How to TAKE CHARGE of Your Future

If you're complaining without being assertive, that is a level of passivity or victimhood. What we know for sure is that everybody values and wants more love, more truth, more tolerance, more responsibility. Now, we can't change the past, but we can change your entire future, your entire family. If you can get consistent positive intention. When you can't trigger me anymore, when they can't upset me all the time, I'm in a majestic level of control of my life. I have freedom. When we talk about family communication, it's all about blame, it's all about passivity, it's all about, well, I don't want to ruffle anyone's feathers. It's all about, well, I can't do this because of this obligation or this belief. And as a coach, I've had the blessing and the challenge of working with families for over 20 years of my life. And I can share with you that that journey has informed a lot of what I'll share today. My job is to do some coaching here today, not therapy. And so I'm not someone who's going to deal with traumas of the past. In your family, I might talk about some communication, that certainly feels that way, but my job is to meet you where you're at today and, and enable and empower better behaviors for you so that you can grow a stronger bond with your families, so that we can improve things. What we know for sure is that everybody values and wants more love, more truth, more tolerance, more responsibility, more unity, more respect, more kindness, more compassion, more care, more love. We all want that, we all hope for that. Very few people, though, build it. Most people complain they don't have it, but most people fail to live it intentionally and fail to build it in the relationships that are closest to them. So with that harsh truth, I have a positive aspect to that. In our very first principle, I like to share some stories along the way. I, I remember one of the very first high performing clients I ever had. She had a family, she had three children and a husband and they were in a lot of turmoil. And you know, I noticed in our first two or three sessions she was doing a few behaviors and sharing with me how their family was. And I knew that those behaviors were not serving her. I'm talking about a lot of those today. Some of those behaviors you already know. You know, playing victim or placing lots of blame or complaining constantly without being more assertive. Because if you're complaining without being assertive, that is a level of passivity or victimhood and that's hard for people to say or to hear. But I'm here to tell you this first principle is going to shift your life. Does the family have consistent positive intention for one another? If you look back into people's troubled histories and past, you can often see that they were part of a family where this did not exist, that it wasn't positive in the family. And people didn't hold consistent positive intention for the family itself or for the individuals in the family. They had somebody who actually held contempt for them. They had somebody who was always negative towards them. They might have had somebody who was good on birthdays. They had a parent who was kind on certain days. But they were not steady in holding consistent and positive intention for their children. And again, this is not a therapeutic workshop today. But I bet you can quickly and easily identify some troubled events, experiences, or even trauma from the past where it's like, oh my gosh, yeah, my family was so disordered because we all hated each other because this wasn't there. Now, we can't change the past, but we can change your entire future, your entire family, if you can get consistent positive intention for the family unit as a whole and for each individual in the family. Now, if any of that sounds a little highfalutin for you or too new agey, let me share with you. The research confirms this. Happy, positive families and happy positive relationships who report good feelings in the family, but also who actually report higher levels of life satisfaction, career advancement, income, productivity, and mental well being all share higher levels of positive communication. You know, in marriages, it's often rated as four to five times the number of positive statements versus negative ones. In family units, it's often two to three times positive experiences around the dinner table or positive experiences on a family outing than it is to negative. We just have a surplus of positive events and communication. That sounds so obvious, but it never happens unless somebody in that family decides it. Somebody in that family says, I have an intention to have a happy family. I have an intention that all these kids feel loved. I have an intention that mom and dad have a good relationship. None of this is easy and none of this is a given. It requires high levels of consciousness and agency on your part. But I'm here to tell you, if you can't teach yourself to hold this through a fight, if you can't teach yourself to hold this when the kids are wild, if you can't teach yourself to hold this as a standard in your mind, in your inner constitution, in your actual behavior, I can give you all the practices and other principles in the world, but without this consistent locked in intention that it will be a positive relationship with me, it will be a positive relationship among us. Yes, that will be violated. Yes, that will be challenged. Yes, that will be conflict. But if we don't return to this, it always falls apart. So critical. I can't emphasize this enough. Let me come back to that story of my coaching client. You know, I meet with my coaching clients once a week like most high performance coaches, and every time we had a conversation