Morning and Evening Bookends: Building Strong Family Rituals for Connection and Growth - LIFE Network: RAW Podcast #4

Welcome to a special raw episode. What does raw mean? Well, within the Life Network at joinlifnetwork.com, I pop on every once in a while and just release solo-sode conversations with me, myself, and I. Today is one of those raw episodes. This is going to be at joinlifnetwork.com if you want to check it out. I have come a long way from the smearing extra virgin olive oil on my face as a moisturizer days. I've learned a lot and I've interviewed some really smart people on my podcast about peptides and stem cells and exosomes and all sorts of things that you can activate or enhance at the skin level with the right type of products. So, probably the most scientifically advanced cutting-edge company I know of in the beauty space is called Young Goose. They have, for example, a blue peptide spray. This has methylene blue in it, yes, for your skin and does not turn your skin blue, but it does help your cells in the same way as methylene blue that you might eat. It also has GHK copper peptides in it. So, that's your cellular energy foundation. They have vampire exosomes that you smear on your face to enhance cellular communication, and even help you with something like a post-cosmetic procedure support. They also have their Youth Daily Moisturizer, which has NAD in it and spermidine to help with autophagy support. So, this is kind of like the long-term cellular resilience layer. And, you can get this as a 3-pack at a 10% discount if you go to younggoose.com/BENGREENFIELD. And use code BEN10 at checkout. That's younggoose.com and use code BEN10. You can start your day with the spray, move on to the exosomes, put on the NAD and the spermidine in the form of the Youth Daily Moisturizer, and know that you're using the best of science to look younger and feel more confident. You've probably heard of your vagus nerve and you've probably heard of vagus nerve stimulation. There's a few ways to stimulate your vagus nerve. You can get a giant needle shoved past your carotid bilaterally on either side of your neck. That's called a stellate ganglionic nerve block. That sounds fun. You can also get surgery to get a vagal nerve stimulator implanted into your neck, which also sounds like a blast. Or you can use gentle non-invasive vagus nerve stimulation by simply holding a device called the TrueVega up on either side of your neck. And that helps your body shift out of fight or flight sympathetic nervous system mode and into a calmer, more balanced state without operations, without needles, and without drugs. It simply uses a mild stimulation for just 2 minutes per day, and it's lightweight and it's travel-friendly, and you'll notice a big uptick in your HRV and your overall ability to be able to manage stress and have a balanced nervous system when you use it. TruVaga is built with award-winning technology that again requires just 2 minutes per day. So, you can support your nervous system naturally. Visit truvaga.com/Greenfield. That's truvaga.com/Greenfield and use code GREENFIELD30. 30 to save 30 buckaroos on any TrueVega device.

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Welcome to the Raw Podcast.

Hey, hey, let's see. Oh, I am recording. Just walking out my front door here. Of my home and using a new little— new microphone for today's Raw Podcast, episode 4 if I'm not mistaken. So, hopefully, my fancy new recorder gives you even better quality audio while I meander around the Greenfield compound here in Spokane and talk with you. You know, these, these Raw episodes have been fantastic. You guys have been giving great feedback, guys and girls. And, you know, something that I've been asked repeatedly that I haven't really talked, I guess, in detail about, but that's been on my mind a lot lately because it's such a huge part of my life. By the way, say hello to our rooster. It's not 4 a.m., it's what, like 4:30 p.m.? The rooster's still going off. Never stops. But something that I get asked about a lot are this whole idea of our family bookends. I like to call them the bookends. How we bookend our family habits and our family day. Now, This is important whether you have a family, you plan on having a family, you know families who you might want to share this with because we actually do have really solid, meaningful family connections every day. And a lot of people, you know, they— I don't want to jinx myself here, but they meet my sons and they say that my sons seem like well-balanced teenage boys. You know, they're not into drugs and porn and looting with girls and alcohol and, you know, disappearing out in the town. They're, you know, they're hardworking, industrious, productive, uh, upright, ethical young men. And I think that a big, big part of that, whether you're raising a girl or a boy, comes down to some key habits. Now, on my main Ben Greenfield Life podcast, I've interviewed folks like Rich Christiansen of the Legado Family Foundation who our family worked with, and I detail that work also in my book Boundless Parenting to develop the Greenfield Family Constitution, the Greenfield Family Values, the Greenfield Family Mission Statement, The Greenfield crest, the Greenfield logo, which is proudly displayed on the flags that hang outside our front door and on the family pickleball paddles and the family throw pillows and the family t-shirts and hoodies and hats and even the family pepper grinder and, and cup coasters. I