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3 Extreme Examples To Help Your Kids Master Anything and Never Give Up · The Family Teams Podcast

• 0:00
  I didn't do this really well as a dad. I learned this later. I think I actually want to implement it more now with my grandkids, maybe even with my adult kids. But this is something that, man, if you're just starting as a father, just starting to build a family team, this is a absolutely killer tool that could completely affect the way that your kids develop.
• 0:23
  Hi, welcome to the Family Teams Podcast. Our goal here is to help your family become a multi-generational team on mission by providing you with biblically rooted concepts, tools, and rhythms. Your hosts are Jeremy Pryor and Jefferson Bethke, and we can't wait to chat about all things family. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the podcast. I'm here with my lovely wife, April. April, how's it going today? Hello. It's going well.
• 0:49
  Doing well, yep. It's a stormy, it feels like a summer day out. It's so hot. It's only the month of April. Yep. Yeah, the humidity is coming for us. Yeah. But it's been really lovely the last few days we've been able to get outside, have so much time with the kiddos and the grandkiddos. That's been fun. Such a great time here. We had a birthday and an anniversary this week, our...
• 1:14
  oldest grandchild turned two and then our oldest daughter and her husband are celebrating their third anniversary. So yes, lots of celebrations, uh,
• 1:25
  and then birthdays. Yeah. It's, it's kind of endless. I think once you have a multigenerational family at a certain level, you basically can celebrate something every week of the, of the year, I think, right. You have birthdays, anniversaries, you know, this multiplying. It's like, um, my sister has nine kids and so far 10 grandchildren and, um, they have a monthly birthday party to celebrate whoever's birthday. It is that month. Um,
• 1:51
  And I think there's like one month that they don't have somebody. So there comes a time where you just have to batch it. There's just a time. Yeah. That's just the only solution. If you want to actually celebrate together, then you have to kind of batch it. Yeah. Yeah.
• 2:10
  Awesome. Well, guys, I wanted to share with you all something that we did a really deep dive on in integrated. So this is our the mastermind that Jeff and I have been running through family teams for like almost seven years now. So this is a for business owning dads. And we are constantly just we come together twice a year to level each other up in fatherhood and in family. How do you integrate faith, family and business? It's one of the most favorite things we get to do. We were in Franklin, Tennessee.
• 2:40
  This last time, and I'm heading to Estes Park, Colorado for the next meetup with lots of the families at the largest YMCA in the world. Gorgeous lodges right next to the Rocky Mountain National Forest. If anybody else wants to join, integrated, man, please reach out to me. This is like...
• 2:55
  one of the coolest things we get to do and we see just so much transfer. I just got a, a video yesterday from a friend of mine who was relaying like how it has totally transformed his life in one year. And then he had brought a friend, um, uh, from their city and he just was blown away and all of the things they're doing together collaboratively. So anyway, yeah, it's, it's an awesome group. Um, we, we, we talk about a lot of like really intense topics, um, um,
• 3:21
  things that really would level up your fatherhood that you probably won't hear anywhere else. And so I want, and this is for family fatherhood, but I want to talk about one thing that's been on my heart. And this really falls in this really specific bucket for me, which is there's a bucket of things I wish I knew
• 3:38
  20 years ago. This falls squarely in that bucket. I didn't do this really well as a dad. I learned this later. I think I actually want to implement it more now with my grandkids, maybe even with my adult kids. But this is something that, man, if you're just starting as a father, just starting to build a family team, this is an absolutely killer tool.
• 4:01
  that could completely affect the way that your kids develop. Okay. So it's the general topic.
• 4:09
  that we're going to dive into is the idea of writing mastery contracts with your kids. Contracts where your kids will say, I want to master something, or that you agree with your child about certain things that they will master. And this has got a few elements to it that I think are so interesting and unique. One of them being that this is an experience of peak fatherhood that your kids get to have.
• 4:36
  Like a lot of times we don't have an arena in which we can really coach our kids. And one of the things we've talked a lot about in family teams is peak fatherhood is really coaching your kids. And the definition of coaching, and really this is the second element that I find so helpful about this, is peak fatherhood is raising the bar on expectations and support at the same time. Right. So we talk a lot about that. This is what coaches do really, really well.
