Ken Blanchard and I have shared the platform at a training industry conference a dozen times over the years. The topic is always the same: faith at work.
More than 1,000 people joined us one afternoon after a full day of other events. During my part of the program, I emphasized that if you do not live out your personal beliefs and values every day, you really don’t have anything to bring to your work. Faith must be a 24×7 proposition. It is something that is always with us on the inside, and shows through to the outside.
This means that we have to put our faith—our beliefs and values—to work in our everyday life, before we can bring it to the workplace. Does this mean we have to be perfect? Of course not. We do the best we can day by day, and we’re forgiven when we come up short.
Ken—who many know as a prominent speaker on training—emphasized that you should live your faith, whatever it may mean to you personally, in the workplace. This means we do not drop off our values and beliefs at the door when we come to work and pick them up when we leave. Faith is part of who we are. Its trappings show in everything we do.
Our values and beliefs become a part of the decision processes we use. They drive how we deal with others. We treat people with courtesy, recognition, respect, and appreciation not because it is a good business practice, but because it is living out our values and beliefs.
WHAT DO YOU STAND FOR?
All too often today, we are encouraged to be “politically correct.” I sometimes wonder what that means. Does it mean we should not offend anyone? Does it mean we should be chameleons, people who adopt the beliefs and attitudes of whomever happens to be present at the moment?
If that’s the case, I must be politically incorrect. I celebrate the right of others to choose their own beliefs, whether they coincide with mine or not.
However, I also choose to live out my values and beliefs, and to let people know whenever they ask that what drives them is my faith—a faith that is important to me, a faith that has supported me through tough times, a faith that lets me know I am loved unconditionally, even when I’ve behaved in ways that didn’t make me very lovable. It is a faith that encourages me to be the very best I can be, and to share that with the world in which I live.
Someone once said that a person who stands for nothing will fall for anything. What do you stand for?
Until next month—continue to add value and make a difference.