think that all of these elements when it comes to family legacy are so important. To pass on generational meaning, generational wealth. If you look at the Greenfield Family Playbook, it has everything from the contact details for all the people who run our insurance, our financial management, all the way down to me and my wife and my son's memorial service plans, our end-of-life wishes, our our family colors, our family spirit animals, you know, what we do on Thanksgiving, what we do on Christmas, what we do on Easter, what we do on a day-to-day basis. It's all spelled out in there. But I specifically want to hone in for you today on the day-to-day, specifically the so-called bookends of the day. Probably one of the most meaningful things for me as a father as a husband, as a human being. This is something that really gets me out of bed in the morning. And despite me loving my job as a podcaster and speaker and author and what have you, my job is wonderful. I love it. I love to be able to help people and educate just like I'm doing right now. But it's really the beginning of the day and the end of the day with the family. That's one of the most cherished and special parts of my day. And I think that just like with a workout or meditation or prayer or journaling or a cold bath or anything else, you have to schedule this type of stuff in. It doesn't just happen, type of stuff that I'm about to talk to you about. So here's how it breaks down. I know I have it on my calendar. That every morning at 7 AM, and yes, sometimes it's 6:55, sometimes it's 7:05, we're just going to go with 7 AM because that's about approximately when it happens and that's when it's on my schedule. I am in charge of gathering my entire family in the living room. Occasionally, if it's nice outside, it's the back porch or the patio or the backyard, but My job as the leader of the home is to gather the entire family and kind of like the quarterback of the football team, get everybody together for the daily huddle. Now, in my book Boundless Parenting, I interview one couple, Patrick and Lori Gentempo, who first turned me on to this idea about probably 8 years ago. So, I've been doing this with my sons and my wife since my sons were about 8. But they literally spoke with their school superintendent and requested that their children be able to skip the first hour of school. And the children said— stayed home for the first hour of school. The family played music, danced, burnt incense, made breakfast together, and just hung out together as a family for that first hour of the day. Now, My kids are homeschooled. I don't need to pull them out of school for the routine that I'm about to describe to you. And it's not really a full hour just hanging out and dancing together as a family even though dancing is sometimes involved. But basically, for that 7:00 AM meeting, we all gather. We sit down on, again, living room floor, backyard, patio, you name it. And, The very first thing I do is I check in on everybody. Hey, how you doing? How'd you sleep? How you feeling? How you feeling about the day? What are you excited about today? What's happening today? You know, and then people begin to share. Hey, I've got, you know, my wife will say, hey, I have tennis practice at 11 and, you know, I'm going to go pick up alfalfa for the goat, home around 2. And my sons, you know, say, hey, Dad, we have, you know, jiu-jitsu at 11 today. We have tennis at 2 and we have a big meeting for you know, a card game company for whatever. And so, we're all kind of like matching up our schedule, talking about the day. And yes, we all also use Google Calendar. So, every family member does put what their activities for the day are on Google Calendar. So, you can at a glance if you really wanted to go in and see what everybody's up to in general. But it's nice to just sit at the beginning of the day. And talk about, you know, what's going on with everybody's day. It's important for two reasons. It helps you all just meet together as a family, even if you're like shifts passing in the night the rest of the day. It's great to be able to gather like that at the beginning of the day. And secondarily, it helps to understand that, oh, hey, you know, my sons and I don't have any major appointments or meetings until 9:30 AM. So our workout today that we do together is going to be at 8:30 AM. Or, we all, like, are super busy this morning and there's no way we're gonna be able to do our workout together because I'm gonna be working out at 8:30 and my son's gonna be working out at 3:00. So, as a part of the huddle, we get on the same page about what the workout of the day is gonna be because my sons and I all do the same workout plan together. I'm kind of in charge of the physical fitness programming in our house. No duh, I'm probably the person most equipped to do that for our house because I'm a personal trainer, just a glorified personal trainer. So, anyways, we match up schedules, talk a little bit about what's going on that day. And as a part of that discussion, there's even a discussion about the family dinner, which I'll get to later on. But it's literally, "Hey, you know, what got pulled out of the freezer?" last night because we'll usually, you know, begin to plan one night's dinner the night before. Who's making a salad? Who's, you know, trying out a new recipe from a cookbook we got? Who's doing the meat? Who's, you know, making the potato salad or the bread or the carrot fries or what have you? Shoutouts