• 5:02
  men tend to either be high support, low expectation fathers. These are the dads who are like, everything you do is amazing. Here's a trophy. Here's a sticker. You're amazing. Good job, good job, good job, no matter how mediocre. So that's one experience. Now that creates an environment in the family where your kids feel very supported. Like, wow, dad thinks everything I do is amazing. And so a lot of times we as fathers, we love that feeling. And I really struggle with...
• 5:31
  being kind of the high support, low expectation father. The problem is, of course, it doesn't really help your kids perform well. And there is elements of life. This is not all of life. This is not the gospel, but there are elements of life in which it's really important that your kids be coached into their potential, right? They have a high potential. And oftentimes the only way you can reach that potential is if somebody is raising the bar. And if a dad is always lowering the bar so he can demonstrate high support,
• 5:56
  You know, your kids are going to underperform what they could have become in certain areas of their life. Again, not their value. This is not about their identity, but this is about their ability to create value in the world. And fathers have a unique role in trying to raise that bar in the same way that if you were to go out for a sport and you really were trying to push the limit on your ability, you want to actually figure out how great could I get at this thing, whether it's like a sport or a musical instrument or anything else.
• 6:24
  You're gonna need a coach who is pushing you a little bit, who's raising the bar, right? And so there is this other kind of dad, right? Which is the high expectation, low support dad, right? And so this is the disappointed dad, you know, he's like, A, A, A, A minus, what happened there? What's your problem? It's like nothing you can do could ever please him, even if he doesn't care about maybe your unique challenges that you face in trying to achieve these things, but everything is this fixed
• 6:54
  impossibly high bar that nobody is able to reach. And he's just disappointed all the time. The high expectation, low support dad have has injured a lot of people. A lot of kids have been hurt by this kind of father. And this kind of father is the reason why we have, I think so many high, high support, low expectation dads, because if you've ever experienced that, you're like, Oh man, I don't want to be like that. And so then we go to the other extreme,
• 7:18
  And just constantly are lowering the bar so that we can express that high support at the expense of actually helping our kids really find their potential in whatever thing they're trying to be a part of. So anyway, that's kind of the framing of this conversation.
• 7:35
  we're trying to figure out, is there an arena for you as a father to actually coach your kids into excellence and into mastery in some area, some area that maybe you and your, your son or daughter choose to actually double down in like, actually let's go deep into this thing. So yeah, I'm curious. Yeah. Anything that that stirs up for you, April, when you think about this aspect of fatherhood, this challenge that dads just inevitably have it being both high, high expectation, high expectation,
• 8:03
  you know, high support at the same time. Yeah, what are your thoughts about that? I think that this is just very important because it seems like it's difficult for the mother to be the one to try to implement this, the mastery thing that Jeremy's about to talk about. Because I don't know why, but there seems to be this like,
• 8:33
  when a mom tries to hold their kids to these things or whatever,
• 8:43
  It goes in and out of having a punch, you know, like a like a like the pizzazz that it needs. But when a dad is like, all right, I'm going to set this bar. I'm going to call you to it and I'm going to set you up for success. Like combining the setting a bar and setting you up for success. Like I'm going to make sure you have the right tutor. I'm going to make sure you have.
• 9:04
  a really good teacher in that and make sure you have the right instrument or whatever the thing they're trying to master is. It just really goes a long way in actually happening because I feel like that my heart towards this was very active and very, I had lots of ideas. I really wanted these things to happen.
• 9:26
  And like Jeremy said, he kind of came into this like later, this like belief kind of later in our parenting. We really only have, you know, memorable examples from our last two kids. And so I think there were a lot of years where I just kind of wistfully didn't even really, I didn't really even know that that was what was kind of like bothering me.
• 9:48
  And then it's like, oh, this is what we were missing. I wish we would have, like you said, I wish we would have started this like 10 years ago or 15 years ago. So I think part of that is just our personal story. But then I think also part of that is how important it is for a dad to step into this role. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think men are uniquely wired in the home to raise the bar in this way. And I think that it actually in some ways violates
• 10:17
  the role of mother, and this is one of those tensions that you might have a wife who's an incredible coach. She may actually be better at this than you, but in the home, the role of mother, the nurturer, the one who bore the kids and empathizes deeply with each of those children, there's a tension, natural tension, between raising the bar higher and higher and higher and that sort of nurturing role that is natural to the mother. And so I think it's important that in the home, the mother is free, right?
