The
Guide to Understanding
At
our core, I think parents are insecure. With Parenthood we have
embarked on the most difficult journey our species will attempt. Can
we grow good humans? Can we watch these little souls become fine
citizens, great friends -Good people!?---> Mensch! (
(Yiddish:
מענטש
mentsh,
cognate with German: Mensch "human being") means "a
person of integrity and honor." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mensch )
I feel we have a responsibility to the rest of humanity: Do not
release damaged goods out into the wilds of the world... Everyday we
see all the crazy people in the news perpetuating evil...How can we
not help but ask, “Are we doing this right?”
There is no instruction manual for raising children. When our kids
look to us for answers, will we respond correctly? Most of the time
we just fake it and pretend, 'Of course we are right?!!' (the scary
thing is majority of what they learn from us is in our unspoken
actions...so...yikes!) But inside we are still uncertain if we are
giving the children the correct guidance... (Well at least I am!)...
Back
in mid February I found two articles on twitter (One was from the
Wall Street Journal: How
to run your family like a business - and reduce stress and conflict:
http://t.co/bX9E3AHP
and the other from the Atlantic Want
to Give Your Family Value and Purpose? Write a Mission Statement
http://tinyurl.com/d6km9yo
) about
some families who were trying an experiment in the management
structure of their families.
Both
immediately spoke to my insecurity and
sense of adventure.
The
Atlantic article starts like this:
Every
parent I know worries about teaching values to their children. How do
we ensure that in today's ever-changing world they understand some
beliefs are timeless? How do we truly know if they grasp the
qualities that are most important to us?
These
articles discuss families who have tried to revamp how information is
spread and how decisions are made within the family unit. These
families turned to corporate America for a possible new way to
organize themselves, based on the 'agile software' approach.
It's
a system of group dynamics in which workers are organized into small
teams, hold daily progress sessions and weekly reviews.It
promotes adaptive planning, evolutionary development and delivery, a
time-boxed
iterative approach, and encourages rapid and flexible response to
change. (The Agile Manifesto introduced the term in 2001.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_software_development
This
idea of spreading decisions horizontally appealed to my 'Meh, it
might just work' side. Families have always been run in a top-down
hierarchical style, with orders coming from the 'boss' or 'management
team' and filtered down to the 'workers' or 'drones'... We had had
reasonable success with this traditional method, but we still had
conflicts and misunderstandings, and so I wondered is there a better
way to parent?
We
had a family meeting and discussed this new strategy. Sage, (my 11
year old daughter) immediately loved the idea as it gave her some
more power and control over her life. Edie, (my wife) wasn't too
sure if it was going to work , and Bodhi (my 8 year old son) liked
that the idea had started in video game companies.
From
the Atlantic: “Jim Collins, the author of "Good to Great,"
says that great organizations "preserve the core and stimulate
progress." The same applies to families, while you need to keep
introducing new ideas, you also need to identify the bedrock
principles you believe in. One way to do that, he said, is to do what
other organizations do: create a mission statement.”
What
was the Hirsch Family mission statement? What are we about? Who do we
need to be? What do we want to do? After an evening's discussion we
created this slogan as to what our goal is:
To
be examples of kindness and civility (and have fun) in our home and
in the world
Part
of what we considered when developing our 'slogan' was a quote from
the Atlantic which referenced
Stephen
Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective Families, which was published in
1989. In it Covey suggests
"The goal is to create a clear, compelling vision of what you
and your family are all about." He likened the statement to the
flight plan of an airplane. "Good families—even great
families—are off track 90 percent of the time," he wrote. What
makes them good is they have a clear destination in mind, and they
have a flight plan to get there. As a result, when they face the
inevitable turbulence and human error, they keep coming back to their
plan.
Then
from the Wall Street Journal:
What
are the benefits of such a statement? A central finding of recent
research is that parents should spend less time worrying about what
they do wrong and more time focusing on what they do right. The
family mission statement is a clear way to articulate what your
family does right.
Next
to continue the fun, we decided on a brand name and a logo.... We
thought of maybe 'Here Hirsch Home', or 'Havi Navi Gravi'
or 'Crapjabber' or 'Toadturd' but finally settled on
'BE
HIRSCH NOW!' (with a hat tip to RamDas' famous
'Be Here Now') … Then I got silly and created our trademarked logo:
From
here we decided to set out what I called a 'Family
adjective value matrix compilation' to further define our brand and
define who we were and what we wish to achieve on this planet. So we
asked a series of questions and wrote down everyone's answers:
What
words best describe our family?
What
are the strengths of our family?
reading
we
get stuff done (eventually)
supportive
ideas/constructive criticism
we
can entertain ourselves
we
know ourselves
we
like the same things
we
look forward to family time
we
value nature/family/music
What
would you like others to say about us?
