It's no secret that we are passionate about making Cultivate What Matters the absolute best place for our team members to work. After all, we're a company that encourages you to live your most intentional, joyful life and do the things you've always wanted to do—and we feel just as strongly about helping each other do those things, too.
In addition to more traditional benefits, we have a number of team perks that are unique to our culture, including access to as much Cultivate What Matters product as we can use (and the ability to gift to friends and family!), a monthly book allowance to help us grow personally, and extra vacation days in years when we're celebrating a birth, marriage, or significant anniversary.
This year, we added another fun one: Leap Ahead Day! Leap Ahead Day is a new, official company holiday designed to help us each leap ahead in our personal PowerSheets® goals for the year. We intentionally left the parameters flexible, but made a point to share our plans and encourage each other both before and after the big day—after all, we know accountability is powerful!
This year, Leap Ahead Day was on Tuesday, July 13, and we thought you might like to see a little behind-the-scenes look at how a few of us spent the day.
Abbie: For Leap Ahead Day, Abbie focused on making progress on her goal of "Love my family well." One of her action steps this year was to attend counseling. It has been a GAME CHANGER for Abbie and she has made mental, spiritual, and relational progress on her goal because of it. She started off her Leap Ahead Day at counseling, then grabbed her favorite cup of coffee before heading home to work on a family memory keeping project. It's been a big project to tackle, but she says she is "grateful to have had the day to make progress on it!"
Alexa: Alexa focused on her goal of working "smarter, not harder" during this Leap Ahead Day. One of the things she worked on was systemizing the not-so-fun household chores to make them more joy-filled! Her focus was on creating an easy meal planning system for she and Aaron, her husband, to utilize weekly. She also made a digital log of their favorite meals, including a list of ingredients for each that can easily be copy/pasted into their digital grocery list. With the new system, her goal is to not only cut down her meal planning time, but to also make it easy for Aaron to plan on the fly if she doesn't have the margin to plan that week. Alexa's other goal is to care for her body & prioritize exercise, so she also took a nature walk break during the day as well!
Bailey: Bailey spent her Leap Ahead Day in Hilton Head, South Carolina, with her family! It was the first time all five of her family members were together since Thanksgiving 2019, which made the vacation even more special. For Bailey, her main priority on Leap Ahead Day was her family: she made it her goal to be intentional about loving and serving others well. Bailey and her family enjoyed going for long walks on the beach, swimming in the ocean, soaking up the sunshine, and eating lots of fresh seafood!
Diana: On her first Leap Ahead Day, Diana prepared for a half marathon by going for a long morning run! Afterwards, she created a Morning Basket to help keep her kids entertained at the start of each day. Diana was also able to use this time to take a deep dive into her calendar for the rest of the year, making sure all of her trips (including one to see Team Cultivate in NC!) were booked.
Irene: Making dinnertime a delight again was Irene's focus for Leap Ahead Day! She spent the day digitizing old recipes and tagging new ones, organizing her recipe binder, and making a few standard meal plans for the weeks she doesn't feel inspired to plan anything special.
Kaylee: Kaylee focused on her goal of renovating her garage to make it a space where she can be creative and innovative. To make progress, she made an Ikea trip and set up new shelves to help her get organized!
Lara: Lara's plan for Leap Ahead Day was to complete 2 photo albums. She was excited to dedicate time to building her family legacy through meaningful photographs! She enjoyed listening to the Bible and classical music while she made the albums. Her favorite playlist? Classical Garden. Is that a surprise? ;)
Lexi: For Lexi, Leap Ahead Day was a chance to make progress on her goal of "Creating Meaningful Experiences with the People She Loves." She and her family planned a beach day and created some sweet summer memories by playing in the ocean, playing games on the beach, and using a brand new (and still secret!) Cultivate product launching this fall to help bring their family together in a new way. She also printed a few photos from their trip to add to her PowerSheets!
Marissa: For Leap Ahead Day, Marissa focused on her "make our home work well for us" goal that she didn't know would be completely reset with her family's recent move! She is thankful for the extra time she had to get through the bulk of unpacking and organizing after a big move.
Meg: For Meg, Leap Ahead Day was all about focusing on her goal to create healthy rhythms so that she can be in the present and delight in her family well! She dusted off her family planning document for 2021-2022, and then had a mid-day run to fill her cup. Meg and her family ended the day with a major purge party! They were able to donate all the clothes her boys had grown out of and organize their closet with what was left.
Shanda: Shanda and her sister, Shonda, are launching a new ministry venture in October! For Shanda, Leap Ahead Day was the perfect time to get ahead on planning for the big day. For most of her life, Shanda has loved encouraging and inspiring women to follow Jesus. She is happy to share that she has finally found a way to do that in this next season of her life. On Lead Ahead Day, Shanda was able to get knee deep in content planning for this fall. She and her sister were also able to complete October to January’s content! This is all so exciting (and a little scary) for the two of them. However, they are believing that God is going to do incredible things during their time together!
Goal progress often comes little-by-little, but we know it can come in big leaps, too. We hope this fun holiday might inspire you to brainstorm how you can leap ahead in your own goals this year, whether that means setting aside a whole day or just a dedicated hour. We're cheering you on!
P.S. Want to come work with us? We're pretty fun! You can see all of our open positions right here.
This is His Year: our first-of-its-kind workbook to let your faith inform the goals you set for the New Year.
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