By: Judith McCartney on January 30, 2025
This IS GOLD! I was all bright eyed and bushy tailed as an 18-year-old that just entered bible college. I had such aspirational dreams of being a missionary in Indonesia. I did not find myself in my family’s place of origin Papua, New Guinea rather I found myself in the urban setting of Toronto. While studying…
By: Alex Mwaura on January 30, 2025
The other day, I was reading the “Future of Jobs Report 2025, by the World Economic Forum (WEC) which provides highlights on skills that will be required for the future. Of course, Generative AI featured as a disruptor in different sectors, but I was mostly intrigued by leadership and social influence as a skill that…
By: Jeremiah Gómez on January 30, 2025
And it saved me for ministry. I know that sounds like hyperbole, but it’s true. I was neck-deep in the stuff of a turnaround ministry environment, and I was lost. I was young (with three whole years of vocational ministry under my belt), newly married, and overwhelmed. The little church on the brink of closure…
By: Betsy on January 30, 2025
When I was four, I hid under the table to avoid being told off and found the tiniest book with a pretty pink and blue watercolour image on the front of it that I can still picture. It was the book of Matthew, and so I read the Bible out loud for the first time…
By: Darren Banek on January 30, 2025
I had a goal and a plan, and it was all starting to come together. I knew I wanted to internalize this week’s material and write better than last week, hoping that last week’s blog post was slightly better than two weeks ago. All that needed to happen was to start typing out my introductory…
By: David Weston on January 30, 2025
Sir Francis Bacon once posited, explaining his quote above, that “much like the sun’s heat, it has the ability to transform and reveal the underlying qualities of people and things, making them pliable and firm and exposing inherent characteristics.” [1] Tom Comacho’s Book, Mining for Gold: Developing Leaders through Coaching, is a wonderful treatise on…
By: Mika Harry on January 30, 2025
I’ve not been a good coach in the past. As a strong one on the enneagram, justice is my word, and doing things “correctly” is my high priority. So, it may be no surprise that I find it incredibly frustrating when someone asks for my advice and then doesn’t do what appears so obviously correct.…
By: Robert Radcliff on January 30, 2025
This week, I read Tom Camacho’s Mining for Gold. It is a primer on coaching to help leaders draw out the God-given talents from their team so people can flourish. I want to extend an idea that Tom Camacho developed in his book that he didn’t fully develop. Camacho says that our Sweet Spot is…
By: Rich on January 29, 2025
I come from a long line of teachers. My grandfather taught languages on the high school and college levels. My dad earned a D.Ed. and was a high school principal. My mom and sister taught elementary school. My sister was born to teach. She taught me to read when I was three. She was five!…
By: Joff Williams on January 29, 2025
“Where we see ordinary people, God sees a rich deposit of gold waiting to be brought forth.” Camacho [1] I enjoy coaching and mentoring. I have had several wonderful people generously share their thoughts, wisdom, and experiences with me. They had helped me seek the Lord in discovering the gold in me, and I wish…
By: Michael Hansen on January 29, 2025
I met Pete during my first week at the company. My direct reports and I walked through an assimilation exercise, and I was able to ascertain a few points about their behaviors, backgrounds, and overall company culture. I then transitioned to a series of one-on-one interviews where we dove deeper into their roles, hobbies, family,…
By: Mathews Manaloor on January 28, 2025
Reading the Overcoming barriers to student learning: threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge [1] on the heels of our first book How to Read a Book [2] certainly made reading and understanding of this book easier. By following the outlines of looking at the publishing data, table of contents, background of the contributors, index, foreword and…
By: Alex Mwaura on January 24, 2025
I don’t know where my passion for serving the most vulnerable emanated from. Perhaps it’s because I was at some point in life equally vulnerable and living on the edge but experienced how kind-heartedness can positively affect human lives. Or maybe God just planted a seed in my heart to care and support the less…
By: Ivan Ostrovsky on January 23, 2025
I still remember when my family moved from Minsk, Belarus, to Moscow, Russia. It was a huge change for us: a new country, city, and school. I was set to go into third grade. My parents sent me to one of the top schools in Moscow, not because I was a particularly smart kid, but…
By: Linda Mendez on January 23, 2025
It was the second quarter of my first year; I sat in Dr. Wonil Kim’s Old Testament class and thought the earth would open up and swallow him up for the heresy he was teaching. I could not sit through the 2-hour class that day; I felt that merely sitting there would make me an…
By: Christian Swails on January 23, 2025
Things are getting better. Life is progressing towards a state of goodness. Forgotten people, abandoned places, and broken systems are being shot through with renewal. Restoration is bursting forth and breaking through the ground. Humanity is good. The Divine is in everyone and everything, more and more inhabiting reality. There is an abundance…
By: Michael Hansen on January 23, 2025
During my first year at the Yale School of Management, I found an ad in the school mailroom looking for individuals to tutor math at a middle school in a neighboring town. The paid position was for one day a week for 10 weeks. I had two objectives in mind. The first was to dedicate…
By: David Weston on January 23, 2025
When I was a boy, my mother consistently told me to take smaller bites when I ate. She would repeat over and over again that I was taking too large of bites to really enjoy my meal. Through Meyer and Land’s book Threshold Concepts in Practice. Educational Futures-Re-thinking Theory and Practice, I constantly felt like…
By: Jeremiah Gómez on January 23, 2025
Nestled between Tombstone Canyon and the San Pedro Valley is the Mule Pass Tunnel. History, lore, and confusion are all part of the story of the tunnel—this is the way to the Queen of the copper mines in the same territory where Wyatt Earp pursued vendettas, and a nearby marker erroneously claims this as the…
By: Mika Harry on January 23, 2025
I spent three years as a middle school math teacher. My students were in the “middle school,” which is between elementary and high school. Their brains were transitioning into adolescence, and it was an uncomfortable stage, to say the least. As you might imagine, they were often not very concerned with 8th-grade pre-algebra. Some of…