to my cookbook, Boundless Kitchen and Boundless Cookbook. Most of our family recipes are in those cookbooks. But basically, We really get on the same page about dinner because it's such another formative part of the second bookend of our day. So, everybody knows in the morning what it is that they're expected to have ready for family dinner at 7:00 PM, 12 hours later when family dinner gathering occurs. And sometimes, there's other little discussions, "Hey, whatever, you know, Dad didn't sleep too well last night. I'm going to take a nap this afternoon. Heads up." or, you know, Mom's not feeling well, let's pitch in and help her today. You know, just little things like that. So then we move into a devotional. We always, for years and years, had some kind of a reading that we do together as a family. Sometimes it changes, like leading up to Christmas, it's an Advent reading. Right now, while I'm talking to you, it is a book about work by a productivity expert and, uh, um, Christian author named Jordan Rayner. It's called Word Before Work. It's about how to take pride in the work that you do and devote it to God and help other people, and just a really good perspective on productivity and work from a theological standpoint. So we do that reading. Usually, I do the reading. I love to read aloud, you know, for years and years. I don't do it so much now that my sons are 16, but, you know, read the family stories every night before bed. But, I do the reading, the devotional reading. If I'm traveling, one of my sons or my wife does it with the family at home. And so, I do the reading. And then, when I finish the reading, I will usually talk to my family for about 2 to 3 minutes about kind of the major takeaway, or I'll ask them a question about something that I read that I thought was important that I want to hear their perspective on. So there's a little bit of a, you know, brief discussion after the reading. Nothing's too long because let's face it, you know, every— you know, we don't have a 6-hour morning routine, but, you know, just that quick discussion. After the reading. And the reading is usually 5 to 10 minutes maximum. So, within about 15 minutes, we have matched up schedules, we've planned out the day, we've done a devotional uplifting spiritual reading together, and then we all pray.

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I lead the prayer and it's just a wonderful thing to do together as a family to engage in something spiritual and sacred together. You know, the very last thing I do in bed before I fall asleep is my wife and I pray together. You know, after we do our pillow talking and our heads hit the pillow and we're falling asleep, get our lover's embrace, we pray together. And our whole family prays together in the morning. My prayers are very simple. For those of you who don't know how to pray or want a structure for prayer, it's very, very simple. I follow the ACTS acronym, ACTS. Adoration, meaning first I will say something like, uh, you know, dear God, you know, you're, you're so awesome, you know, wonderful. Thank you for, for allowing us to just come before you and for creating the universe. And you just basically act like you're walking into a king's throne room. And then confession, you know, please forgive us for this or that, or you know, something that we fell short on, or, you know, forgive me for being selfish, or, you know, forgive me for not trusting you and getting anxious yesterday in work. And typically after the C part, the confession, I'll stop for about 20 or 30 seconds to let other members of the family, as well as myself, just silently, you know, confess whatever it is that we want to lay out on our hearts. Before God that we would like to be forgiven for because that's one of the, of course, the most beautiful parts of, in my opinion, my religion, Christianity, is that you're not expected to be perfect but you can ask for forgiveness for what you've done and come away completely clean and with the weight off your back and not have to carry shame and guilt. And, that's, in my opinion, just the most beautiful part. About Christianity. Almost tears me up talking about it here. And then I get to T, which is Thanksgiving. Thank you for a home. Thank you for, you know, the fun time we had last night with such-and-such at a restaurant. Thank you for, you know, the wonderful, you know, tennis game that we got to play as a family yesterday afternoon. Thank you for providing us with this beautiful sunshine. And thank you for the rooster. And, you know, thank you for our dogs looking at our faces right now as we're sitting on the living room floor. So it's thank you, thank you, thank you. You know, so it's basically our family gratitude practice, essentially. And then finally, uh, the S is supplication, right? Um, people who I've committed to pray for, or our family has committed to pray for, things that have come to our heart that we need to ask God for, right? Like we're in the process of moving to Idaho. So we'll, you know, pray about God blessing our move and helping to, you know, make it go smoothly, or praying that God would, you know, provide direction and wisdom for some business issue that I might be tackling, or praying for my sons as they build their business, or praying for my wife as she ministers to the local community. But it's just asking God for, for, you know, whatever's on our hearts that we want to lay out and, and ask for. So that's the S. So ACTS: adoration, confession, thanksgiving, and supplication. And, uh, I always pause at the very end. I pause for about 30 seconds just in complete silence. And usually in those 30 seconds, other things come to mind that I want to thank God for. It's on my heart. I think it's always important to have that silence at the very end, you know, before you say, you know, in Jesus' name, amen. Just because some other things usually come to mind. And just for perspective for you here, this whole prayer is usually about 5 minutes long or so, right? So, the entire family huddle that I'm describing to you start to finish is no longer than 20 minutes, right? So, this isn't a huge lift, but it's so meaningful and so impactful for just bringing the whole family together at the beginning of the day. We finish the prayer and then we all stand up and we have a big group hug. Sometimes it's individual hugs and embraces. Sometimes it's, you know, all of us literally just like circling up and hugging. Um, and then we get on with our day. We get on with our day. Occasionally the family huddle changes. I will sometimes, if I sense that the mood is down or I want to throw a curveball. I will just put on a song and we will, we'll have a family dance party for like 10 minutes, you know, playing some big, long, fun song or a couple of songs or the happy mix on Spotify or whatever. Right. So that might be like a Saturday that we do something like that or a day when it's like rainy outside or, you know, people, if I just sense the mood is down, I'll sometimes just call a random dance party or we'll do something different. But 9 times out of 10, it's exactly as I just described. Meet, talk about the day, match up schedules, match up dinner, do a devotional reading, and pray. And that's it. So, that's the beginning. That's the first part of the day. And again, like, I'm not going to detail all of our family habits start to finish. I have an entire— Boundless Parenting is 700 pages long, you guys. And so, it details a lot more as far as family habits of not just our family but 31 other families who I interviewed for that book. But I want to fast forward now because the purpose of this podcast is to talk about two things, the beginning of the day and the end of the day. So, after that family huddle, we're all going about our day. I have a home office. I'm often podcasting, consulting. I don't get out much. I'm usually just around the house all day. My sons are going this way and that to jiu-jitsu or tennis or piano or, you know, my wife's off, you know, doing all of her errands and going about the town and, you know, at home and working in the garden and taking care of goats and chickens. And, you know, everybody just stopped doing their thing. We see each other throughout the day, uh, and, but we don't have like a big breakfast together, we don't have a lunch together. But then at 7 PM, everybody just knows 7 PM is when the end of the day occurs, when our end of the day family gathering occurs. Now depending on how the day has gone, often prior to that 7 PM family dinner meeting, we do go off and do something. Like, you know, if I'm done with work by 6 PM, we'll go off and play family tennis or family pickleball. Or maybe at 6:30 we'll play family bocce ball or cornhole in the backyard, or my sons and I will have a quick ping pong tournament in the garage. Sometimes we're all busy and we literally all just haven't done anything, but we just meet at 7 PM. At 7 PM for the family dinner meeting, here's what happens. Number 1, I always am going through a book with my sons. My wife doesn't like to read. She's mostly dyslexic. She kind of sits in the background and listens in. But my sons and I devote the first 10 minutes when we meet around 7 PM, and again, sometimes 6:55, sometimes it's 7:15, but you know, it's 7 PM-ish, we go over the chapter or the section of the book that we're reading together. And it varies widely. I mean, it's everything from some deep theological book to a productivity and time management book to a health and physical sciences book to— right now, it's a Harvard Business School financial management for entrepreneurs. You know, so we're talking like literally tonight at dinner, you know, 2 hours from now, We'll be talking about the different ways that you evaluate a business for a sale or an investment. So, that is our time though for me to share wisdom with them, for us to be able to engage in dialogue about the books that we're reading together. Our cadence is about 1 to 2 books per month. So, every year since my sons were about 7, I have taken them through a cadence of at least 12 books a year, sometimes more. And it's great because, you know, all of these great books that I read and that I want to share with them, I'm able to do so in a really systematized format throughout the entire year. And it doesn't matter, you can be public schooled, private schooled, homeschooled, you can do this practice. And it's great because even though, you know, I'm typically reading anywhere from 2 to 5 books a week— some in preparation for a podcast, some for personal interest, some for spiritual growth, et cetera. There's always at least one big hell yes, this is a book I want to read with my sons book that we're reading. And then, again, what gets calendared is what's going to get done. We always have that calendar time right before dinner to talk about the chapter or the section that's been assigned from that book. So, after the book reading and discussion, we then move on to song.