• 10:45
  to be highly nurturing and empathetic. But oftentimes that comes in direct tension with the need to raise the bar. And I think that's important that the wife, oftentimes the mother in this situation, sometimes if she really embraces that role, and oftentimes, by the way, the problem culturally is that we have redefined parenting, good parenting, as traditional mothering.
• 11:07
  And so oftentimes the mother will even resist the father and she will assume that when he's trying to raise the bar, maybe he's trying to be high support and high expectation. She might think that that's inappropriate for the children. She might think that this is really being low support and high expectation and that this is going to injure the children. Now, there is a version of this that injures kids. We talked about that. If it is low support as opposed to high support and high expectation at the same time.
• 11:33
  But it's important that she understand that she's just reacting oftentimes to the reality that her role is different. And that she does need to be there to help pick up that child when he or she is struggling. At the same time, not undermining the effort, the coaching of the father in the life of that child. So that tension is always going to be there. And I think this is a beautiful dynamic God's created in every marriage.
• 11:59
  And every mother and father. But I think it's really important for fathers to embrace this and for mothers to also embrace, you know, the uniqueness of their role. But I think, I think, like I said, that one of the problems we have is because we've redefined parenting as good mothering. There's not an arena for a father in most families to coach his children into mastery.
• 12:20
  to raise the bar. Now, what does this look like? I'm going to give you three examples in April. I want you to respond and react to these three. So these are my three. These are extreme examples. Okay. I'm going to give you three extreme examples because a lot of people don't understand how possible this is. And I really want to hang out on these examples because these kind of have blown my mind.
• 12:40
  And it really raised the bar personally for me of what's even possible when it comes to this arena of fatherhood and trying to help your kids master specific arenas, specific things in their lives. Okay, so example number one is a guy named Laszlo Polgar. Okay, he is the father of the famous Polgar sisters.
• 13:02
  Susan, Sophia, and Judith, whom he raised to be chess prodigies, with Judas and Susan becoming the best and second best female chess players in the world, from the same family, fathered by the same man. Judith is widely considered the greatest female chess player ever.
• 13:21
  as she is the only woman to have ranked in the top 10 worldwide, while Susan became the women's world chess champion. So how did he do this? Well, the experiment began in 1970 with a simple premise that any child has the innate capacity to become a genius in any chosen field as long as education starts before their third birthday.
• 13:40
  And they begin to specialize at six. Okay, so Polgar was a psychologist who literally was experimenting on his daughters. Now his, again, extreme example of what is possible, right? So this guy, he is one of these fathers who was like he believed very deeply that he could give his daughters an incredible gift.
• 14:00
  if he started early and trained them well. And so Polgar began this process when his kids were really young. So Polgar began teaching his eldest daughter, Susan, to play chess when she was four years old. Six months later, Susan, this four-year-old, toddled into Budapest Smokefield Chess Club, which was crowded with elderly men, and proceeded to beat every single one of them, including the veteran players. So...
• 14:22
  At age four? At age four, yes. She was the best chess player in Budapest. So Susan said in a 2005 interview, quote, my father believes that innate talent is nothing. Success is 99% hard work. She also described Polgar as a visionary who always thinks big and who thinks people can do a lot more than they actually do. Now, Sophia, there's three daughters, right? One was the best chess player, woman chess player of all time. The other was...
• 14:50
  the best in her life or her time as chess champion. She became the top chess player in the world, chess best woman chess player in the world. There was a third daughter, Sophia, the least successful of the three, who became only the sixth best woman player in the world, quit playing, studied painting and interior design and focused on being a housewife and a mother.
• 15:11
  So anyway, three daughters. And there's kind of a famous story that happened with one of one of the daughters where I think she was like a young child. And after a full day of practicing chess.
• 15:24
  They put their daughters to bed and a few hours later found one of the daughters in the bathroom hiding, playing chess. It's funny because, you know, one of the things – so there's a guy, Cal Newport, who describes –
• 15:43
  This whole obsession our culture has with finding your passion, right? Like this is how you figure out like what you're supposed to do. And there's a, in Cal Newport pointed out that there's a, there's a really,
• 15:58
  a clear fallacy in the find your passion kind of obsession we have. And he, and he wrote this quote. This is a quote from Cal Newport. Passion comes after you put in the hard work to become excellent at something valuable, not before. In other words, what you do for a living is much less important than how you do it. He says that, you know, basically the feeling of mastery is,
• 16:19
  provides a lot of people with passion. And so these girls had no passion for chess when they were three years old, beginning the process of their training. But by the time they were five, six, seven, they became extremely passionate about chess. Why? Because they were really good at it. And it just turns out that we tend to become passionate at the things we're really good at. Now, Sophia, she wasn't that excited about it. I'm not recommending at all this prescription. I'm not saying let's all become like Laszlo Polgar and do this to our kids.