where her family would be involved, she would readily vent like most clients do. And I would listen, but I would always have to remind her and kind of re baseline her back to consistent positive intention. If we can't get consistency in a family, we don't really have a family. That's a central element of creating strong families. A level of steadiness of expectation and intention within the family unit. We know this not only from research, but I can tell you if I can't get you, even in your own personal life to constantly and more consistently hold with a strong firm grasp positive intentions for yourself in this world. If you can't hold positive intention for yourself in this world, then everything else is ice baths and noise, right? Everything else is never going to have the discipline or the drive or the actual outcome and result that it could have had without a stronger hold on positive intention for yourself. Okay? Consistent positive intention. Hold this, grasp this, keep it firm, everything changes. Second, I've worked with a lot of families and a lot of incredible dads and moms as they have raised not only, you know, their children, but sometimes the other person's children because they got together after a divorce. I've seen them in multi generational leadership within their own family have phenomenal outcomes. Even if one kid was super weird, the other four turned out okay. Why? What was going on? Well, central to the family is this one as a principle. Ownership of feelings and behavior. Ownership of feelings and behavior. There is a level of truth and consequences. There is a level of personal ownership and agency that, you know what, when I share something with you that I don't like, I speak about my feelings, my observations. I use I statements. I saw this, I heard this, I experienced that, I felt like this. It's not accusatory. You, you, you, you, you. It's ownership. I, I, I. The people in these families who are the happiest speak more of personal ownership. They're not victim, they're not projecting and they're not pointing. They're able to speak about their own personal experience without Using that as a weapon against others. They're owning it. And their ownership. Listen please. This is the critical turn. Their ownership and their feeling flows into the ownership of their behavior. Longtime customers with me, you've heard me share this phrase about always thinking, how do I take the next right action of integrity? So let me walk you through this. If you're in a conflict with a family member, instead of lashing out, pointing, blaming, complaining, and you're able to share authentically, free from their behavior, authentically how you feel, what you think, sense, desire, saw, heard, need. And you're not sharing that to get them to change. You're sharing that so that you own your reality and then you're sharing it with clear expectation of what you're going to do next. Yes, you can make the request of what you want them to do. But see, so often we want to share something to sell. You made me feel this way. So you're a jerk and you need to change versus I sense this. I saw this, I felt this way. And you know what? Next time, next time, I don't want to get hooked as much. I don't want to get angry as much. I want us to have a closer relationship. I want us to talk it through. I would love for us to take a walk. So the request is, I would like us to do this. It's still owning the behavior of your part. If you grew up in a family where, you know what, Everyone blamed each other for each other's feelings and everybody always blamed each other's behavior for the negative effect on their feelings. Those environments become low trust families. A low trust family is where everyone's hiding their feeling and blaming others for their behavior. Let me say it again. A low trust family is where everyone is hiding their feelings and blaming everybody else for their behavior. Well, I'm like this because of dad. I'm like this because you said this. I only got fired up and I only pushed you because you pushed me. Where we outsource the control of our behavior to somebody else's. We complain about our feelings and we say our feelings are caused by them. Now, this is really hard. This is probably the hardest thing in all of personal development. This one, this one is one of the hardest things you will ever do in personal development. Because as you know, we're social animals. We do have that component of our lives, including our brain, where our mirror neurons in our brain want us to match other people and act like other people. But that is ultimately over the long term in our lives can be a level of Dependency and conformity that makes most families crater. You don't want a family conformity or dependency. In fact, what you want is family members who are highly independent and interdependent. There's a cohesiveness in their individual character. She's who she really is, and an interdependence in which she can be who she is and she can appreciate this person being who they are. And because they appreciate each other, something magical happens. And again, this is pulling from real research as well as my hard, difficult challenges in coaching some of the most extraordinary families. But I also say this. Some of the most extraordinarily pressured families, some families in the public eye, families who, you know, are part of a. You know, somebody in that family is a celebrity and the family's falling apart, and they think they're calling me to help the, you know, the celebrity or the person or the person of influence or the CEO, you know, repair themselves, find themselves, recover, get better, achieve greater things. But then when I start broadening the conversation, I can see where