of the other staff either. It’s a design choice, one which doesn’t upset her much.

I decided to help the situation. To the left you see a picture of Nancy at the Children’s Choir concert a couple of days ago. Though there are 1200 other people in the picture, I know exactly where she is.

This doesn’t help you at all. If you have been reading what I write, however, you have gotten glimpses of her. She shows up by direct reference. She shows up in the shaping of our children. She shows up in the thoughts you read here in ways that you could never see, but, just like I can see Nancy in the picture, she can see herself here.

You think this is a post about Nancy. It’s not. It’s about you.

The picture above may be the kind of picture of your self that you want floating around. Although you may or may not be leaving clear photographs of yourself, you are constantly painting a picture of yourself, providing details, adding shading. And the picture isn’t exactly what you think.

If it’s like mine, the image you are creating may be what you want to be, what you are afraid you are, what you wish you weren’t. I had someone say to me recently, “If I could, I would provide you with a mirror so you could truly see how others see you, and to give yourself more of a break.”

Stu was right.

We all are better and worse than we wish. We are more and less perfect. We are more and less interesting, more and less effective, more and less cool. We are, in short, human. And we are loved.

And if we spent less time on impression-management, we might have more time for other things.

It’s Tuesday. Give yourself a break.

Go ahead, applaud

Chris Brogan has said that today, Monday, April 28, should be comment day. Chris tells us to go visit other people and engage in their conversation. I was going to list a bunch of links.

But I’m not. I’ll just go there myself and comment.

However, I was at a concert on Sunday and a musical on Saturday night. I’ve watched how feedback works and helps in those places and decided to create another 8 ways list.

1. Be spcific in your comments. It helps the conversation to continue.

2. Be persistent in your comments. Some of us don’t reply immediately, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t listening.

3. Be thoughtful. Be willing to use your mind to suggest new ideas, new perspectives.

4. Be connected. Make sure that your comments relate somehow to what the person is saying. I have a hard time continuing the conversation when I can’t figure out the nature of the connection.

5. Be encouraging in your comments. Sometimes we just need to hear a cheer, or know that someone in particular is listening.

6. Be multi-modal. I just made that up, but it means that sometimes the comments should be in the comment field, but sometimes they should be in an email or a phone call or a text or a tweet. A post and comments are just one place for interaction. (I know the value of having the conversation in public. But there are times for keeping parts hidden or directed).

7. Be conversational. Conversation invites other people to talk as well. I’m not great at this. I tend to give the last word. So…

8. Be _____________. What kind of comments are most helpful to you?

The floor (or the comment box) is yours.

for aiden

Yesterday, the son of a friend was confirmed and took/made first Communion. It was, for me, a good time to think about faith.

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expectation

I love to be in empty performance halls. There is a sense of quiet expectation.

While you are setting the stage, working on the last-minute details, all the people that will be sitting here tomorrow are living their lives. This event is one more item on their schedule.

So as you are preparing for this room to fill, how does your perspective change if you move from filling it with paying customers to filling it with guests?

If they are customers, they pay and you deliver.

If they are guests, they come with a sense of wanting to belong, of wanting to be welcomed. It’s okay if they have to bring some money, guests bring food to parties all the time, (particularly when it’s a potluck.) If they are guests, especially good friend guests, they are on your side. They want it to be a great time, they want to overlook the odd things. They just want to be part of the party, the event.

The more we treat them like customers, the more they expect perfection and the less they give us grace. The more we treat them like customers, the less we have to be nice to them, because the niceness is purchased.

The more we treat them like guests, the easier it is to be nice to them, because we are less worried about the price and more interested in the relationship.

Whether we are filling a concert hall or a blog or a hardware store, what if we thought about guests?

What do you think?

too many words?

Yesterday, five books arrived on my virtual desk, from two sources. I bought another last Saturday. I committed to reviewing another this week. I read another and wrote about it already this week.

Between email and comments and posts and other writing, I’ve written at least a small book this week (If it were put together with the amount of white space of many other books these days, it would be a large book.)

Since last Saturday, I’ve been to most of two banquets, a long meeting with a large presentation, a meeting working on writing a large grant.

I’ve read posts and shared reading lists from the 83 blogs on my Google Reader list, though most don’t write often.

Some of you have had much more of the same this week.

And now, on a Friday, when I have a day off work, what do I want to do?

Read and write.

Which is great.

Unless of course I am doing those things as an excuse for not actually thinking through what I’ve read and living out what I’ve said. In our consumption of vast quantities of information, there is the risk of not processing any of it, engaging with any of it, taking it in, taking it home.