• 16:49
  What I am saying is, wow, a father with a vision can craft a certain kind of family culture that is way beyond what I think most of us think is possible because of that vision, to give your kids mastery at certain things. Now, I like to be – I don't care if my kids are the best in the world, but, man, dads who have that kind of vision –
• 17:10
  You know, a lot of times in what we're going to use some other examples here. What's interesting to me is oftentimes the kids, when they grow up, a lot of times we think they're going to grow up and they're going to hate their dad and hate whatever their dad forced them into. And that does happen, right? Some of these dads are really vicariously living through their children in a totally inappropriate way, forcing their kids to do things they have no interest in and doing that for way too long. So we're going to talk about the details of the mastery contract, which is not a lifelong contract, by the way.
• 17:37
  And so it's important. I think these guys took it to way too far of an extreme, but they do paint a picture for us, right? So that's Laszlo. Two more examples real quick. And then April, your take on this. Dion Sanders, if you guys know, prime time, this is, you know, he was an incredible football player in his prime. And he decided to dedicate his life to his sons and coaching them in football. So he became the coach of their high school football team
• 18:06
  Then he became coach of their college football team at the, you know, at Colorado University. And it's really interesting to watch what Dion, he's constantly fathering his sons in football. And so when I watch what he's doing with these boys and just what it, what it would feel like. And this is kind of what I want to, you know, Laszlo, one of the takeaways I get from Laszlo is you can start this very young. Okay. That's one of the things I take away.
• 18:32
  From Dion, what I've really learned is the emotional connection he has with his sons. Like if you watch a football game and all of a sudden Dion is pulling his son, you know, who's the quarterback of the football team. And he's like fathering him right there in the moment as he's pushing this boy in one of the most elite sports that exists in our world.
• 18:58
  What is that experience like? Because one of the things I imagine his son is experiencing is he probably cares more about what his dad feels at that moment than the 60, 70, 80,000 screaming fans, right? Which tells you a lot about the power of fatherhood and one of the things that you can leverage, again, not for your sake, but for the sake of your children to master things.
• 19:22
  They care a lot about what you think. And I think that you can use that to bless them. You can also use that in incredibly selfish ways, but you can use that to bless them. And this is one of the things I enjoy watching when you watch Dion coach's boys. Okay, and the last one...
• 19:38
  and by far the most interesting one to me, um, is what Richard Williams did with, uh, Serena and Venus Williams. Um, so this story just, I've never gotten over. I've mentioned it before on the podcast. I, I just, but I just think I want to put a pin in this one as well, because, um,
• 19:56
  This story is mind blowing. You can watch the movie King Richard. But basically, the story was that Richard Williams, who grew up in one of the most racist places you can imagine, this is real racism he suffered. If you watch or if you read his biography, Black and White, it's just it's just heartbreaking what he went through.
• 20:13
  He moves to Compton in LA and one of the most gang ridden places in, in the country. And he marries a woman who had two daughters and is, is raising these daughters, his stepdaughters. And he watches TV one day and notices that there's a woman who is winning a tennis tournament and is handed a $40,000 check. And Richard just freaks out. He's like, oh my gosh, I had no idea.
• 20:39
  that people can win that kind of money playing tennis and that women could win that kind of money playing tennis. He goes to his wife and says, we need to have two more daughters.
• 20:47
  I want to train some tennis champions. Then he goes and starts to write a vision document. That's like 84 pages long, extremely detailed. And in that document, he outlines his, his plan for how these two daughters are, one is going to become the greatest tennis champion in the world. And the other is going to become the greatest tennis champion of all time. Well, lo and behold, I don't know how they figured this out, but they ended up having two daughters and these two daughters are,
• 21:16
  Venus, the older daughter, becomes the greatest tennis champion in the world, women's tennis champion. And Serena, to this day, is considered the greatest tennis champion of all time. Now, you can look at their whole history. And, you know, he was a very good coach. He was extremely connected to the hearts of his daughters. And one of the really interesting things about the Williams story is that...
