Latest / The Family Teams Podcast / Ep. 01 | How to Make Individual Activities into Team Activities

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Ep. 01 | How to Make Individual Activities into Team Activities · The Family Teams Podcast

• 0:06
  Hey guys, welcome to the 5-Minute Fatherhood Podcast. I'm your co-host, Jeff Bethke, along with my friend and mentor, Jeremy Pryor. Join us Monday through Friday as we chat about quick tips, skills, and ways to help equip you on your journey as a father to build your multi-generational family team on mission. Stay tuned.
• 0:27
  What's up, guys? Jeff and Jeremy here. Welcome back to the 5-Minute Fatherhood Podcast. Starting off this week is another listicle, as we like to call it, so we're going to kind of go rapid fire, quick. Jeremy's got a bunch, and I have a few. And the topic this week is how to take traditional individual activities and make them a little bit more of a team activity. Jeremy, go ahead and go first.
• 0:46
  As we think about trying to build our families into teams, one of the things that people almost immediately say is, oh, does that mean my kids can't be into music, can't be into sports? And it certainly does bring up all those conversations. But one creative thing to consider is that are there ways that the entire family can really engage in an activity that's traditionally thought of as an individual activity? Yeah.
• 1:11
  An example in our case is my son Jackson, super into martial arts. He's the one son. He's got four sisters. And so we just sat as a family and said, hey, let's all go with Jackson into this sport. And so we all went. We spent two years training. You and April even. What are you guys? Yeah, me and April we did. Black belts, white belts, yellow belts. I don't know what it is. We're both red belts. We got all the way to red belt. And all the girls made it to black belt with Jackson. Nice.
• 1:37
  Yeah, it was awesome. So I think think about be creative, try to figure out how you can maybe if it's important enough to that individual, then maybe it's worth the family trying to figure out how to do it as a team. So what other examples have you guys thought about this, Jeff? Yeah, totally. And I think one thing, too, is I think for some reason people just get really caricatured with this conversation and they hear that and they go, oh, you must be you're saying we have to hang out every five minutes or every waking minute of our life.
• 2:01
  That's not what we're saying. What we're saying is this culture is actually deeply, deeply, deeply individualistic. And if you're not, if you don't kind of have a resisting force or ethos towards team, then you will just actually be deeply, deeply, deeply individualistic, just like the culture. So take a couple of things and make them a little bit more team oriented or kind of turn them on their head. There's a bunch of different examples. We have toddlers right now, so there's still not a ton of activities we can do together as a family besides really organic things like going for walks, playing together, et cetera. But one fun one that I've realized is I love to build. I'll make cutting boards, made one for you guys. I'll make, you know.
• 2:31
  bookcases and this and that. And so I've realized, I mean, I don't really want my kids yet around the saws yet, even though I'm really excited to teach them all those things in this. But what I'll do is there's a bunch of steps before and a bunch of steps after that are usually, you know, either pre or finishing stages where it's totally a fun group activity. Like, hey, Kinsley, you put the glue on or I give you a fake hammer and you do this or here's a tape measure. And so I actually think that's a really fun one is I kind of really purposely try to invite the kids in when I'm trying to make or build something and they absolutely love it. And it's fun to see them play that. So that's one for me.
• 3:00
  Yeah. So for us, we've always tried to figure out how to do this with work. We've owned some of our own companies. And so my wife just started a sewing studio. So there's a conversation that goes on with each of the kids. What are you going to do to help be a part of this team effort? Let's not make this feel like just mom's project. Let's make it feel like a family team endeavor. So
• 3:20
  with her mom and other kids have had different activities. When our kids were really little, we had an e-commerce company. And so all of our kids put stickers on all the inventory. We always made that their task. Right now in my company, there's not a lot of obvious places for kids to intersect.
• 3:37
  But I'm always looking for them. And one of the areas where I found was that we do a once-a-month breakfast where the leaders of the company serve all the employees. And so I bring a couple of my girls in typically to that breakfast to help serve all the employees, to help clean up afterwards. And so they spend two or three hours just –
• 3:55
  serving with me, serving our employees. And that just some of that stuff just takes a little bit to think about, figure out, be intentional about, be creative around. If you work for a company, is there something going on that may be monthly or weekly or small or occasional or narrow and specific that's like, oh, I think my kid could actually be a part of that? Like, is there any way to integrate your family in any way so they at least have some connection as a team to the activity that you're doing? That really is a simple way to start to ratchet up sort of the feeling of team you might have in your family.
• 4:24
  Oh, that's, I love that one. I love that one. And actually, I just thought of this one because of what you said. And one thing that we're really, really big on in trying to really integrate team nature, but also I think just for the ethics and for them learning to follow Jesus is generosity and service together as a family in really tangible giving ways that are not just like, you know, I go on my Wells Fargo and give it to someone, you know, because I think a lot of times families can totally just give their money in a digital way. That's fine. That's great. Or, you know, or just in a really disconnected way. But especially with our kids, we've really tried to say, okay, I'm going to give it to someone.
• 4:53
  I don't want me to give or me and Alyssa to give. I want it to feel like the Beth keys are giving. So we really, really, really try to really include the kids. We try to let them choose. If it's a gift for someone, they get to kind of pick and have insight into it. A lot of little things we do, though, usually seasonal. So like right now it's Christmas where, you know, we get Amazon like five times a day because it's the only thing we can get here. So we got, you know, UPS, PS, FedEx and UPS guys come into our house all the time that
• 5:16
  And we know they're working crazy hours during the holidays and we know it's really hard on them. So we got them Starbucks gift cards and then the kids are going to probably write some little coloring pages for them. So we kind of make a thing out of like, hey, we're all going to thank our mailmen. We've done the same thing with firemen where we'll go walk up the street to the fire station and give them little thank you things as a family. And so I think, yeah, serving or being generous, like and including your kids on that. They love that. And it really kind of starts setting a precedent for them.
• 5:42
  Hey guys, Jeff here. Thanks for listening. Make sure to subscribe on iTunes so you can get a new episode straight on your phone Monday through Friday. We are also on Spotify, Google Play, and a bunch of other places. If you don't know, we have a five-minute fatherhood Facebook group for any of the dads listening here where we talk about the episodes. We encourage one another and we share tips and tricks as we're all on this journey together. Search five-minute fatherhood on...
• 6:06
  Facebook, or you can go to our YouTube channel and the link is actually in all the descriptions of every single five minute fatherhood video. All right. See you guys tomorrow.