My wife and I were recently organizing a box of keepsakes we have been collecting over the last few years: birth announcements, report cards, art class masterpieces… you get the idea. And in that box, we found a note we had written to ourselves, where we had laid out our intended “principles of parenting.” We wrote it when my wife was pregnant with our first child, before we had any idea what it actually meant to be parents. During that period we spent a lot of time thinking about the type of parents we wanted to be, or rather hoped to be. And we clarified what was important to us.
Here are a few things we wrote down:
- Treat each other with respect, always. Our child(ren) will model the behaviors they see from us.
- Allow for lots of downtime and free play. And let the child(ren) be bored once in a while. Teach them to work through their own boredom.
- Set reasonable and fair rules for the household, and enforce them consistently. (And remember that those rules apply to mom and dad also.)
- Mistakes happen. But make sure we are always learning from them.
- Failure happens. We can tolerate failure. But lack of effort is not acceptable.
- Always encourage questions, even we are exhausted.
- Mom and Dad have two primary jobs: to protect them AND to push them. Too much of either, to the exclusion of the other, won’t turn out well.
- Privileges come with responsibilities. Both matter.
- Remember that we were young once, made stupid mistakes and struggled. Don’t hold our kids to an idealized version of our own past.
You get the idea. Yes, we are a little nerdy… we wrote it all down, and saved it. But I’ll take a heavy dosage of the nerd gene in cases like this, because it was a hugely valuable exercise. As I look now at this document, well more than a decade after we first wrote it, I see how valuable it has been for us.
Why? Because it is easy to forget what is important to you when things get hard, and you are in the heat of the moment, frustrated and not thinking straight. When the hard days of parenting arrive, and you are exhausted, and don’t feel great about yourself… those are the times when it is easiest to compromise on the things that matter most to you. You either forget your principles entirely, or you say, “Screw it… I don’t care right now.” Either way, the principles get compromised.
And those are the times when you need to have something you can refer back to, to remind yourself what matters most to you.
This is a business blog, not a parenting blog (although sometimes there is some overlap). So while I advocate doing something similar for your own parenting principles, my real point today is that this sort of personal accountability and planning is enormously helpful in the workplace too. What kind of leader do you want to be? Write it down. What type of colleague do you want to be? Write it down.
Capture what matters most to you, in a calm moment, before things go crazy on you. You will rarely need to refer back. But those few moments when you do will be among the most critical moments of your leadership or professional (or parenting) life.
Have a great day.
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Does your team:
– Overwhelm the audience with too much detail?
– Make things too complicated?
– Fail to ask for what they want or need?
Does your organization:
– Waste time because of poor internal communication?
– Take too long to make decisions?
– Struggle to clarify and frame discussions?
Do your leaders:
– Exhibit poor executive presence?
– Lean on incomplete communication skills?
– Fail to align the organization?
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