Kind
giving
happy
generous
not
overly obnoxious
helpful
good/neighbors/citizens
awesome
not
bad
smart
What
makes me want to come home?
What
is the essential mission of this organization and what is its main
strategy in accomplishing this mission?
Absolutely
no meanness...that means you can't be mean while telling someone to
stop being mean...using niceness/kindness
Be
kind to each other and other people...A
politeness...manners/utensils/no slime sleeve/ and no
interrupting...B...
Help others with chores/volunteer/ reach out...C
...reflection on how I affected others each day
Support
each other --- in learning who we are...Strategy: ...listen to what
others say in an open way and offer to help
There.
BE HIRSCH NOW! Was a fully articulated idea: We had done all this
busy work and had fully defined our organization so away we went off
into the Garden of our Days. (It will be interesting to have
quarterly shareholder meetings and chart our 'profit/loss ratio' in
terms of 'kindness' 'civility' and 'fun'...-Thanks Dan Toma for this
suggestion!)
Then
within a week, there was a fight. Some battle over something and the
children lost it and were crying on the stairs, or in their room
thrashing. I looked around and said to myself, “Where is our
mission statement now?”
What
I had realized at that moment was a common occurrence in young
startup organizations- a disconnect between our written goals and our
day to day actions. How can we weld the two together?
So,
another family meeting was called and we discussed this new wrinkle.
Edie, being a teacher, had a great suggestion based on some training
she had done at her school: We needed to work on our emotional
lexicon. She had this flier (from the Girls Leadership Institute)
which showed different emotional states; her idea was let's use these
images in times of conflict to help find words for our feelings. Me
being me, I wanted to take the concept even further to what I called
--->“The Guide to Understanding.”
One
night after dinner I sat down with Sage and came up with actions
based upon all the different emotions expressed on the paper. My
vision is to print them up and laminate the actions on the back of
the emotional picture page and hang it in a common area, so when we
are losing our minds in a battle we can grab “The Guide to
Understanding” and try to work through our disagreements. If it
works I will sell it to the United Nations! (In truth, can't we all
improve our connections to our emotions and the language we use to
explain how we feel to others?)
Here
is the list of actions to the emotions shown on the page:
What
is the 'Action' from the 'Emotion'
1.Happy!
2.Confusion-
Explanation
3.Panicked-Comfort
4.Anxious-Comfort
5.Angry
-Give space
6.Betrayed
-Explanation-Rebuild Trust
7.Frustrated-
Communicate- Break the frustration down into steps
8.Ecstatic
-Give space?
9.Hurt
-Sincere apologies/discussion
10.Guilty-
Apologize make good/reparations
11.Used-
Make the person who made me feel used do the same/learn from the
situation so that it will not happen again.
12.Calm-Share
it, Be left alone, harvest it...
13.Relieved.
-Express how you feel, breathe,relax,smile.
14.Annoyed-Express
the way you feel,OMG!, Share the experience, Commiserate
15.Disappointed-
Accept and figure out another option-Learn why I felt disappointed
and learn how I empowered the other person to disappoint me, so that
it will not happen again
16.Embarrassed-
Seek solitude and reevaluate -
Move
on with gratitude for learning opportunity
17.Scared-
Find people around you, think of good things, Educate yourself,
Take
control of what you can
18.Enraged-Take
space, Use my words, breathe,Yell?
19.Excited-
Tell everyone why I'm excited, Breathe, Try and keep it in
Perspective,
Live
it! ,Be Present, “BE HIRSCH NOW!”
20.Insecure-
Self-Knowledge, Be comfortable with your self, SING a SONG!
21.Sad-
Hugs, Be present with it. Think of happy things-
Talk
about it... No Sniffings!(Derek)
22.Content!
23.Confident-
Humble, humility
24.Jealous-
Recognize and (vaporize feelings of?) why you are jealous
25.Lonely-
Be with people, Entertain yourself, ( with books, ukuleles,
spin!,iphones?)
Ok
then, this is where we stand in our experiment. I haven't done the
printing/lamination process yet so we will have to see how it works
on the front lines of life.....Overall, day to day life has not
changed much under this new corporate restructuring, but it has been
an interesting educational process.
In
closing one last quote from The Wall Street Journal....
Parents
need to look for new ideas wherever we can find them. As Jim Collins
told me, the more any organization knows about itself, the better
it's able to deal with life. "And one thing we know about life,"
he continued, "is it's going to hit you in random and unexpected
ways." If you don't have your own frame, he said, you'll be
whipsawed by life. If you do, you're more likely to succeed.
