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Welcome to Episode 147 of the Non- anxious Leader Podcast. Before I get into today's show, I want to ask a favor. A friend and colleague had suggested that they compile a list of maybe the ten to 20 best episodes for a new listener to go through, rather than trying to pile through all 147 episodes. So if you are willing to help me, please contact me through the contact form on thenonanxiousleader.com or if you are on my list, you already have my email address. Send me an email and let me know what your top 1, 2, 3,5,10 episodes are, and I'll kind of put all that together, put my own take on it, and put together a list that will be on the website so a new listener can go through those first.

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Thanks in advance for your help. And now without further Ado, here is episode 147, How to Be A Better Parent and Leader. This episode is a family systems theory on an article in the online publication Psyche How Chinese Philosophy Can Help You Parent by Aaron Klein You may know by now if you are on my email list or just listening to this podcast that I love Psyche as an online publication, it has some really deep articles on ways that we can learn and grow. This article is no different.

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Klein's basic premise is that looking at the way Chinese philosophers taught moral values taught virtues will help us to understand how we can live more fulfilled lives, how we can be better leaders, and how we can teach children to do the same. They focus on virtues such as humaneness and compassion and having a true calling or vocation in life. Their belief is, and I agree with this that those who genuinely flourish in these areas who develop these virtues are the happiest and most fulfilled in life.

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I find this to be consistent with my own faith journey as well. When I am focused on understanding what God is calling me to do. When I'm focused on understanding what I believe God values in life and in human connection, I feel like I am more connected to God and to others. I feel like I am more connected to my work and I feel like I am flourishing. It's important to remember that this is not a one and done that this is what happens in the moment at any moment.

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But over time focusing on these things I believe can help us as parents, as leaders and as persons. The Chinese philosophers don't measure success in terms of achievements and accomplishments. They measure success in terms of how we treat people. And so I believe that this sense of calling and this idea that we want to be connected to others actually will help people, children, people that we lead manage the tension between self definition and emotional connection. The first recommendation that Aaron Klein makes in this article, based on Chinese philosophers, is to recognize a wider range of vocations and don't privilege success.

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The emphasis here is on fulfillment, on finding meaning, as opposed to achievement, especially those achievements that are prized by culture and society. She notes that it's especially important to shy away from things that bring prestige and wealth because pursuing those things not only will not make us happy and fulfilled and find a meaningful life, but they will also lead to a constant need to achieve more and acquire more by not privileging success. What we are doing is we are helping others to focus on intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation.

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It can help children and team members understand the difference between our own goals and values and the surrounding togetherness pressure that come from the norms of the system. We can do this by praising effort as well as seeing outcomes not as a scoreboard, but as a way to learn when we focus too much on, "success" we point people in the direction of extrinsic factors instead of focusing on who they are, who they're called to be and how they live out their lives through continual effort and learning.

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The second recommendation is to cultivate the virtues that help children genuinely flourish. Klein notes that the philosophers focused on values such as compassion, kindness, generosity, gratitude, and resilience, as opposed to a certain set of skills or degrees or aptitudes. What this does is this helps children and team members develop a moral composite. It helps them to focus on values that matter and to understand what those values are. It encourages self definition by encouraging each person to know what their own values are. And I think the key word here is cultivate, which reminds me of a farmer or a gardener.

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They are focused on creating the conditions for growth, but actually they don't have the ultimate control as to whether or how that growth takes place. As the Apostle Paul wrote it's, God who grants the increase. I think the same is true here. When we want to help children and the people we lead develop the right values, we can model it. We can express what we believe, but in the end, people have to find their own way. In fact, we know that if we over function or try to force feed values to children or those that we lead, then it will have the opposite effect.

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This means that we want to create healthy emotional space so that people understand what you believe, but at the same time are given the freedom to choose for themselves. Klein's third recommendation is to create and practice rituals. She emphasizes the importance of them in cultivating virtues and building and sustaining relationships. She notes that by having daily and annual rituals or regular rituals that this helps children be more thoughtful, generous, and grateful. She also makes the point that if you are not fully present for these rituals, then you might as well not do them.

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They actually may do more harm than good. In fact, in our culture, it seems like ritual has a bad connotation in that people just go through the motions without really being fully present. So that's not what client is talking about here, and you don't hear me talk about this a lot, but I believe this is the upside of surrounding togetherness pressure. This is the upside of cultural norms. So often it may seem like cultural or system norms hold us back, but that's not always the case, especially with those norms that help emphasize the goodness in life and the goodness in who we are as a person or as a people, as a family, as an organization, rituals help others understand what is valued in that culture and when we participate as a non nonanxious presence, when we are fully present, fully connected and not anxious, rituals have the great potential to create an environment for people to grow.