A friend recently talked about a reading group, where people are “expected” to have read carefully enough to be able to bring those reflections to the group. There is, in that expectation/commitment, putting people ahead of data flow. Another friend just asked whether I would keep working on a writing project. I would love to, except I’m not happy with the way I’m lobbing words into a conversation and then running away. What I would like to do is to stay and talk. (I’m staying and talking in some other conversations that I can’t give up, so it’s not simply a matter of saying, “If you’d like to, just do it.”). What I realize, when I am willing to look in the mirror, is that the desire to keep up with what is being said is activity which, for me, replaces reflection.

There is an addictiveness to “flow”. Somehow we need to add in “chew”. To somehow balance news and wisdom, research and reflection, monologue and dialog. We can think of thee two as “in and out” and “in-between”.

If we are all about in and out, consuming and producing information, we become parrots or skimmers. If we are all about “in-between”, the processing, meditating, brooding, reflecting, we may never let anyone else into the process with direction and suggestion. (I realize that these are over-simplifications. Expand them, if you will).

For me, this morning, that means pulling the books that are scattered throughout the house into one pile. For me, this morning, that means loading in some ideas and then mowing the lawn while I think. For me, this morning, that means finishing some email conversations. For me, on Monday, this means being part of Chris Brogan’s comment day, (Sometime over the weekend I’ll suggest some places to go comment).

For you, this morning (or whenever you read this), what does balancing “in and out” with “in-between” look like?

Dental assisting

I got a crown yesterday. A filling had cracked and it was time to fix it. A couple weeks before I had the bad part done (with incredible amounts of novocaine). This appointment was merely for putting the $700 piece of metal in my mouth.

I walked in and sat down. The dental assistant said, “You have an iPod, don’t you?”

I do. She knows because it is my own pain reliever. I discovered that if I play David Crowder as loud as possible through the ear buds, I can’t hear the drill.

I told her that I did. She asked about charging it. She said that she had gotten the new iPod Skip. (She meant Shuffle). She tried to charge it at home but it kept flashing red. She brought it in to the office but wasn’t sure it was working. I asked where it was. We went to the front desk. She told me she had called tech support who said she needed to stop it before unplugging it. We stopped it. We unplugged it. I asked her about directions. It hadn’t come with any that she remembered. She hadn’t downloaded iTunes. I told her to start there when she got home.

We went back to the chair. I sat down and the dentist came and put the crown on. And I laughed at the fact that I was dental assisting.

I didn’t help much, I’m sure. I can figure out how to do things in the moment. I have an iPod mini (thank you again, Michael). I can run it, I can load songs, I’m listening to Yo Yo Ma right now. However, I don’t have the manual memorized and I have never used the new Shuffle. I can’t tell you how to do the installation nearly as well as I can show you. I can’t tell you all the steps nearly as well as I can help you think through the questions.

And that is the answer, for me, to yesterday’s question. I quoted Patrick Lencioni who has a character in a business fable ask “What is the one thing I do that really matters to the firm”. His character actually identified four things that he had to do as the CEO of a consulting firm: hiring an effective team; providing organization clarity; communicating that clarity; putting in place human systems to continue the process.

The point of the exercise is to identify what you are made to do, equipped to do, gifted to do, shaped to do. Having discovered that one or four things, the challenge is to learn how can you strip away the rest of the activities to focus on that thing. Because if you do that one thing well, even if you don’t get to other activities, you are invaluable to the firm.

For me, that one thing is helping people understand. I am a translator, not of languages, but of ideas. I can find metaphors that can illustrate. I can find threads of meaning. I can create pictures. I do it here all the time.

The danger for me is that I also like to do as part of that helping. I can get caught up in producing the video, in fixing the technology, in sorting through the details.

Here’s why that’s a danger: if I can help someone else understand, then they can do the fixing and I can help someone else understand something else.

I offer that understanding of me only to help you understand the point of the post yesterday.

What are you built to bring to the table, better than anyone else at your table?

Don’t get falsely modest. You know that you are better at gracious truth-telling. You know that you are capable of handling chaos that would drive others over the edge. You know that you can handle details. You can create powerful word pictures. You can synthesize ideas. You can encourage. You can love unlovable people. You can write in 5 words of poetry what other people spend essays to accomplish dimly.

And you are likely the only person with that one thing at your table. There are other poets, but not in your house. There are other synthesizers, but not in your firm. There are other detail people, but they are in other departments or churches or universes.

So what is the one thing or the three things?

And what is it that you get caught in, that keeps you from that one thing or those four things?

And what would it do for your firm or family or friends if you put your energy into doing your one thing or four things as well as you possibly can?

I wish I could have helped the dental assistant more. But I think I helped her understand.

I hope I helped you.

So, let’s try again. What’s are your one or two or four things?

————-

This marks my 575th post. When I started blogging, I read that someone said you couldn’t talk about staying power as a blogger until you had 500 posts. By now, that number is probably higher. Ah well.