things often fall apart. And it's so simple. There are too many people in this person's life who don't own their feelings and behavior. And this person who might be really struggling has never learned to do this. Whether you're here for family communication or not, I'm going to give you something. This card is called personal freedom. When my feelings are my own and my behavior is my own, I'm responsible for them. I can adapt them, I can improve them. Now I have real freedom when you can't trigger me anymore. I have independence when they can't upset me all the time because I don't take it personally. I'm in a majestic level of control of my life. I have freedom. See, as a coach, it's hard to describe, because when I describe what I do, so many people think it's always just like working on the field with NFL athletes or, you know, in the arena in the prep room with an Olympian. They don't know how often I'm seeing families fight, like, literally in front of me. Like the couple is arguing and screaming, and I'm in the room in the kitchen with the billionaire who has all this power and their spouse who has all this power. And they are just screaming and the kids walking in, and I just happen to be there for the day, and I'm in the role of. I need to do something about this, because that's why I'm there. And so I don't see everything beautiful. I don't see everything through Rose colored glasses. This stuff is hard. This stuff is hard. I'll tell you, if you can hold that consistent positive intention and you can now take control of your own personal reality by owning your feelings and your behaviors and communicating in that way. I saw this. I felt that. I experienced this. I'm desiring to do this next time I own my behavior. I did this. I did that. I could see how my behavior made you mad. I can see how my behavior hurt us. I can see how my behavior wasn't the best of who I really am. And I'm sorry for that. Now we're talking real communication. We're just getting going, okay? Third thing in Principles of the Greatest Families is I'm just going to use this word over and over. So I'm laying it as a principle for everybody. Cohesion. Somebody in the family is the family knitter. Somebody in the family is planning some events, bringing people together. Somebody in the family wants dinner to go well. Somebody in the family wants to start rituals on Thanksgiving or Christmas or holidays. There's always. It doesn't need to be the whole family. This is important. There's somebody in the family who is creating the rituals, who's creating the standards, who's making it feel like a family, not just a bunch of crazy people in a house. They're trying to bring the family together. A lot of their efforts are thwarted. A lot of their efforts don't work. And yet they keep doing it. And what I've noticed is it only takes one. As my friend Ed Mylett likes to say, be the one. Be the one to change your family. Be the one to set a new level. Be the one in this language to create a real bond in your family. But I can also share that in the family language. Now we're going back into the research in the family language, family communication theory. It's very clear that there's also somebody in the family and often multiple members of the family who speak as the family. By using more language that's so simple and direct of we. We are like this as a family. We experience this as a family. We are going through this together. You got it? We're going through this together. We're a family unit. We're in this together. We love each other. We're going to get through this. We care for each other. The language of we solidifies the cohesion of the family. So in one level, there's the rituals, the routines, the standards, the holidays, the stuff that you do to bond and bring you together. But at another level, there's this language of we. And you talk like you can hear the language of them talking about themselves. As a family, we're proud as a family. We do these things as a family. We volunteer as a family, we care as a family, we learn as a family, we try new things as a family, we work out together as a family, we eat healthy together as a family. It's like this we story is not only relevant, it's just real and recurring. The we story is relevant to each family member, meaning they care about it, but it's consistent. You know, it's real. They're actually saying this stuff and it's repeated. And I didn't learn this until I started working with families that were happy and had multi generational achievement and high life satisfaction. Believe me, these families exist. And there was just a, a different level. I mean it was almost like watching a team at play. You know, they really cared about each other. There was somebody always bringing them together, saying the we story that needs to be you at the next level of your family to talk about you as a group, talk about you as a family, what's important to the family, what we do as a family, how we act as a family, how we treat each other as a family. It's not just how, you know, the daughter teaches the brother. It's not just how the mom teaches the dad. It's not just how the parent teaches the in law. It's not just like those individual nodes. It's a whole, it's a circle, there's a communication, there's like webs between everything. And somebody thinks that way. It's like family systems dynamics, if you will. Somebody in that family is just thinking as a systems thinker, not just as is Sally Happy. And it's just a very different approach. You can see there's always somebody like that. I bet you can think of somebody in your past or in your family that was the person who was kind of the linchpin in the family. Be the linchpin, be the holder, togetherer, be that person.