• 21:39
  Richard insisted that his daughters not play in junior tournaments because he wanted his kids to have a childhood. In other words, he was not sacrificing their childhood on the altar of some ambition he had as a visionary father. He insisted that his daughters, for years and years, while they were clearly the best junior tennis players in the world, he wouldn't let them compete in any tournaments because he wanted them to have a normal childhood. But once they became adults, he allowed them...
• 22:04
  into, of course, that he was training them someday when they were emotionally and physically able to take the challenge. That's when they came on to the tennis scene and destroyed everyone in the world. It's an unbelievable story, again, of fatherhood. And if you listen to any...
• 22:23
  of the interviews of these daughters. For example, Serena said, dad stayed up many nights watching films so he could teach us. A big part of their success in experiencing this was their dad who was totally invested in coaching them. And he was hiring other coaches. There's a lot to the story, a lot of detail. But the thing I really took away from this story was the detail of the vision document. Who writes an 84-page vision document? Yeah.
• 22:51
  Um, and if somebody were to show me that my, my, my assumption is, well, that's just your crazy, you know, vision or musing about what you think is possible, but then it happened. Yeah.
• 23:03
  And I think that, I think, again, we underestimate, again, these are all extreme examples, but we underestimate what a father can do when he decides to coach his children into mastery. Now, we live in a culture where fathers are not expected to do this at all. And so you have...
• 23:22
  the absolute epidemic of underperforming sons and daughters without father coaches. And so if a few of these fathers decide to step up and actually help their kids and use these tools of fatherhood to coach their kids into mastery of things,
• 23:40
  then oftentimes they do become extremely skilled at these things because that is such a potent combination. A child with a loving, high support, high expectation coaching dad. And so I'll talk about kind of the how to do this, I think, in a little bit more balanced way, because, again, I'm not personally interested in,
• 23:59
  or care a lot about our kids becoming the greatest in the world of these things. Even Richard Williams, his reason for doing this was because he felt like, as raising a black family in Compton, LA, the chance that his kids were going to end up with horrible lives on drugs, in gangs was so high that he was looking for an aggressive way out of that life.
• 24:21
  And he found it in tennis. So I think I find what Richard Williams did to be tremendously noble given the circumstances he was in as a dad. And you can look at it in this. Imagine what Venus and Serena's life would be like had their dad not engaged in this way. It's hard to imagine looking at it and understanding what was going on in those other families in Compton.
• 24:42
  So it's such a cool story and just kind of pulls back like the possibilities of what a father could do or who a father could be. But they're tough, too. And these are extreme examples. So, yeah, April, what does it stir for you? What do you think this stirs up for moms to hear these kind of extreme examples? I'm curious. Yeah, I think it touches on your earlier point about, you know, in general, mothers are more empathetic or, you know,
• 25:10
  what's the word? Nurturing than fathers. And so they might, you might hear them, you know, a gasp or two like, oh no, but it's going to be so hard or oh no, will they get hurt doing it or, you know, that kind of thing. And so I think that's why God gave each family a mother and a father because I think that the combination really needs to be present and a father to be able to issue the challenge and then a mother to be able to come alongside and support, I think is,
• 25:40
  is really and then also kind of like to have those conversations behind closed doors where maybe, you know, if if she needs to kind of talk her husband down a little bit and say, OK, I feel like that was too intense. Do you think that was too intense? Like, let's talk about this.
• 25:56
  Or, you know, or saying good job. Some husbands just need the encouragement from the wife to like have a vision for their kids. And we're all trying to figure out how to do that in a way that's healthy and not controlling or domineering, but also not like passive and.
• 26:14
  So it is a really hard balance to find. And I think that the teamwork of a husband and a wife working together, figuring out what their kids' skills are. And I know my dad had a little bit of a philosophy around this. And he would say he would want us to try things out because we didn't know if we were good at it or not.
• 26:32
  We didn't know if we were going to be interested in it or not. And so it's like, you want to play the violin? Sure. Play the violin this year in fourth grade at your school and see if you like it. Or the band instrument or something like that. And then I know just different sports and stuff when we were little, just trying a thing for the little league type stuff for two months or something like that to see if we were –
• 27:00
  liking things or interested in things, piano lessons, things like that. So I think he was really willing to try a bunch of different things, not necessarily trying to get us to commit to something, really. But just if you are interested in this and if this does strike a passion in your heart, like I want to know, how will you know unless you try this out? Some exploring.