I’m just grateful you come by. And have contributed to the more than 1000 comments.

If you haven’t subscribe, you can subscribe to this blog for free by clicking here.

filtering

In The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive: A Leadership Fable, Patrick Lencioni talks about a leader who, in a period of overwhelming busyness, asks himself what he needs to be doing. The way he asks the question, “What is the one thing I do that really matters to the firm”, stopped me dead. There are many things I do. If I am honest, there are several of them that I am capable of doing well. But there in any of my settings, there are only one or two things that are “only Jon” things. These are the things that I am uniquely constructed to do, to care about, to add to the setting.

So I’m thinking today, what if I focused on those?

As a husband, as a dad, as a friend, as a writer, as an executive pastor, as a part of this meeting on this day…what if I focused on doing the one thing that I add as well as I possibly can.

What if you did that focusing? In what you are already part of, committed to, living for…what’s your one thing?

The way I see it

My dad turns 78 today.

That’s him with his laptop.

He bought a laptop a few months back. My parents spend half the year in Illinois and half the year in Wisconsin. He used to haul his tower back and forth, but decided that a laptop would be easier.

He tends to have a slightly newer computer than I do, which makes troubleshooting over the phone challenging. Now, since he has vista and i have XP Pro, we struggle sometimes. However, most of his problems are simple. One of the things we keep trying to figure out is how to sort pictures.

As I was thinking about him today, I realized that he has always had a desire for helping people see things, especially using images.

When he was younger, he was about photography. He spent a couple years in Korea. He carried a Brownie, a basic Kodak camera. On the troop transport on the way over, he was seen taking pictures when he shouldn’t have been. When ordered to throw the camera into the ocean, he complied–sort of. He tossed the case over the side, after pocketing the camera itself.

There aren’t many pictures left from there, on paper anyway. He was wounded by some people he had been investigating. He came back on a plane with a bullet and bandages. He spent the next several months in hospitals.

He also ended up with a clearer focus about what was important. He gave up real estate and architecture and prepared to be a pastor. On the way, he discovered that the only thing you can make men from is boys, and so spent his whole career with an organization that was about training boys. He traveled between churches explaining this organization and explaining God, training men, encouraging them. He eventually moved to headquarters, working to coordinate the staff. He never ended up as the president. I’m not sure he could have changed the world through thousands of men if he had made it to the top. He retired as number two on the organizational chart.

All along, he took pictures. He took the pictures of travels and camp and meetings with one of the series of Pentax SLR cameras he had. (He had build the camp, too, but this post is about his use of technology). He lost one of his camera when someone at a boys conference decided to steal it.

On the way, he figured out slide shows with audio tracks recorded on reel-to-reel tape. Because we couldn’t edit, we had the music playing on a phonograph in the background while reading the scripts. We had stuff for title slides, he shot with timers and telephotos. As we moved from reel to cassette, he followed. He shot 8mm and super 8 and video with a big VHS camera.

He never had much of a budget for stuff. He had to raise his own salary. But he made the most of what he had.

I started my education as a broadcasting major, using some of those same skills. I shifted to rhetoric, the analysis of persuasion, but still am making slide shows, taking pictures, looking for new ways to see.

Dad’s still looking for new ways to see, too. He isn’t nearly as agile with technology as he once was. The stroke a few years back that took away his public speaking ability shortly after he retired also has pushed a right handed man into having to use a mouse left-handed. But dad is still cutting edge.

DSL isn’t easily accessible in their condo, but he’s patient enough to use dialup. Even to read blogs.

Or at least one blog.

So happy birthday dad. There are a bunch of people you will never know who talk about how I help them to see things differently. Thanks for letting me tell them where it comes from.

Thomas, no doubt

Some thoughts for a Sunday morning about Thomas, the disciple we always label as doubting. You can read about him in John (in the Bible) chapter 11 and chapter 20.

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impending

We talk often about the calm before the storm. We talk about waiting for the other shoe to drop. We talk about a sense of impending doom.

But sometimes there is just calm before day.

Tuesday morning I looked at this small lake in Northern Indiana. The only ripples were caused by me walking out onto the dock. I had thought about taking a walk, but my walk took the path that ended here rather than the one that would have talked me further.

On this walk I had to stop. There was no place to go. I had to reflect, just as the water reflected the trees.

Okay, to be accurate, I stopped and was able to reflect, just as the water couldn’t reflect the trees unless it stopped, unless it was still.

As a result of the stillness, I was calm and, perhaps, avoided the storm. I was calm and was able to think and discuss and pray and contribute and understand.

Maybe, rather than calm being the front end of catastrophe, it lets us face it with our feet more firmly underneath us.

Maybe.

I’ll have to reflect a bit more.