The Guide to Understanding

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?

• Happy to be together/homebodies
• creative
• readers
• problem solvers?
• Gratitude
• comfortable with ourselves
• awesome
• irritable
• yelling
• hugs
• loving
• fun
• kind

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?

• The deck on a sunny day
• i'm tired
• to see/hear other people's days and experiences
• have to go pee
• hungry
• hugs
• laughter
• ukulele
• I want to know my family
• a book
• no homework
• be by myself/ no one bug me

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.