I was way ahead of my time. (wink wink)
Work-life balance.
Work from home.
Dress for your day.
Continuous improvement.
Team building.
Corporations say they are “changing with the times” but these ideas have been around for a long time. When I had my second daughter, I went out on a limb and asked if I could reduce my workweek by a day but promised to keep up on my workload while taking a cut in pay. Fortunately for me, they took the offer and 25 years later, I’m still “keeping up with the times”.
That was my first stab at work-life balance. It was risky asking the higher ups to approve a work schedule out of the norm. I think some people thought work-life balance meant holding one kid on one hip while the other is hanging on your leg all the while making dinner and answering emails!
Another new phenomenon is “Dress for Your Day”. Now, I work better in business casual clothes but there are some days I wake up and just want to wear jeans. Now I can feel comfortable “dressing for my day”.
And good heavens – “continuous improvement”!! Organizing has been around for a long time but if it makes everyone feel better, we can call it “continuous improvement”.
And team building. To me, team building is all about relationships and how we can incorporate that into the work place to work better together. Celebrations of birthdays, service anniversaries, milestones, babies, and successes are what we love to do. But if slapping a corporate seal of “team building activities” makes benchmarking easier, then that’s okay with me.
Now I won’t make a big ordeal about it, but I am amazed how corporations pay big bucks to bring in consultants to teach us how to sort, organize and improve processes and teach us how to get along better by playing games and figuring out our personality color when we have known a lot of these concepts for years.
I sometimes wonder if God doesn’t feel the same way. We do our own thing and give it our unique stamp. When it doesn’t work, we cry out to God and He says, “I’ve known the best way all along but you had to figure out to trust me on your own.”
He has perfected work-life balance. He is with us continuously and we don’t need to work to earn God’s love. When we surrender to His ways, we get an immediate work-life balance.
And Jesus has the perfect outfit for “dress for our day” which includes the suit of armor found in Ephesians 6. When putting on our dress for the day we are ready to fight the devil’s schemes.
When we can read scriptures, pray, study, worship, and develop our relationship with God, we “continuously improve” in our Christian life.
And the best way to “team build” for God’s team is to tell others about His love and encourage them to follow His ways. No better team than God’s team!
Do we sometimes know the best way before it becomes the cool way in society? Sure.
But I am so glad God is way ahead of us all!
