Posts Tagged ‘Transparency’

Communities and the Importance of Rituals

Since I started attending St. Francis of Assisi Church in Victorian Village, I’ve been learning about the idea of building a community around faith.  Father Ron, a spiritual and community leader, always places a good deal of emphasis on community.  The formula is pretty simple: a closer and more connected community helps community members find deeper faith in what the community believes or stands for.  No rocket surgery here, folks. Yesterday morning, our faith community welcomed a new member through the Christian ritual of baptism.  Through the use of ritual and symbolism, as well as a publicly shared affirmation of beliefs from the community, we welcomed and marked a new member as being one of us.  The parents and family stood by, taking pictures of the joyful occasion.  For them (and the community), this ritual is very important.  It holds deep meaning. One of Us Being one of us comes with a promise from other community members.  The community promises to educate on values and share knowledge, offer support, create opportunities for fellowship, and help guide new members along the way. What’s interesting is that the Christian community is one of the oldest communities in existence today.  It has survived thousands of years and has millions upon millions of community members.  Sure, there are subgroups and different takes, but make no mistake, it’s a large and solid community.  In the next few months, I’ll begin the RCIA process – a sort of ritual that adults engage in to become full members of the Catholic church.  That process is filled with rituals and experiences that work to teach the ways of the Catholic community. The Importance of Rituals Aside from structures and leadership styles, I can remember being fascinated with studying rituals, artifacts and stories as part of my coursework in [...]

Read This Post

Diigo Social Bookmarking: 5 Reasons Why It Rocks

It’s been my goal for the past two years for at least a portion of my career to be professional speaking.  With that turf comes the need for constant research. I’ve found a need to get good at things like boolean searching, basic image cropping, video editing and, most definitely, building presentations using Keynote (for Mac). The other side of becoming a professional speaker is in how you organize all your content and research information, especially if you are in the business of delivering customized presentations. As I’ve become more in-tune with researching various topics, social bookmarking has become a mainstay extension of my brain. First Tools When I first started on the path towards professional speaking, I was still working on a PC (I know, how sinful).  I developed my own organizational system, using Microsoft OneNote - which is actually a pretty slick program that comes the high-end packages of Microsoft Office.  OneNote boasts some great features, like being able to mark up articles visually, attach annotations and rich media, and organize through one heck of a folder system. The issue was that OneNote lived locally on my laptop’s hard drive.  When I left my gig at People To My Site and switched to my own MacBook Pro, transferring all of those saved articles was a major pain.  About halfway through, I gave up. Bookmarking On the Web Most of you have heard of sites like Digg and Delicious.  For the past two years, I’ve used Delicious as a private, online bookmarking system.  Take notice that I didn’t say “social bookmarking system.”  While Delicious does provide a social element in their system, using it has just never really appealed to me.  I’m busy connecting across multiple networks that aren’t focused on saving industry and trend information. One of the drawbacks I’ve [...]

Read This Post

Double-Edged Sword of Transparency

CEO blogger, Michael Hyatt, is one of the people I make it a point to read on a regular basis.  He’s a shining example of how a CEO can position a blog to work in favor of a large corporation.  Aside from that, I just enjoy reading what he writes.  Content.  Style.  Deep thinking.  Bravery in his editorial choices.  It’s all there. Today, his post, What Does Tiger Wood’s Apology Require of You?, stopped me in my typical morning routine and made me consider the bigger picture.  Tiger Woods has been the focus of intense public scrutiny, since the week after Thanksgiving, for is multiple affairs and marital problems.  And yes, I believed be earned the press that he received.  He messed up.  Big time.  No excuse for what he did.  Ever. Here’s an excerpt from Micheal’s post to chew on.  By all means though, go back, click the last link and read the whole post.  It will be good for you to do so.  I promise. “Last Thursday, I watched the Tiger Woods press conference in amazement. I was stunned at his candor. He didn’t sugar-coat his sin. Instead, he repeatedly acknowledged the magnitude of his wrongdoing and the scope of its impact.” If you can’t see this video in your RSS reader or email, then click here. It is worth reading or watching the statement in its entirety.  It contains several important lessons.  However, these three paragraphs summed up his thoughts: “The issue involved here was my repeated irresponsible behavior. I was unfaithful. I had affairs. I cheated. What I did is not acceptable. And I am the only person to blame. I stopped living by the core values that I was taught to believe in. I knew my actions were wrong. But I convinced myself that normal rules [...]

Read This Post
  1. Pages:
  3. 1
  4. 2
  5. 3
  6. 4
  7. 5
  8. 6
  9. 7
  10. 8
  11. 9