Feigning decisiveness she dodges the question.

Karl Edwards

Today is the first working Monday of the new year. All the schools are back in session. The morning commute here in Los Angeles is packed again. The neighbors are all back from their holiday family trips.

Happy New Year! Or is it?

For many this is a tough year to celebrate the ringing in of a new year.

The economy is still limping along. Unemployment is still a painful reality, either for themselves or someone they know personally.

Job security feels fragile when one can be so easily replaced.

Bosses are afraid of making mistakes, which is resulting in a depressing risk-averse conservatism in decision-making.

The advent of a new calendar year does present an opportunity, though.

Even if the optimism isn’t built in this year, we can choose to use the calendar to our advantage. Even if (especially if?) our spirits and energies are low, we can use the tool of the new year to choose an attitude shift within ourselves.

Even if circumstances are difficult and the outlook is bleak, we can choose to face and confront this reality rather than complain about it or wish it were otherwise. 

Yes, for many people it would be dishonest to exult “Happy New Year!” That things are difficult doesn’t mean, though, that it has to be a bad year.

So choose yourself a “Meaningful New Year!”. Give yourself a “Proactive New Year!”

There is no power in the world that can stop you from choosing to have an empowered, responsible, determined, creative, persevering, generous, and life-enhancing new year.

To those for whom this is a particularly difficult season, I pray we find our way together to making it a deeply worthwhile season.

On your side,

- Karl Edwards

Loving Monday is a weekly column designed to encourage us to step into our weeks with an intention to show up authentically, engage fully, and choose to make it a good week for ourselves. Explore past columns here.

New year presents creative adjustment opportunity.

Karl Edwards

How does faith inform one’s job when the subject is work?

• Do you feel like you live in two separate worlds… work and church?
• Do you yearn for more meaningful or fulfilling outcomes from your daily work efforts?
• Are you unsure how—or if—your work can be pleasing to God?
• Do you feel your job is less important because it is not professional ministry?

Join us for a one-day workshop designed to equip and empower the working believer.

When:
February 4, 2012, Saturday
9:00 a.m. – 3:00 p.m.

Where:
Vineyard Christian Fellowship
3838 S. Centinela Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90066
(click here for map)

Cost:
$25 (lunch included)

For more information click here.

Sometimes the best thing we can do is simply say good-bye.

To revel in our victories or stew in our defeats is to overlook the ever-moving hands on the clock.

We cling to the past at our own peril.

Here on the last day of the year, we pause to say good-bye to 2011.

For some of us it was a year of heartbreak, unemployment and/or assaults on our health.

For some of us it was a year of discovery, achievement and/or new beginnings.

Here on the last day of the year we pause to both give thanks and to learn.

In order to move boldly into the new year we need to do both, give thanks and learn.

Both getting stuck in the past or relying on the past are mistakes that can cost us dearly going into the future.

Giving thanks helps us put our triumphs and tragedies into perspective so that we don’t give them too much power over us either in blind over-confidence or paralyzing fear.

Learning allows us to leverage and transform our gains and losses into something that will resource and fuel our future.

Good-bye 2011. We pause to give thanks and learn from you.

Tomorrow we greet the new year. Stronger and wiser we will build on what has gone before.

Tomorrow we begin anew.

“If we were logical, the future would be bleak indeed. But we are more than logical. We are human beings, and we have faith, and we have hope.”

Jacques Cousteau

Mandating holiday cheer, another leadership fail.

Karl Edwards

I first came across Parker Palmer during my graduate work at Fuller Seminary in Pasadena. To Know as We Are Known: Education as a Spiritual Journey was one of the required texts.

He turned my assumptions about teaching and learning upside down!

Some years later while developing my consulting practice, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation became a key point of reference for how I chose to help people think differently about themselves and their career development.

Palmer offers a refreshing if challenging perspective on human learning, maturity and wholeness that comfortably integrates spirituality, education, vocational aspirations and community engagement.

Below are links to the Amazon.com pages for each of his books. Head over there now and nourish your own journey toward a more meaningful future.

Must Read Books

Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation

A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life

The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life

Healing the Heart of Democracy: The Courage to Create a Politics Worthy of the Human Spirit

To Know as We Are Known: Education as a Spiritual Journey

The Active Life: A Spirituality of Work, Creativity, and Caring

The Promise of Paradox: A Celebration of Contradictions in the Christian Life

The Heart of Higher Education: A Call to Renewal

You are a gift, and we all need you to show up fully and boldly in your life. While no one else can live your life for you, Parker Palmer will be an invaluable resource along the way.

Favorite Authors are those unique writers whom I believe are worth reading everything they have written. Explore all my favorites here.

Everybody hates performance reviews. As much is not news to anyone.

More interesting is the lack of creativity in designing meaningful and effective alternatives. 

In this morning’s Wall Street Journal, Rachel Emma Silverman takes a look at the fading allure of this rigid, intimidating and counter-productive time-waster.

Teams need to be able to communicate about their work. Everyone needs to be able to give constructive and timely feedback to those with whom they work.

The problem with most performance evaluation processes is that they function exclusively as a top-down tool for ineffective leaders to communicate the negative feedback they didn’t have the courage or grace to communicate throughout the year.

Two major problems result. The climate of judgment and intimidation makes even the most competent employee reticent to be honest about their (more…)

“Why can’t somebody give us a list of things that everybody thinks and nobody says, and another list of things that everybody says and nobody thinks.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes