There is nothing more beautiful than a group singing in perfect harmony. There is nothing more productive than a team working in harmony. But, harmony doesn’t just happen. In this episode of By Your Life, we talk about how to create harmony in our relationships with one another.
Mass Readings Audio
http://ccc.usccb.org/cccradio/NABPodcasts/2019/19_12_08.mp3
The Second Sunday of Advent – December 8, 2019
Welcome to the eighty-ninth episode of By Your Life. I’m Lisa Huetteman and I know that you have a hundred different things you could be doing right now, so I thank you for choosing By Your Life.
My goal is to inspire, empower, support, challenge, and encourage you to connect Sunday, with Monday-Friday, in a secular, business world. It’s my desire to help you live our Catholic faith in the marketplace. I hope to offer you practical ways to go forth and glorify the Lord by your life.
In this edition, we’ll reflect on the readings for the Second Sunday in Advent. This week, we are reminded that with God, even what may seem impossible, is possible. In the first reading from the Prophet Isaiah, we heard that the wolf and the lamb, the leopard and the kid, the calf and young lion, will “browse together,
with a little child to guide them.” (Is 11:6) In this divided world, where people from different countries, races, political parties, and even departments in our companies, waste so much energy fostering division, our readings offer hope of a different kind of world. With God, will we see harmony among enemies? Only with God the impossible is possible.
But before we get too lackadaisical and passively wait for God to do his thing, we are also reminded that we have an active part in creating harmony. In the Gospel, John the Baptist warned the Pharisees and Sadducees, “do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father.’” (Mt 3:9), neither can we just claim Jesus as our Lord. We must “produce good fruit as evidence of [our] repentance.” (Mt 3:8)
This week, I was blessed to celebrate the life of my uncle, Fr. John. He passed away last week after 87 years of life, 62 of which were dedicated to living as a priest of Jesus Christ. At his wake, people spoke of how he had transformed their lives, not by what he said, but by how he lived. The impact he had on each one of these people’s lives is the “good fruit” that his life produced.
What about you? What lasting memories do you want others to have of how you impacted their lives? Our behaviors have consequences, good and bad, for us and for others. Our lives will impact others, for good and for bad, in ways we usually never know.
I interviewed John Faulkner when I was writing my book. At the time, he was the president of Cornerstone Solutions, a $25 million dollar landscaping services company that he founded. He read me a letter he had “received” from a former employee. The letter described all the ways he had made a positive impact on this person’s life. When I read it, I said “Wow! What a great testimony to your leadership.” John then told me that the letter didn’t really come from an employee but that he had written the letter many years ago for himself as an example to live up to each day. He acknowledged that he failed at times, but it helped him create a mental role model of the type of leader he wanted to be so that he would consciously work to have a positive impact on each person who worked for him.
I’ve heard of people writing their own eulogy to reflect on the type of life they’d like to lead, but I’d never heard of writing a letter of appreciation from an employee. What a great way to set a vision for the type of work-life you’d like to lead!
Last week in episode 088 of By Your Life, we talked about how to successfully change behaviors. This week, I’d like to build on that reflection to include ways to improve relationships with others. In the second reading from St. Paul to the Romans, he wrote, “May the God of endurance and encouragement grant you to think in harmony with one another, in keeping with Christ Jesus, that with one accord you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” (Rom 15:5-6) “Think in harmony with one another” doesn’t mean we all think alike or lose our individuality. It is not rigid uniformity of thought and expression but rather thoughtful consideration of other people’s views. As in music where harmony requires a combination of different tones, so it is with one another. We do not lose our individuality to become one voice, rather, the one voice is enhanced by the combination of our differences. Thinking in harmony is to seek this enhanced oneness.
Thinking in harmony is not rigid uniformity of thought and expression but thoughtful consideration of other people’s views. #CatholicleadersBut it isn’t easy, which is why St. Paul prays for “the God of endurance and encouragement” to grant it, “in keeping with Christ Jesus.” (Rom 15:5) Too often, we live out of harmony because we are stuck in our ways and want others to change to adapt to us, and they are stuck in their ways thinking we are the ones who need to change. No wonder we’re out of tune! We live with resentment of others as they fail to become who we think they need to be. If only we all (they and we) invested our energy in self-reflection and other appreciation. Then maybe, just maybe, we could join our voices in harmony.
So, what do we do about it? If we want harmony, we need to seek harmony. And as musicians know, it takes practice, a lot of practice. It doesn’t just happen. The harmony we seek is granted through “a spirit of wisdom and of understanding, a spirit of counsel and of strength, a spirit of knowledge and of fear of the LORD, and his delight shall be the fear of the LORD.” (Is 11:2) Though Isaiah was prophesying of the perfection of these gifts in Jesus Christ, wisdom, understanding, counsel, strength, knowledge, and fear of the Lord are six of the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit rooted in our baptism and perfected in us at Confirmation. (CCC 1299, 1305) We were sealed with these gifts. The question is, are we using them?
Let’s just focus on the first gift, wisdom. According to Wikipedia, wisdom is associated with attributes such as unbiased judgment, compassion, experiential self-knowledge, self-transcendence and non-attachment, and virtues such as ethics and benevolence. If we just focus on developing one of these attributes, unbiased judgment, we may discover a whole new world that we’ve shut ourselves off from.
In our first reading from the Prophet Isaiah, he wrote, “Not by appearance shall he judge, nor by hearsay shall he decide.” (Is 11:3) Think about how often we are quick to judge by appearance or by the opinion of others. We do this all the time. We do this with regard to things – we won’t try a food because of the way it looks – and we do it with regard to people – with all prejudice rooted in this habit.
But it is more than a habit. It is how we are wired. According to Psychology Today, “Human beings are built to size each other up quickly. These first impressions are influenced by a number of factors, such as facial shape, vocal inflection, attractiveness, and general emotional state.” We do this so we can quickly decide if the other person is friend or foe and whether we should fight or take flight. The problem is, “People tend to get attached to their initial impressions of others and find it very difficult to change their opinion, even when presented with lots of evidence to the contrary. This is because confirmation bias sets in and we only look for evidence that reinforces our currently held beliefs.
People tend to get attached to their initial impressions and find it difficult to change their opinions, even when presented with evidence to the contrary. #confirmationbiasAt work, judging by appearance and hearsay is built into our hiring processes. I heard a statistic that hiring managers will spend an average of 7 seconds reviewing someone’s LinkedIn profile before making a decision to eliminate them from consideration, and the majority of those 7 seconds is spent looking at the profile picture. If you are invited to an interview, you’ll be judged based on how you are dressed, your body language, your handshake, and eye contact. Once you pass those tests, the hiring manager will contact your references and by hearsay, they will decide.
Not by appearance shall he judge, nor by hearsay shall he decide. (Is 11:3) Unfortunately, our #hiring processes are built on these practices. #confirmationbiasBecause we know this to be true, everyone involved in hiring will coach you to have a professional LinkedIn profile picture, dress one step up from what people wear to work every day and to help your references give you a relevant and positive referral. Right or wrong, you know the system, so you work with the system and use it for your benefit.
Unfortunately, biased judgment doesn’t end with the hiring process. I live in Florida and it can get very hot. One day years ago, I was visiting a client and he was complaining about the lack of work ethic displayed by the younger employees. He told me, “It was 9:00 in the morning and I catch these two workers in the breakroom. One of them was saying to the other, ‘Make sure you drink plenty of water because it can get hot out there.’” I looked at my client and said, “It can get hot out there.” He continued complaining, “It is only 9:00 in the morning. Why do they need to be taking a break that early? They’ve hardly been working for an hour.” Then he muttered something about “snowflakes.” I replied, “It can get very hot out there.”
Instead of appreciating the caring way one of his employees was looking out for the other, he categorized them as weak and lazy based on what others have said about people from their generation. By appearance and hearsay, he judged. Not only that, he missed a great opportunity to appreciate and encourage teamwork. That was a coachable moment for my client. But before we judge him, we need to remember that we’ve all been guilty of viewing people based on appearance, hearsay and their ability to meet our needs instead of how we can help them meet theirs.
I was just talking with my brother who spent his entire career working in foreign countries with people from a multitude of cultures. He worked in some systems that were filled with corruption, but he said, “I always gave a person nine months to a year before I judged them and their abilities.” He chose not to judge the people by the system, nor by his first impression, because he knew by experience that his first impression was often wrong. By living this way and consciously choosing to get to know the people as individuals, he not only became a better leader, he made many lifetime friends. This is an example of practicing wisdom.
So, as we enter this second week of Advent, let’s all use the gifts we have been given and practice wisdom. I encourage you to be aware of how many times a day you make a biased judgment. There will be many. When you do, stop and ask yourself, “What am I assuming? Is it true? How do I know it to be true? What if I’m wrong? What else could I assume?” Then consciously look for evidence that disproves your initial and biased judgment.
Doing this will take a conscious effort. Any time we practice something from playing the piano to our golf swing, it takes conscious effort to repeat it over and over until it becomes subconscious behavior. In the same way, through practice, we can imitate Jesus Christ and develop our ability to not judge based on appearance and hearsay. When we do, we’ll produce good fruit and find ourselves living in greater harmony with one another.
So, before we busy ourselves buying gifts this Christmas, let’s think about using the gifts we’ve already been given, specifically, the gift of wisdom. Unwrap it. Take it out of the box and practice using it. Only then will we experience its good fruit—living in harmony with one another. Let’s join St. Paul in prayer:
“May the God of endurance and encouragement grant [us] to think in harmony with one another, in keeping with Christ Jesus, that with one accord [we] may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Rom 15:5-6) by our lives.
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