• 27:21
  Yeah, he wasn't able to have us explore, which I appreciated. He was definitely not the kind of visionary that you just described with those men, but he had some amount of an idea of wanting us to be able to explore.
• 27:37
  Yeah. Most families today are exhausted, not because they don't care, but because they're trying to build something without a blueprint. If that sounds familiar, I'd encourage you to take a look at the Family Teams Accelerator. Each month, we focus on one area of family life, like the Sabbath or discipline or family mission, and give you the tools to actually build it into your home.
• 27:55
  A short video, a simple playbook, real-life templates, and a community of other families doing the same thing. It's not overwhelming, just a couple of hours a month. But those small shifts can make a big difference. If that sounds helpful, you can learn more at familyteams.com slash accelerator.
• 28:16
  Yeah, and this is really one of the fun things, I think, a fun partnership between a father and a child is looking for areas of mastery. And I do think, and there's sort of like a little Venn diagram that I've written, kind of try to figure out how to find the what of some area of mastery.
• 28:35
  There's your child's natural ability, right? So something that you think they might have a proclivity toward. So certainly if you notice that your child is incredibly coordinated, then picking some kind of sport. If you notice your child is very musical or very artistic-
• 28:55
  Um, like these things should actually elicit some level of, uh, direction and, and because they're going to potentially be good at that. Or yeah, if they can study something like chess or, you know, dial into, to strategy or whatever. Um, so, so I would say something that aligns maybe to their natural ability and bent, and you can do that through just letting them explore different things. And again, people just tend to get excited or interested in things they're good at. So if they, they start to really get interested in music, it's probably, it could be because there is some natural ability there.
• 29:24
  then if that overlaps with things that you're interested in, and I do think that the father's interest should have some level of vote, because sometimes I talk to dads about this, and they're like, yeah, my kid's really into that thing, but I just have no interest in it. And so I really am interested in this, but not that. Now, if you can bend towards your child, that's great. But oftentimes the problem is that,
• 29:45
  One of the things is, is if the father is going to actually engage in the process and really that's what this is all about. I want to have your children to have an experience of your peak father, giving your kids experience of peak father with you, with their dad. Right. Then I do think that what you're interested in should get a vote in this thing. Right. If Deion Sanders obviously is going to be more excited about football.
• 30:09
  right? Then he is going to be about, you know, about piano. And I don't think that his sons would have had exactly the same experience if they decided to play the piano. That doesn't mean that maybe the piano wouldn't be the right. If that's just clearly what they're good at, clearly what they care about, and they don't care about football. Okay.
• 30:28
  But I do think we need to be okay with the idea that steering in the direction of something, right, that you both can do together is a good strategy move, I think, in general. And then the last part of the Venn diagram is really an infinite game, right? Something that...
• 30:43
  you can get better and better and better and better at, especially if there's something that there is, there is a competition or a ranking or something where excellence can be objectively described and experienced by your child. And so, and that's true for most of these arenas, even, even in musical instruments, right? I mean, go to recital and,
• 30:59
  boom, you're like, wow, that was incredible. And you have people that are mastery in that world that can watch what your son or daughter is capable of doing, what they've really experienced there. And you can see, yeah, that's an infinite game, just like sports or these other areas. Okay. So that's the idea. Now, what we're describing here, and I'll give you guys the very practical kind of way to implement this. And that is with each of your children,
• 31:26
  Consider the idea of having them writing up and signing a mastery contract in some arena, some area where they can experience mastery. A contract where you write up some basic elements. What is the area of mastery? What's the length of time that you're going to, if they're going to sign up for this, they're going to focus on this thing. Is it six months? Is it a year? Is it two years? Is it three years? Now, the younger they are, the shorter probably...
• 31:55
  This contract should be because they don't really know what they're getting into. But as they're getting older, I think it's really important to consider longer contracts where you're like, I want to help you actually get to mastery. And you're not going to become fluent in that foreign language by dabbling in it for three months.
• 32:12
  So let's really get serious. If you're going to get fluent in Spanish or our kids studied Hebrew, then yeah, there's going to be, we're going to have to invest in this thing. Then there's the how, like how often are they going to practice? Are we going to engage, you know, other coaches or tutors or others who are going to help us? Or is the dad going to try to stay a step ahead of the child and just become their coach in this area? You know, can the mother engage in elements of this as well to really help?
