By Scot Kersgaard, JVA Consulting

Joy is everywhere. How you see the world is a choice.

Longtime JVA friend Rebecca Saltman has spent the last year blogging about joy on a daily basis, and has declared 2014 to be the year of joy.

She has turned her blog into a book for which she is currently seeking an agent and publisher.

Go to her Facebook page and say hi, you’ll find new blog posts virtually every day.

Rebecca says she began thinking about joy in September of 2012 when she was watching a presidential debate between Mitt Romney and Obama and saw a friend posting on Facebook a lot of really hateful things about Obama, culminating in something to the effect of “if any of you are going to vote for this #*#*#ing idiot, just unfriend me now.”

“So , I unfriended her but it threw me off and I started asking what has happened to basic decency. I have friends on both sides of the aisle and we ought to be able to talk as friends. Whatever you might think of Romney or Obama, neither one is an idiot.”

Beyond that, her response was to start looking for joy, to make a point of it, to recognize it when she sees it and to blog about it. “I find a piece of joy every day. I started writing it just for me without really thinking that other people would find value in it, but then I started getting emails from old friends and random people, telling me things like they had been depressed but then they saw my blog and found a way out of depression, and it just touched me.”

As a nonprofit leader, you often experience moments of frustration. The question is can we look at the joy in these moments as well?

Can we turn the fear of not finding new funding prospects in 2014 to instead experiencing the joy of a proud donor who gave a larger gift last year and has shared what your nonprofit means to her?

Can we flip the frustration of how slow social change sometimes seems to experiencing joy by recalling a hard fought legislative victory last year?

Can we turn the occasional isolation of being a nonprofit executive director to experiencing the joy and camaraderie of other executive directors in JVA’s Executive Director Breakfast Club?

May we all find new ways to say yes to joy.

Happy Joyous New year from JVA!