“Would you rather me 1) give you a high five or 2) work on a puzzle with you?” I asked my five and nine-year-old over the holiday break. It was one set of about twenty force choice questions from the Five Love Languages for Kids quiz I was giving them in order to explore how my husband and I can continue to be mindful of how we can best customize our parenting to each child. Both easily answered, “Work on a puzzle with you.” The Love Languages quiz started in romantic relationships and describes five primary love languages: Physical Touch
I have the opportunity to coach a lot of middle managers. Quite often they are middle-aged men, and I’m working with them because there is some issue with how they lead (or actually don’t lead) others. Through some type of feedback mechanism, these men are described mildly as “aloof” or “disinterested” (always related to how they are with people, not necessarily the tasks or functions of their job) to more extreme words like “jerk” or “a**hole”. I’m brought in most of the time to try to fix their “personality”. Making them more caring and a better leader of people is
“I can’t turn little Johnny into a Stanford bound student,” said one school principal when I was meeting with him. “These parents expect us to take a B or C student with a 21 on the ACT and create Ivy League individuals. I get all the hype about growth mindset,” he said. “It is everywhere in my world, but the truth is, I can’t take your five-foot-nothing kid that can’t jump and turn him into Michael Jordan no matter what I do.” I get it. Some goals are realistic and some are just delusional. He was quite funny sharing these thoughts,
January. The time to set a resolution for better living and better outcomes. Have you set one or two or ten? Resolving to be better is always a good thing but resolve rarely accomplishes. As Paul David Tripp says in New Morning Mercies for the December 31 devotional: …the reality is that few smokers have actually quit because of a single moment of resolve. Few obese people have become slim and healthy because of one dramatic moment of commitment. Few people who were deeply in debt have changed their financial lifestyle because they resolved to do so as the old
“A pound of prevention is worth an ounce of cure” is a phrase I heard for the first time this week. I was at lunch with an attorney who specializes in employment law, and she said that phrase as we were talking about clients who don’t see the benefit of proactive, preventative measures and instead just hope everything turns out alright. I immediately wrote it down and googled when I got home, and the internet says it’s a Benjamin Franklin quote. Apparently, Franklin wrote an anonymous letter to his own newspaper in Philadelphia in 1735 about the importance of preparing