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Whether that's eating dinner, as a family, attending regular worship, celebrating birthdays and holidays, or going on family vacations. These rituals add meaning and context to help children develop a sense of self, and you can do the same thing for the teams that you lead for the organizations that you lead through regular celebrations, doing meetings in a certain way that promote healthy conversation and regular practices that point towards the missional. Likewise, I just attended a biannual gathering of United Methodist camp and retreat leaders. This was our first gathering since the beginning of the Pandemic, and it was a wonderful reminder of who we are as Christian camp and retreat leaders in the United Methodist tradition, these kinds of rituals help to create, promote, and sustain positive values and identity.

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Klein's fourth suggestion is to resist conformity. This means focusing on what's best for your children and family, regardless of the surrounding together and this pressure, it's about being countercultural in a good way. She mentions that we will naturally tend to conform to that pressure around us, whether it has to do with signing kids up with sports or certain activities or hosting birthday parties at certain places. Instead, we should be looking at what is best for each individual child, whether that's the children in our family versus relative to children around us, or whether that's children within the family differences between each of the children in a given family.

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The same can be said for teams in which we lead and recognizing that each is an individual and we want to resist the conformity that says, we have to do things a certain way. Of course, this is the essence of self selfdifferentiation. It is resisting conformity so one can remain true to self. It's not resisting conformity for resistance sake. It's trying to live out wholly as a person. When our two older children, both daughters, were about 13 and ten years old, we asked them if they would prefer to go away for a weekend together with us rather than have birthday parties, we figured we would spend about the same amount of money as we would throw in two birthday parties, and we would get to share things we love with them instead of doing the same old birthday party thing.

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It's not that we were against birthday parties, but we thought this might be something better. We didn't put pressure on them, but they both readily agreed. For the next three years, we spent weekends in Philadelphia, New York, and Washington, DC. We spent time in museums, saw a Broadway show, and ate food that we loved. This only lasted for three years because of the ages of our children, but it created memories that we cherish. It's important to note here, too, that we did not do the same for our boys.

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They wanted to have birthday parties. That was fine. I can think of a professional example as well. When I started as a camp director in the year 2000, the norm was for the director to be at summer camp pretty much 24/7 for the ten weeks of summer. I didn't have a problem with that, but I also knew that my wife's family, our extended family, went to Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, for a beach week the last week of July. We had already been doing this for ten years, and because of school schedules, it was the only time that we could do this.

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Cape Hatteras had already become a cherished place for even the youngest people in our family, and so I decided to go even my first summer. It was not an easy decision, and it was certainly countercultural, but I believe it was the right choice. I know it was the right choice, and nobody ever complained about it at work. And I'm hoping what it did was it modeled for the staff, that families are more important than work. And of course, they were fine without me. That week of summer camp and I got to continue to celebrate the family ritual.

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Klein's fifth recommendation is don't be too quick to sacrifice yourself. She reminds us that what is best for the child is not wholly distinct from what's best for you. This is all about taking care of self and servant leadership, whether it's as a parent or a Ministry leader is important, but it's important to remember that you still need to be yourself. If you don't take care of yourself first, you'll have nothing to give to others. This is not about being selfish, it's about being wise. It's knowing that to be your best for others, you have to take care of yourself and not sacrifice who you are.

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This is challenging for parents and leaders we want to give everything we have to the people we care about, but there's a limit to what we can do. We also need to be able to let other people become themselves and give them the space to do it, which leads to the last recommendation. Look for the Gifts in Imperfections and Challenges client focuses here on understanding that limitations and challenges can help us to be more resilient can help us to grow in our ability. And rather than fixating on losses, we consider those challenges and limitations as gifts.

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Family systems theory teaches that there is a difference between a challenge and a problem. Edwin Friedman famously said, Nobody gets the problem they can handle if they could, it wouldn't be a problem. We want to encourage people to embrace challenge and to understand that they are rarely in a helpless situation. In fact, how we respond to challenge is one of the biggest influences on how we get through it. The biggest challenge we face as parents and leaders is being able to tolerate the pain of others as they go through their own challenges.

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We want to help them get through it, but doing it for them will actually make them less capable and less resilient. Encouraging others while staying connected to them. But letting them respond to their own challenges is an act of love. This is true for children, and this is true for the people we lead. Parenting and leadership is about helping people be their best. It's about being a self so others can be a self in the best sense of the word. This is what non nonanxious leader do.

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So as I say at the end of the outro for this podcast, go and be yourself. That's it for episode 147. Don't forget to connect with me at thenonanxiousleader.com Or send me an email to let me know what your favorite episode or episodes of this podcast are until next time. Thanks and goodbye.