May 21st was my husband Grady’s two year sober anniversary. Two and a half years ago, during Christmas break from college, our youngest son sneakily invited his father out to lunch. Unbeknownst to Grady, much of the family, our priest and I lay in wait with a plan for intervention. The date was December 23, 2016.
I’ve heard it said, “He is a natural born manager.” I don’t believe it.
It took me years no, – decades – to learn how to manage employees. As I sit in the salon chair getting my hair blown out and listen to my stylist (who also happens to be the salon owner) shout orders to her assistants, I realize how much I’ve learned.
In FlagandBanner.com’s parking lot stands an 80 ft. flagpole with a 15×25 ft. American flag. The past few Mondays as husband Grady entered the parking lot, he noticed that over the weekends someone was driving circles around our flagpole.
At first it was a curious site, like a crop circle, but as the circular ruts in the lot deepened, the problem of potholes and strewn gravel became a nuisance. As Grady pondered who would so consistently be returning to do “donuts” in our parking lot, a suspect came to mind.
As we all know, Spring is a time of rebirth, rejuvenation and reorganizing. Part of reorganizing is Spring cleaning. If you’ve started, congrats! If not, I’ve got some tips using the KonMari Method of tidying up: category-by-category, rather than room-by-room.
If you read about the history of the Arkansas flag you will see it has been modified several times. So, it is not out of the realm of possibilities that we revise it again, though thinking this will erase history may be in error. In the words of Carl Jung, “What your resist, persists.”
This September will mark my third year as host of Up In Your Business on KABF radio. Though the show began as a mentoring program for entrepreneurs, it has become much more than that. It is the human-interest stories of my guests that listeners have found interesting and inspiring.
In order to mitigate risks, large companies become inflexible and impersonal. Avoiding the risk of discrimination is accomplished by discouraging nepotism. But, at FlagandBanner.com, we feel a societal duty to support our employee’s families and train the young. So much so, that our employee roster reads much like the book of Numbers in the Old Testament.
Much of our productive life seems to be a struggle against procrastination. But don’t let that fact keep you from trying to overcome it. There is good news.
In the words of Mark Twain, “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”
An aversion to rules is one of the reasons many entrepreneurs become business owners. They are not conformists and find big company policies stifling. I am no exception. But I have learned through the years that written rules keep things fair…and I am all about being fair.
My daughter frequently encourages me with the phrase, “Don’t give up before the miracle happens.” She first received this piece of advice from her allergy doctor. This is the back story on how this affirmation grew within me from cliché to gospel.
Its hard for people like me (and maybe you too) to let go and live in the moment; to “enjoy the ride.” I’ve done a pretty good job of training myself not to live in the past, to practice forgiveness for myself and others, but thoughts of the future can keep me preoccupied, worried, and impatient.
