You can’t be a great leader unless you are passionate about the mission. Great leaders have a passion for what they do. They understand where they are going and are all bought into lead, follow, and work to get everyone they can to the family’s mission. The funny thing about a family leader’s passion is this drive can be one of the easiest things to have and the hardest, depending on the day. It is so easy to have that passion when you can see the progress of yourself and, more importantly, those in your family you support. There is just something special seeing those you love to have those moments where they reach out and touch their potential. Where Read more…

Hope is never a plan, but it can be a direction. Hope is a great thing that can give us the motivation to carry on in difficult situations. It provides a light at the end of a long tunnel of conditions we feel we might not be able to raise above. It is something we all need in our lives to keep taking steps forward to what we see in the future. Where it can get us into trouble is when we rely too heavily on hope. I had a mentor who would always tell me that hope is never a plan. It can be a lot of things, but it should never be our plan. Where we just sit Read more…

Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself. – Leo Tolstoy. As a leader in your family, if you see something you want to change, you need to start with the person in the mirror first. If you feel something is off that needs adjustment, then we need to look at the environment we have created. Every behavior we see in our families, good or bad, reflects the culture we have in our families. Creating culture is complex and but it is always within our control. The leadership teacher John Maxwell talks about leadership in one of his concepts, the law of the lid. This law states that an organization or group can only rise Read more…

Love first, judge second, or not at all. What if every interaction with your family started with love? This is the actual difference between leadership in the world and leadership in our families. Our leadership comes to us not in some promotion or title but because we genuinely love someone and feel responsible for their growth. Parent leadership is the purest form of leadership. Love first is the single most significant way we can be there for those we lead in our families. When we seek to love, we look to empathize and better understand those we serve as parent leaders. Know them better to love them stronger.  When you love first, you will find you don’t need to judge. Read more…

The days are long, but the years are short. – Gretchen Rubin   Gretchen tells us something here that I think we all learn at some point in our lives. When we had our first child, it seems like everyone who was grandparent age would tell us something along these lines. They told us these long days would pass by quickly. I have to be honest I don’t think I understood because I could not relate to what they were saying. To me, I was just in over my head, and some days did seem longer than others with a new baby. Maybe that was just due to lack of sleep. As our kids get older, I can now relate Read more…