• 32:39
  you know, help the child acquire that skill. Maybe it's a skill the mother has. And then the, why like in the reason why the dad has to be really convinced of this more than anyone else is that what they're instilling in their child is the confidence of competence. Most kids have never experienced the, the incredible confidence that comes to,
• 32:58
  from feeling exceptionally competent at a thing. And as you are coaching your kids towards mastery in some area, you're not just teaching them, giving them the gift of mastery in one area, you're at the same time simultaneously training them how to master everything and anything because now they know the process.
• 33:14
  And the reason for the contract, the reason why you, is really probably more for the dad. Like, I needed the contract more than the child. And the reason why we all need the contract, but especially the father, is because there's an experience that's coming for your son or daughter in the midst of attempting mastery. And that experience is what Seth Godin calls the dip, right? And every single time you're trying to master something, it's very exciting in the early stages. Like, oh my gosh, the violin is so cool. It makes these noises and...
• 33:41
  wow, this is fun. I've never tried this before and all the excitement from novelty, right? And then a month or two later, what happens? Like the novelty, yes, novelty wears off. You haven't even come close to mastery, but now it's just hard work and you're in the grind of the dip.
• 34:00
  And how are you going to get through the grind of the dip? And one of the worst things about modern Western culture, especially American culture, is how we continuously give in to children when they run into the dip and teach them that quitting and failure are just natural part of how you, you choose to approach every topic. You just give up when it gets hard. And if you want to coach your kids out of that terrible habit,
• 34:25
  then you're going to need to create an arena where you help them get all the way through the dip. They're continuing to practice, continuing to push through, and we're going to get to the other side of the dip because there is an amazing world on the other side of the dip, and that is the incredible experience of what happens when mastery begins. You begin to experience mastery in some area. It becomes really fun again.
• 34:45
  And you actually come into another kind of fun. And at that point, if you want to quit, if you want to move on, if you want to explore something new, it's different because you've already now you're achieving. You've achieved a level of mastery that we've we tried to attain. And now it's it's it's understandable if you want to move on to something else. Right. And so we don't want to lock our kids in forever. Right.
• 35:07
  to these things. I think it's better if they can get through the dip to, to experience of mastery. And then I think if, if I think there should be a strong case made for continuing to go deeper and deeper into this game and your kids are going to experience like a lot of the funness of that because they do know what it's like, wow, I can sit on a piano and I can actually create music that I enjoy and
• 35:28
  I'm not just like dinging out, you know, these, these really basic tunes like that. You want them to have that experience and then say, Hey, yeah, but here's another level we can get to, you know, another level we can get to, but there may or may not be something you're interested in. So yeah, April, what does that start for this process of like signing a contract, getting that, you know, getting that going, getting through the dip?
• 35:50
  Yeah, well, I would say, possibly speaking, make sure that the contract is a time frame that is realistic to be upheld. I think the age of the child does have a lot to do with it. And then what the thing they're trying to learn, actually, it also does. So if it's a sport, if two seasons, two years, is that too much? Is that just right? A language is going to take time and lots of repetition, especially if you don't have someone that's...
• 36:17
  native speaker around you. Musical instrument takes lots of reps. So really good tutors or, you know, teachers, schools that you can go to for that kind of thing. So I would just say, think through the timeframe. I think we did a two years, two year contracts with kids who were maybe like 13 and 15 or 16, something like that.
• 36:44
  Um, I think that's about how old they were when we did that. So, um...
• 36:50
  Yeah, I think that – so for ours, one was a sport and one was a musical instrument. And it was very effective in terms of the two years was a pretty good amount of time. It was – I liked how the sport one was very helpful. Like you being involved, you enjoyed that a lot because it was pickleball and you really enjoyed pickleball. So you were automatically going to be really –
• 37:17
  To the point, to your point of like having it, it's okay if it's something that the dad is really interested in or the family culture is like really interested in this thing because it really has everyone continue to be excited about the contract when you do hit that dip, things like that. Yeah.
• 37:35
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• 37:59
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• 38:21
  And it brings so much fun into the family. I was just playing Kyra and Pickleball last night, and it's so fun that she can really challenge me because of those two years of practice she had. And it's incredible to come downstairs and have Elisa play the harp, you know, and just fill our house with music. But you got to get past some of these initial elements. This is why I'm saying, like, I wish I would have thought of this or knew about this tool earlier. I wish I would have just created... I mean, in some ways...
