Latest / The Family Teams Podcast / Ep. 348 | Great Families are Broken

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Ep. 348 | Great Families are Broken · The Family Teams Podcast

• 0:05
  What's up, guys? Welcome to the 5-Minute Fatherhood segment. I wanted to talk to you, Jeff, about, okay, what does it mean to really be succeeding as a family? Does it mean that, you know, 9 out of 10 times you're just crushing it? When you're interacting with your kids, with your wife, in your life in general. So there's a few things that we want to talk about in terms of, like, how do you—
• 0:25
  think about what it looks like to succeed as a family. So I'm going to start with this quote from Stephen Covey, and then there's also some research we've been looking into as well. But he wrote this, good families, even great families, are off track 90% of the time. The key is that they have a sense of destination. They know what the track looks like, and they keep coming back to it time and time again.
• 0:48
  And this is so true. And for a lot of people who may listen to what we're saying about family or have ideals that they want their families to achieve, they could feel totally defeated because, you know, they're off track, you know, 50% of the time. And even though they're skillfully leading their family back to the track, they could think, well, there's something terribly wrong with us.
• 1:10
  I love what Covey is saying here. He's just like, guys, like every family gets off track constantly. What's really unique is the ability to bring the family back. It's the ability to repair that breach. And so that kind of dovetails into some of the research that we've been recently thinking about.
• 1:26
  Yeah, it was awesome. Josh Straub, another guy in Integrated, which if any business owner, kingdom loving guys, we would love to have you check it out, familyteams.com slash integrated. But Josh is a PhD in the group and kind of owns some internet stuff and some practices in regards to counseling and mental health. And yeah, he talked about this one study that basically talks about one of the, it was like one of the top predictors of the,
• 1:49
  deep bonds between kids and parents as the kids get older is that they, uh, reap there that they are successful, uh, at only two out of five times in any emotional disconnect or any emotional, like basically any, as long as any time a parent thinks they blew it with like, I got angry there or I was, you know, I was, I was too harsh there, et cetera. If a parent is,
• 2:09
  doing the right thing and like actually getting it right two out of five times. Research actually shows that that's like wildly successful and tends to create a really strong bond with your kids. And then on top of that, it's two out of five plus what he calls repair, plus this idea of the three out of five, you make sure to mend, you make sure to soften, you make sure to reconcile. And that was just powerful research, as I told you, just because I think it's so easy to get in these scripts of perfection or thinking that I think, especially in our world today,
• 2:36
  that, you know, uh, that any little thing is going to be like the wound that the kid brings up at counseling 20 years from now. Right. Um, and so I think that one is, um, so pivotal to be like, oh yeah, it's really about staying soft on the ones where you miss and then real, and then also being encouraged that you do, you do have to get it right, but only 40% of the time at least, you know, and there's something about that's really encouraging.
• 2:57
  Yeah. So you guys, you probably heard the phrase, two steps, three steps forward, two steps back. That's what successful family life looks like. So please, when you hear us or anyone else talk about how awesome family is and how much we're striving and how excited we are for the wins that are happening in our family, please know there's a lot of hits, a lot of things that we wish we could do better. A lot of times where things are that are getting off track and, you know,
• 3:23
  Really what we need to be clear about success is that repairing, bringing us back on track, making sure that as we're interacting with our kids that they know that we love them and we're keeping those bonds strong, even though they're tested. But relationships are tough and family is all about the challenges that happen in relationship. And so don't think about it as a – think about it more like baseball, like what's your average? Don't think about it like something that you're trying to get 100% right all the time.
• 3:53
  because none of us are there, but it's a really, really important to learn how to repair those relationships and get back on track.