Let’s talk about one of the hardest problems that Americans face today. What is it? Taking on a healthy approach to life. Some people call it work/life balance. That is a farce and I’ll explain why. Let’s begin by talking about your “yes”. When a person says “yes” to something they are automatically saying “no” …
I went to law school in Virginia Beach. While there, I was often asked whether I liked living in Ohio (because apparently, a few people don’t). But I did, which is why, no matter where I’ve traveled, I’ve always come back home. There’s just something here, in the rural countryside of Ohio, that I have …
One of the questions that I have been asked many times over past several years is why I decided to become an attorney. While I am sure there are times the question has been nothing more than a conversation starter, there is a general curiosity why someone who grew up in a Beachy Amish home would make the life choice of becoming an attorney. Like so many others people’s stories, to understand how I ended up becoming an attorney, you have to understand where I have been.
We have been exploring the word “mentoring” but for the purposes of this article, I would like the word “Coaching” instead. To me, mentoring implies one person, probably someone who has been doing the job for many years and is overseeing every aspect of a person’s job. But coaching has another view for me. If you look at a coach or a teacher they go through a process of working with a student or team.
This past week one of my friends, Andy (Bims) Mast passed away. We were not friends in the traditional sense that often think of as friends. We didn’t share many common interests and outside of the occasional breakfast, we didn’t spend much time together over the past five years. Bims and I came from different generations and often had different ways of looking at the world. But despite these differences, we became friends when we worked in the same business over twenty years ago. I was a typical high school teenager who was looking for a summer job, and Bims was the seasoned employee who wasn’t sure that I would last the summer.
For more than 5 years we have been building the cultural touchstones of our business. For most of that time, those touchstones came from the ownership down to our team. But something changed in 2017. At first, it was a comment here and there, then it grew into discussions, and, as I found out last week at our 4th quarter meeting, our cultural touchstones are a now firmly held beliefs about who we are and how we act as a team and business.