What do your futures say? Up, down or flat?

The stock markets are always looking to the future. Stock prices are based mostly on expectations of a company's performance in the next few years and the long term.

Of course the corporation's current situation is always part of the equation. You need to know how they are operating now in order to envision the potential growth, or contraction. The stock price becomes an average of peoples belief in the future. Although not always correct, it is usually a long-term "bet" on corporate earnings.

How does your stock rate? As Catholic Professionals we are continually assessing our own value; either to our company or the job market around us. If someone were to bet on your future as a professional would they go short or long? Don't just focus the financial future, but the positive impact you will have on your company, your profession, and the colleagues that surround you.

Wherever you side on this "futures" wager. How do you increase your stock more? As a Catholic Professional, how do you add to the value that you bring to the world in which we live, for the long-term payoff?

We must see it as just that: long term. There have been many companies and people who hit the world markets with a splash. Their value skyrockets in no time, with everyone jumping on the bandwagon to praise their strategy and their future. But, not many of these last very long. Most crash and burn, just as hard and fast as they shot up.

Our common sense knows. It is the one who does the hard work; the long, slow, and consistent details are what sets us up for the future growth. It may be boring, but these are the tenets we all know have better potential for this wager.

What are the details that, as a Catholic Professional, will give us and our world the best future? Daily readings and prayer; frequent meditation and confession; consistent Mass attendance; offering our work to God; deliberate efforts to help others genuinely, not just out of selfish gain; these are just a few of the simple, unexciting tasks that can set us up for this future growth. What we don't see is what it does for us right now. Our present world will be affected immediately.

You may see some risk in the wager. But we know the odds are on our side. The world will be a better place for us all in the if we invest our energy in the simple, consistent actions right now.

How will you invest during these troubled times?

TCP

Each must do as already determined, without sadness or compulsion,
for God loves a cheerful giver.
2 Cor 9