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I whip out the guitar or I have one of my sons who are getting better and better at the guitar play the guitar and we have a big family song. Usually, it's a hymn or a psalm or a spiritual song. It can be everything from Amazing Grace to The Blessing to sometimes an old Johnny Cash or whatever, but we always play a song. Before dinner. And it's a great way to just come together. And singing is so great. It's wonderful for the kids. We harmonize. We, you know, some people— sometimes people will clap, and I'll play little drums on the back of the guitar. You know, occasionally one of my sons will plunk out something on the piano. But we play a song, uh, and sing a song together, and then we pray again. And the prayer in the evening is very similar to the prayer in the morning, right? Adoration, confession, Thanksgiving supplication. You know, the primary thing is, you know, is a blessing of the meal and bless this food to our bodies and give us a wonderful evening together. And then, what happens is everybody busts out whatever dish that they've prepared for dinner that evening. So, you know, I'm pulling the meat out of the oven and my wife's grabbing the potato salad out of the fridge that she made earlier that afternoon and one of my sons is grabbing the the salad that he put together or the, you know, the bread that he sliced and toasted and put some olive oil and honey and salt on. And so everybody just kind of brings their dishes out. It's almost like potluck style as a family. And, and we put all the dishes out and then everybody loads up their plate. Then we move on to really, I think, the highlight of the night. And that's family game. Almost every single night. Of the week unless we have some serious discussion to have as a family or we've got guests over and, you know, we have to talk to our guests even though our guests often join us in what I'm about to describe to you. We play a big, glorious family game. We have a family game closet that's full of over 100 games. At least once a month, I take my sons out to Barnes Noble or we'd go surf over to Amazon and we just get a new game. Obviously, you know, as I think I've, I've said before on other podcasts, my sons have actually decided that the business they want to go into is card and board game production and design, and they have a company called Fried Pickle Games. They're bringing their first game called Fart of War to Kickstarter here in a few weeks. Um, but a big part of that was inspired by the fact that we just play so many games, and it's so wonderful for laughter rhetoric, for logic, for game flow theory, for reasoning, for argumentation, for conflict resolution. There's so much that you learn through games. And it's not like we aren't talking with each other. We're still, a lot of times, in between a hand of cards or in between a round of gameplay, we're talking about our day and, you know, how'd everybody's day go? And What were your accomplishments today? And, anybody have news to share, et cetera? But, there's always gameplay involved as a major part of dinner. As a matter of fact, I joke that you could eat off most of our games because they're just so covered with food particles and chunks of meat and all the things they get dosed with during dinner. But, we play games. Sometimes, the games are short, right? If we've started dinner late because it's been a busy day, sometimes, we're choosing a quick game like, I don't know, you know, Little Birdie or Exploding Kittens. And sometimes we've got a little more time to spare, so we're playing Scrabble or, or, uh, or, um, you know, the Ticket to Ride train game or Canasta or something that's a little bit longer. But, you know, there's always some kind of a game that we play, and it's just so wonderful. And I, I can't recommend it highly enough. I know some families play games after dinner We're kind of like a later night. Obviously, if we're starting our family gathering at 7, you know, by the time we sit down to actually eat dinner, it's 7:15, sometimes as late as 7:30. And then by the time we finish dinner, it's like 8:30. So we're not going to— you know, we're old buddy daddies. We go to bed at like 9:30 or 9:45. So we're not going to go play some big game after dinner. You know, occasionally we'll go out in the yard and play some cornhole or bocce ball or something like that. But usually, once dinner has ended and game time has ended, we're like doing dishes and starting to clean up the house and button up things and begin to get ready for bed. So, anyways, much to the chagrin of many longevity enthusiasts who finish their last meal by 5:00 PM, I will admit your sleep quality, your sleep onset, your sleep latency, all that's