Month: December 2021

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Our Most Important Gifts

With the holiday season fully underway, many of us are busy looking for the perfect gifts for our family and friends. I have been reminded repeatedly that our most important gifts are the ones that don’t cost money. Our most important gifts are when we are in service to each other in small ways.

It is fully listening when another person is talking. It is seeing the person and affirming that they are valued and appreciated. It is a smile or greeting when we see another person. It is remembering to ask about someone’s family or pets. It is texting or calling a friend to just let them know you are thinking about them.

As my husband reminded me recently, instead of asking for blessings, we should be asking how we can be a blessing to others.

I wish you all a joyful holiday and hope you look for every opportunity to give the gift of service to others in small but meaningful ways.

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Labels That Stick

Each morning my leadership team does a quick standup meeting to coordinate and connect. At the end of each week we also share one thing that we are grateful for or learned during that week. A video shared during last Friday\’s meeting got me thinking about the labels we give ourselves and others.

Senior Relationship Manager Will Mills(link is external) shared this short video(link is external) as a primer for a Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Justice workshop we were participating in later that day about our identities and explicit bias.  

One of the workshop activities was to list adjectives we use to describe ourselves, then pick out the characteristics that we dwell on the most and the least. Many people in the workshop found that the labels they thought about most were the ones that they were most self-conscious about. If a person felt judged by others for a piece of their identity, they focused on that piece the most.  

The video and my experience in the workshop showed me that judging ourselves and others can be entirely unspoken, but highly impactful. We are constantly receiving (and assigning) labels. What if we focused on the positive instead of the negative? 

As we head into Thanksgiving, I am reminded of a saying that sits over my friend’s door that is so important, especially in how we talk to ourselves: 

“Be Kinder Than Necessary”

It is true that every person is both amazing and flawed. Do you focus on the amazing or flawed parts when you interact with yourself and others?