Sound Financial Group

Great leaders make you want to stay late.

Bad ones make you update your resume at lunch.

There's always one moment -- one thing they said, one thing they did -- that flipped the switch.

What was yours? 👇 Share it below.

Spoiler alert. The founders asked for Jesus' blessing at our founding. That is not really the point of this post, but stick with me.

I came across a short video this week on the first prayer delivered to the Continental Congress in 1774. What stopped me had nothing to do with politics.

Here is what got me. Those men had already committed to something big before they ever asked for God's help. The mission came first. The prayer grew out of the mission, not the other way around.

That is true for your business too.

Most of us did not start our business or our career because we wanted a bigger title or a nicer office. We started because we saw a problem worth solving, or we wanted to build something that mattered, or we wanted to provide for our family in a way we never had growing up. That original reason had power behind it, real energy. It is what carried you through the early years, when nobody was watching and nothing was working yet.

Then success happens. And here is the strange part. Success can actually pull you further from your why instead of closer to it. You get busy managing what you built. You get pulled into decisions that have nothing to do with the reason you started. Years pass, and you realize you have not thought about your original mission in a long time.

We are halfway through the year. That makes this a good moment to pause, not to check your numbers, but to revisit your reasons.

Why did you start this? What did you want your life and your work to look like? Does how you are actually spending your time right now still connect to that?

You do not need a dramatic answer. You just need an honest one.

If your actions have drifted from your original mission, this is your reminder that you can realign. Not by starting over. By reconnecting to why you started in the first place.

I hope you enjoy the prayer below. It was the first one delivered in our nation's founding congress, and it still carries weight 250 years later.

—

The Prayer in the First Continental Congress

September 7, 1774 — Rev. Jacob Duché

"Be Thou present, O God of Wisdom, and direct the counsel of this Honorable Assembly; enable them to settle all things on the best and surest foundations; that the scene of blood may be speedily closed; that Order, Harmony and Peace may be effectually restored, and that Truth and Justice, Religion and Piety, prevail and flourish among the people. Preserve the health of their bodies, and the vigor of their minds, shower down on them, and the millions they here represent, such temporal Blessings as Thou seest expedient for them in this world, and crown them with everlasting Glory in the world to come. All this we ask in the name and through the merits of Jesus Christ, Thy Son and our Saviour, Amen."

Happy 4th of July.