The way you fulfill your mentoring role with any family member—but particularly with your most difficult child—will have a profound impact on the level of trust in the entire family. As we said in Habit 6, the key to your family culture is how you treat the child that tests you the most. It is that child who will really test your ability to love unconditionally. When you can show unconditional love to that one, the other children will know that your love for them is also unconditional.
I have become convinced there is almost unbelievable power in loving another person in five ways simultaneously:
Empathizing: listening with your own heart to another’s heart.
Sharing authentically your most deeply felt insights, learnings, emotions, and convictions.
Affirming the other person with a profound sense of belief, valuation, confirmation, appreciation, and encouragement.
Praying with and for the other person from the depths of your soul, tapping into the energy and wisdom of higher powers.
Sacrificing for the other person: going the second mile, doing far more than is expected, caring and serving until it sometimes even hurts.
Most often neglected of the five are empathizing, affirming, and sacrificing. Many people will pray for others; many will share. But to truly listen empathically, to truly believe in and affirm others, and to walk with them in some kind of sacrifice mode so that you are doing what they would not expect you to do—in addition to praying and sharing—reaches people in ways that nothing else can.
One of the biggest mistakes people make is trying to teach (or influence or warn or discipline) before they have the relationship to sustain it. The next time you feel inclined to try to teach or correct your child, you might want to push your pause button and ask yourself this: Is my relationship with this child sufficient to sustain this effort? Is there enough reserve in the Emotional Bank Account to enable this child to have an open ear, or will my words just bounce off as though he or she were surrounded by some kind of bulletproof shield? It’s very easy to get so caught up in the emotion of the moment that we don’t stop to ask ourselves if what we’re about to do will be effective—if it will accomplish what we really want to accomplish. And if it won’t, much of the time it’s because there’s not enough reserve to sustain it.
So you can make deposits into the Emotional Bank Account. You can build the relationship. You can mentor. As people feel your love and caring, they will begin to value themselves and become more open to your influence as you try to teach. What people identify with far more than what they hear is what they see and what they feel.
Organizing
You could be a wonderful model and have a great relationship with the members of your family, but if your family is not organized effectively to help you accomplish what you’re trying to accomplish, then you’re going to be working against yourself.
It’s like the business that talks teamwork and cooperation but then has systems—such as compensation—that reward competition and individual achievement. Instead of being in alignment with and facilitating what you want to accomplish, the way you have things organized actually gets in the way.
In a like manner, in your family you may talk “love” and “family fun,” but if you never plan any time together to have family dinners, work on projects, go on vacations, watch a movie, or have a picnic in the park, then your very lack of organization gets in the way. You may say “I love you” to someone, but if you’re always too busy to spend meaningful one-on-one time with that person and fail to prioritize that relationship, you will allow entropy and decay to set in.
Your organizing role is where you would align the structures and systems in the family to help you accomplish what’s truly important. This is where you would use the power of Habits 4, 5, and 6 at the mentoring level to create your family mission statement and set up two new structures that most families don’t have: dedicated weekly family times and calendared one-on-one dates. These are the structures and systems that will make it possible to carry out the things you’re trying to do in your family.
Without creating principle-based patterns and structures, you will not be able to build a culture with common vision and shared values. Moral authority will be sporadic and shallow because it will be based only on the present actions of a few people. It won’t be built into the culture of the family.
But the more moral or ethical authority grows and becomes institutionalized into the culture in the form of principles—both lived and structurally embodied—the less dependent you are on individual persons to maintain a beautiful family culture. The mores and norms inside the culture itself will reinforce the principles. The very fact that you have weekly family time says a hundredfold that family is truly important. So even though someone may be flaky or duplicitous and someone else may be lazy, the setting up of these structures and processes compensates for most—though not all—of those human deficiencies. It builds the principles into the patterns and structures that people can depend on. And the results are similar to those that happen when you go on a vacation: A family may have emotional ups and downs on a vacation, but the fact that they went on a vacation together and that it was renewing a tradition builds the principles into the culture. It frees the family from always being dependent on good example.
Again, in the words of sociologist Émile Durkheim, “When mores are sufficient, laws are unnecessary. When mores are insufficient, laws are unenforceable.” In adapting this to the family we might say, “When mores are sufficient, family rules are unnecessary. When mores are insufficient, family rules are unenforceable.”
Ultimately, if people won’t support the patterns and structures, then you’ll see instability enter the family, and the family may even struggle for survival. But if these patterns become habits, they become strong enough to subordinate individual weaknesses that manifest themselves from time to time. For example, you may not begin a one-on-one or family time with the best of feelings, but if you spend the entire evening doing some fun thing together, you’ll probably end with the best of feelings.
This is one of the most powerful things that I have learned in my professional work with organizations. You must build the principles into the structures and systems so that they become part of the culture itself. Then you are no longer dependent on a few people at the top. I’ve seen situations in which an entire top management team moved into another company, but because of the “deep bench strength” in the culture, there was hardly a blip in the economic and social performance of the organization. This is one of the great insights of W. Edwards Deming, a guru in the field of quality and management and one of the key reasons for Japan’s past economic success. “The problem is not in bad people, it’s in bad processes, bad structures and systems.”2
That is why we give such energy to this organizing role. Without some basic organizing it’s easy for family members to become like ships that pass in the night. So the third level of this tree—depicted by the trunk breaking out into the larger and then smaller limbs—represents your role as an organizer. This is where people experience how the principles are built into the patterns and structures of everyday life so that not only do you say that family is important but they experience it—in frequent meals together, family times, and meaningful one-on-ones. Soon they come to trust these family structures and patterns. They can depend on them, and this gives them a sense of security and order and predictability.
By organizing around your deepest priorities, you’re creating alignment and order. You’re setting up systems and structures that support—rather than get in the way of—what you’re trying to do. Organizing becomes an enabler—literally transforming restraining factors into driving or enabling factors on the path from survival to significance.
Teaching
When one of our sons started junior high school, he began coming home with poor test scores. Sandra took him aside and said, “Look, I know you’re not dumb. What seems to be the problem?”
“I don’t know,” he mumbled.
“Well,” she said, “let’s see if we can’t do something to help you.”
After dinner they sat down together and went over some of the tests. As they talked, Sandra began to realize that this boy wasn’t reading the instructions carefully before taking the tests. Furthermore, he didn’t know how to outline a book, and there were several other gaps in his knowledge and understanding.
So they began to spend an hour together every evening, working on reading, outlining books, and understanding instructions. By the end of the semester he had gone from 40 percent test scores to all A’s and one A plus!