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Community News
Food-n-Things
Dixie Hoeh
Bear Lake Branch Manager
Chairperson, Food N Things
Honor Bank held its 8th annual food drive in October. The bank was able to collect 6,318 pounds of food and raised $6,858.33 for 13 different local food pantries in Wexford, Manistee, Benzie, and Grand Traverse counties.
Honor Bank partnered with the Buckley Schools, Bear Lake Schools, Martin Marietta of Manistee, Benzie Central High School Key Club, Papa J's in Honor and Lake Ann, and Rosie's of Bear Lake.
The fundraiser started in 2004 and to date, has collected 49,941 pounds of food and has raised $46,580.44. We would like to thank our customers and our local businesses for their support.
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Important links
Honor Bank
Northern Michigan Business Blog *
* new link with local legislative and business issues that will impact you and your business
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5 Cool Ideas for
Creating Memories
1. Living in the past doesn't create memories.
People who dwell on the past often develop a victim mentality about life. Victims perceive life to be a series of negative occurrences because of things that have happened to them.
Their attitude seems to be "People have always taken advantage of me, so I'm not interested in meeting new people." Old scripts can be keeping you from enjoying new material.
2. Invite new memories by rewriting your slate.
Imprinting is a series of repetitive life lessons that help us determine our view of the world, including our self-concept. Most of us are indelibly imprinted early in life. Philosopher, John Locke wrote that, as youngsters, our minds are "tabula rasa" or a blank slate. Early on, people write on our slates, helping us create memories.
Some of us have trouble writing over those old memories. When you can rewrite your slate, you can easily add new memories. Computer experts might describe rewriting your slate as overwriting your disk.
3. Accept that new invitation.
A female friend of mine was jogging when she encountered a group of strange men. The men identified themselves as secret service agents traveling with then President George Herbert Walker Bush. My friend told me that the agents invited her to run with the President and his entourage the next morning.
She passed on the offer. I asked her why she declined such a unique opportunity and my friend said, "I guess I didn't feel like it." Doing new things avails us to new memories, so make it a habit to step out of your routine.
Memories are generated by a process behavioral psychologists refer to as "experiential learning." New experiences, of course, are a form of imprinting, which helps us to create memories. Routines do not promote newness.
4. The present is sometimes too predictable.
People who only think about the present condition are so caught up in routines that they cannot seem to try new things. In their determined effort to maintain status quo, they resist new opportunities, thus stifling the creation of new memories.
5. Live as if you don't have much time left.
Impresario, Steve Jobs, urged us to not live other people's lives. Do what you want to do. Do it now. Sociologists have discovered that people near death have an overwhelmingly common regret about their life. They usually regret not trying more new things like traveling to foreign countries and meeting more people.
What have you always wanted to do? What would you do this year if you knew it would be your last year? Use the answers to these questions as incentive to generate new memories.
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Don BeemHonor Bank Financial Planner
AFFORDABLE RETIREMENT BENEFIT
Are you considering starting a retirement plan for your company, or is the current plan more expensive than you wish?
The SIMPLE IRA, or "Savings Incentive Match Plan for Employees Individual Retirement Account" is a cost effective way to offer a systematic retirement savings plan. You and your employees (company size of 100 or less) can set aside pre-tax savings for retirement in a simple and less costly way than a 401k plan.
Company match is flexible from one to three percent of employee compensation. Contribution limits top out at $11,500 ($14,000 for age 50 and older). The cost of setup is minimal ($10 per employee) and IRS 5500 reporting is completed by the sponsoring mutual fund company. A simple spreadsheet of participating employees with purchases funded immediately and directly from the company bank account via ACH.
SIMPLE IRA plans can be dated January 1 through October 1 with a 60 day enrollment period. Honor Bank financial services representative Don Beem can answer your questions, set up your SIMPLE IRA and conduct meetings with your employees. Don can be reached at Honor Bank number 231-326-1817, or his cell number 231-633-4328.
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News You Can Use
Don't Send That Email. Pick up the Phone!
by Anthony Tijan
Anthony Tjan is CEO, Managing Partner and Founder of the venture capital firm Cue Ball and vice chairman of the advisory firm Parthenon.
Around this time last year, I wrote about how we need to get back to allowing conversation to occur without texting, emailing, browsing, Tweeting, Facebooking, or doing whatever else zeros and ones can do these days on smart phones, iPads, notebooks, etc. I am as guilty as the next person of falling for the perception that any response latency is unacceptable. As 2012 fast approaches, this needs to go on top of my New Year's resolution list: focus on the live conversations at hand, rather than parallel conversations on the Blackberry screen.
But the bigger need is just for more live conversations to occur, period. This is especially true when people are trying to resolve a conflict or communicate an important business decision. There is a rising and unproductive trend towards people trying to do digital conflict resolution. The de facto path for issue resolution seems to be increasingly via email. More accurately, email has become a convenient mechanism for issue-avoidance. It is easier, quicker, less stressful, and less confrontational to have critical or challenging issues sent over email versus a live one-on-one with a counterpart.
Like many readers, I have experienced too many unproductive strings of back-and-forth emails or texts that should have stopped in round two, but continue. The problems with trying to resolve sensitive matters over email or text are quite obvious:
1. It is hard to get the EQ (emotional intelligence) right in email. The biggest drawback and danger with email is that the tone and context are easy to misread. In a live conversation, how one says something, with modulations and intonations, is as important as what they are saying. With email it is hard to get the feelings behind the words.
2. Email and text often promote reactive responses, as opposed to progress and action to move forward. Going back to the zero latency expectation in digital communications, it is hard for people to pause and think about what they should say. One of my colleagues suggests not reacting to any incendiary message until you have at least had a night to sleep on it, and always trying to take the higher ground over email. While by definition reactive responses occur in live discourse, they are usually more productive. The irony is that while email, as an asynchronous channel, has the potential to be more thoughtful, it often promotes the opposite tendency to be immediately reactive. Why? Because the bark is almost always bigger than the bite behind remote digital shields.
3. Email prolongs debate. Because of the two reasons above, I have seen too many debates continue well beyond the point of usefulness. Worse, I have experienced situations which start relatively benignly over email, only to escalate because intentions and interests are easily misunderstood online. When I ask people if they have called or asked to meet the counterpart to try and reach a resolution, there is usually a pause, then a sad answer of "no."
Email is one of the greatest productivity contributors of the past two decades, and social communication platforms such as Twitter and Facebook have fundamentally changed and positively enriched the means and reach with which we are able to interact. Yet we have to recognize when such digital channels cannot substitute for a live conversation. Email and social networking modes of communications have created a generation of casually convenient new connections, and even helped us deepen existing relationships, but they can rarely replace the real world. As digital communication accelerates the pace at which people form and broaden relationships, it is also decreasing the rate at which people are willing to resolve issues professionally and directly in-person. The next time you experience an issue over email, ask yourself if it is something that would be better served by a real conversation. Then have the courage to stop emailing and pick up the phone. Or even better: have a meeting.
Toll Free: 877.325.8031
www.myhonorbank.com
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