going to be better if you do have an early dinner time and if you can finish eating 3 hours prior to bedtime, it's always better for sleep. But you know what? I wouldn't trade slightly better sleep for our wonderful, glorious family dinners and family game nights. And I'm okay with finishing up dinner closer to like an hour to an hour and a half before bed rather than the token gold standard 3 hours before bed. So, anyways, we we finish up game and dinner. And then after that, you guys, it's, it's, it's, it's pretty straightforward. You know, we, we clean up the kitchen, we do the dishes, and then everybody's beginning to, to get ready for bed. We always, every single night, we all gather in my son's room ever since they were born. Sometimes it's story time, sometimes it's song time these days. And this is the practice of ours for the past 6 years, we all memorize one verse from the Bible together, not only because it's so uplifting and encouraging to have the words of what I consider to be my handbook for life, like memorized in your brain. You know, even if you don't have a Bible on hand, you can pull out encouraging verses. I don't want to tell you how many times I'm traveling and in some foreign hotel room and I'm just reciting Bible verses to myself to fall asleep. Or get myself back to sleep if I wake up at night. There's something about it that's just super soothing to the soul. But it's also nice because honestly, memorization is great for the human brain. And you know, my sons, they're not intimidated when they see some like 2-page old-school, like, you know, Hebrew text translated to English, you know, New King James Version, you know, giant psalm. And they know, oh, hey, in a month, I'm going to have this totally committed to memory. So, our family has literally memorized hundreds and hundreds of verses of Scripture. Like, right now, we're just on the tail end of memorizing Psalm 19. So, we do that every night in the boys' bedroom. We do our memory verse together. And then, once we've finished up that, you know, then it's getting ready for bedtime. And I'm not going to get into bedtime routine in much detail on this raw podcast, but really The main things that I wanted to go over with you today was A, that morning time routine, and B, that evening time routine. So, what can you do? Obviously, a lot of information here. What can you do right now? Let's say you have a family. Let's say you don't have a family. You've got a spouse, husband or a wife because if I would have known the magic of the tactics I just shared with you as far as togetherness, and relationships and solidarity and growth together earlier, I would have started this from day one of getting married with my wife. But, and by the way, when my sons are gone at camp or wherever, my wife and I have the same routine. Okay? My wife and I have our husband-wife-family huddle, 7:00 AM in the living room. My wife and I meet 7:00 PM for dinner. My wife and I sing a song together. We pray together. We play games together. Same thing, even when the kids aren't around. So you don't have to have kids to do this routine that I just described to you. So anyways, what can you do? Think about a morning routine. Think about some type of bringing together of a community. Could be your roommates, could be your family, could be your spouse. But think about calendaring a way to start off the day with some kind of a fostering of relationships and community and togetherness at the beginning of the day. And then, think about how can I make dinnertime a more structured magical routine of coming together? Because I've eaten at some people's houses and it's kind of like, "Yeah, let's play up this and play up that." And, there's no prayer. Everybody just kind of dives in and finish up and a few of the kids go off to play video games. And, it just seems very odd to me. After experiencing, not to overuse this term, the magic that is our Greenfield family dinner. So, think about that. How can you create a morning coming together and evening coming together in the relationship, the community of a family that you currently live in? Try it out. It's going to change your life. So, I hope this raw podcast and this specific topic has been helpful for you. Feel free to share it with anyone you know or implement it this week. And, thank you so much for listening. Wherever you're listening, there'll be shownotes. Check out Boundless Parenting. Also, check out the Legado Family Foundation with Rich Christiansen and my podcast with him, which I'll also link to in the shownotes here. And, this has been another raw podcast. Thanks for being a part of the Life Network. Until next time, I'm Ben Greenfield signing out.

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