Compassionate Leadership for the New Year

This is the last Leading Thoughts I’ll send you this year. I’ll resume in early January and we will storm into 2022 together, facing all challenges and leading well. I want you to rest and go deep relationally during the holiday season. I’ll stay out of your email box to help you make this happen.

What we are doing together in putting great leadership tactics into practice is more vital than perhaps at any other time in our lives. We are living through tumultuous days, yes, but also days in which smart, skilled, compassionate leadership is being both prized and rewarded. So we are working together to craft the future. There is little more important than this.

I often end our time together with a list. I have a short one for you now as we end this year. Here goes.

• Don’t worry. Worry is rushing into the future viewing it apart from the grace of God. Try over the holidays to shake worry about 2022 from your soul.
• Sit in your control room. You may recall that I believe the control room is a condition in which you sit quietly and scan your life, prayerfully, to see what needs to be addressed and what you feel peace about. I know I’m speaking in spiritual/emotional terms, but that’s how it works. During the holidays, find a few times to sit quietly—perhaps by the fire with some eggnog when everyone else is in bed—and look over your life. Answers will come. You’ll have a sense of what needs attention, and what needs celebrating.
• Take the faces of those closest to you in your hands and tell them you love them and couldn’t do life without them.
• There are some people in your firm and in your life who cause you to lose peace when you just think about them. Write down the names of these folks. You have something to deal with regarding them. Perhaps you’ll even let them go. But do it next year. Just knowing something is wrong and being courageously willing to deal with it is the goal for now.
• Fifth and finally, do whatever business with God you must do before the dawn of the new year. This is the best guarantee of a fresh start and of new power.

That’s it. A short one. Much love to you this Christmas Season, and trust that the best is yet to come for you.