According to US News 80% of people will break their new year resolutions come February. How are you doing on yours?
Last year I confessed my love/hate feelings about setting new year’s resolutions. The tension I have with this ritual caused me to make a paradigm shift with regards to my aspirations for the coming year and instead prompted me to set redemptive resolutions. For 2017 my redemptive resolutions were to: #1) Take in beauty; #2) Tune my heart to sing thy grace; and #3) Practice the bigness of humility. Interestingly, the idea of redemption stayed with me throughout the year and not in a pressure filled kind of way but rather in a manner that promoted exploration and discovery.
One takeaway from 2017 is that it can be a challenge to know what redemption looks like, especially with regards to work. It is not always clear. On the one hand, I am encouraged that the desire to redeem stayed in the forefront of my thinking. On the other hand, I am eager for more thoughtful responses on my part.
Part of the difficulty is that there is no formula or recipe for how we go about redeeming our work. However, 2017 has provided some insight. Three ideas have surfaced that are worth considering: 1) practice thinking in redemptive categories; 2) strive to do the next right thing; and 3) know that small things matter.
These things are great conceptually, but can we practice what we promote. The following is an example of The Collaborative striving to incarnate those things we are encouraging in our readers. In the spirit of the three ideas here are some changes you will soon see with regards to this blog.
1. Practice redemption: After reviewing our blogs and how we post them, we determined that we were unwittingly misleading our readers. Currently, the authorship of an article is credited to whoever wrote the article that is either being featured or was curated. The problem is if we post an article from Comment magazine that was written by James K.A. Smith then it can appear that he is writing an article for The Collaborative and therefore misleading our readers.
2. Next right thing: Over the next few weeks changes will be made to the author line for our blogs. Most of the time for curated material my name will appear in the author line, but I am going to try to indicate who the author is in the blurb that accompanies the blog entry. If the content is original to The Collaborative, then the author’s name will appear. For example, this blog will have my name as the author or the blog on November 14 by Robert Woglemuth.
3. Small things: This may seem like a small thing, but we thought this was an important change. We are striving to build and earn trust with our readers and do not want anything to rob us of this privilege and opportunity.
Please do not misunderstand this practical example as a way for us to pat ourselves on the back. Instead, I find hearing about what others are doing can stimulate my own thinking about issues with which I may be wrestling.
Occasionally, throughout the coming year I will post other blog articles that dig deeper into this idea of how to redeem our work.
Crosland Stuart, of Crosland&Company, LLC, works with The Collaborative on marketing, recruiting, and content creation.
Special thanks to Rayi Christian Wicaksono on Unsplash for his picture.