• 38:50
  this is almost the primary way that I think I would have engaged in our kids schooling. Like if you were handling kind of the basic homeschooling, they're part of a co-op and, and that would free me up to be able to say, okay, with each one of my kids, I want to be coaching them into mastery in an areas. This is a personal fatherhood arena for how I'm going to school the kids.
• 39:12
  And so make sure that their basics are covered in math and science and literature and all those things. But I would love to help them achieve mastery. So and this could be done at a young age. Legos, you can start four languages at three or four years old or even earlier, you know, tumbling at that early stage. We get into six, six to ten. It's a great time to start like instruments, martial arts. You can start doing the chess thing. You could do that even earlier, like.
• 39:33
  You know, Lazlo, if you want, um, pickleball, like, like April said, you know, learning, writing debate is something that I really am coaching Kyra in now. And I'd love for her to go deeper and deeper into videography, even running, or, you know, there are a lot of sports that you don't have to necessarily join a formal team and get coached in that way, uh, in order for them to really experience that mastery. There are ways, and there are these more individual sports or smaller team sports like tennis or, you know, pickleball, things like that.
• 40:00
  where it's possible, right, to bend it more around the family schedule. But anyway, I just wanted you guys to be aware. This is sort of like a flag out there. I just feel like any time I run across one of these things, I'm like, man, I really wish I would have heard this when I was like 27. I really think I could have given each of our kids more of a fatherhood experience in this arena and also these other two elements, mastery in a particular thing and mastering the process of mastery.
• 40:27
  Like that is such a, such a cool gift to give your kids. So I want to try to give this to my kids even now, if I can. And then maybe my grandkids, like I've thought about like, Oh, it wouldn't be fun to, to sign a master contract with several of our grandkids and just like help them. Imagine taking it off the plate, you know, initially of the parents and saying, okay, they're a really busy season. We can help you guys in this process. Now I would still want my kids to have that experience with their dad.
• 40:53
  Um, but a grandfather can also step in, I think, and give, provide this experience and maybe seasons where this would be really tough for the dad or we could partner together. I don't know if you have any thoughts about that, but how might this fit into our life today? I don't know if that stirs up anything, but I've been thinking about that. It's kind of like on the edge of my, like, Ooh, where, where could we go with this now? Yeah. Yeah. I think, I think, um, probably the.
• 41:17
  you know, I'll be interested to see as it unfolds, but how to have things like this be a part of our role as grandparents or just like how we can support the parents in these, these ideas and keeping the family unit still unified and functioning as a team while the individual gets challenged within that framework. Yeah.
• 41:43
  Yeah. Yeah. This can challenge the team dynamic because this is really, we've spent most of our time with family teams talking about what are the things you can do together collectively? And I think that we kind of experienced that with Taekwondo. Like, I think that was something Jackson really wanted to master, but we said, look, if we're going to go into this, the whole family needs to go into this mastery process.
• 42:03
  Um, and, and so I would say that that's also something to really consider in the same way, like all three examples that I gave were really family teams doing family things. The Polgars were all doing chess. I don't think this would have worked if every Polgar sister was doing something different.
• 42:18
  You know, the Sanders were all doing football. You know, the Williams were all doing tennis. And so sometimes you just like, we're going to be the gymnastics family. We're going to be, you know, the Hebrew speaking family. Like we're going to be the sign language family. We're going to be the musical family. Yeah, I think there is a lot to be said, too, for just deciding to sort of do this together as a team. Yeah.
• 42:42
  Cool. Awesome. Well, thanks so much, April, for jumping on here today. This is definitely like, oof, newer thing for us to talk about. And we've been working on this a little bit, but man, yeah, I'm just really excited about this topic. And those of you guys listening, if you come up with a master contract, you start doing this stuff, please let us know. I'd love to hear and collect some stories for how this is impacting families. But yeah, thanks for jumping on here today. Yeah, absolutely.
• 43:09
  Thank you for listening to the Family Teams podcast. If you're enjoying this content or have learned something new, please make sure to leave a rating and review and share with a friend. To stay up to date with our events, new content, and products, you can follow us on Facebook and Instagram at Family Teams.