DW's Blog
Faith And Well-Being
by DW Green — May 14, 2015
Faith is our sixth core value. Faith can be a difficult word to explain and define. Heck, even Dictionary.com has seven definitions. All of which express a piece of the essence of faith.
- confidence or trust in a person or thing:
faith in another’s ability. - belief that is not based on proof:
he had faith that the hypothesis would be substantiated by fact. - belief in God or in the doctrines or teachings of religion:
the firm faith of the Pilgrims. - belief in anything, as a code of ethics, standards of merit, etc.:
to be of the same faith with someone concerning honesty. - a system of religious belief:
the Christian faith; the Jewish faith. - the obligation of loyalty or fidelity to a person, promise, engagement, etc.:
failure to appear would be breaking faith. - the observance of this obligation; fidelity to one’s promise, oath, allegiance, etc.:
he was the only one who proved his faith during our recent troubles.
To me, faith means believing in a Power greater than oneself. Whether it’s the combined wisdom and talent of your employees or the belief in the Divinity, the Creator of all things. Even personal intuition, or gut feeling arises from a power greater than the faculties one possesses.
We had a client who owned a store that was failing in what was considered a “bad” location. Three previous owners were unable to generate a profitable store. The client was considering whether or not to renew their lease when additional retail space became available adjacent to the store. The client had recently launched a successful new format in a different area of town and believed that if they doubled the size of the failing store they could make it work.
The market analysis was not positive. The location was problematic, the ingress and egress were unsatisfactory. The shopping mall itself was losing tenants. The reasonable, rational decision would have been to vacate the space and seek a better location somewhere else. But intuition came into play. The client had faith in their new format. They had faith in their staff, faith in their ability to create and sustain a meaningful and experiential customer experience. They choose to spend several millions of dollars to remodel and expand the failing store. Initially the store struggled but eleven months after the grand re-opening it began to make money, and has been extremely profitable since. Today the store does more than a million dollars a week in revenue.
I’m not suggesting faith always leads to success stories. But I am suggesting that regardless of the outcome, success or setback, faith always leads to personal growth and well-being.
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