So, I had this moment this morning. A moment of perspective. Hit me right between the eyes while I was chastising my 18-year-old for opening a new bottle of syrup when there was still some left in the old bottle. As I was placing the bottles back in the pantry, I suddenly thought, "Is this how I want to spend my life? Focused on syrup bottle efficiency?"
I stopped, turned to him and said, "You know what? You're an honor student and an Eagle Scout, and you're going to a really good university with scholarships you earned. I think we'll just let the syrup issue go for now." He smiled a large and fairly grown-up smile, and we moved on with our mornings.
If you read my blog on any kind of a regular basis, you'll know part of what I'm going to say--it's all about perspective. What do we focus on as parents? And, to go deeper, what do I focus on myself and in my life? Now, there may be a conversation in our family's future about waste, efficiency, enough, and global climate change (I refuse to call it Global Warming any longer, since it's been snowing in late April around here--unheard of--we've broken records). However, that's a conversation about values and contribution as opposed to morning nagging about a couple of innocent syrup bottles.
My other question, which serves me well when I remember to ask it, is "What is my goal?" or "What am I trying to accomplish?" and "Am I being effective?"
I gave a presentation yesterday about Steven Covey's Urgency/Importance matrix. I believe we are so addicted to urgency as a culture that we often sacrifice what is important in our lives in order to rush around and do stuff we think is urgent. Not all of it truly is. Sure, some things are urgent and important--I used to live in that quadrant at my old job--suicidal, homeless, hungry, abused children in my office every day. Everything was urgent and important. By the way, that's the Quadrant of burnout, so be careful if this is your life....
I invite you to join me in taking a breath today, and say a prayer in whatever way fits with your faith tradition for guidance in slowing down and focusing on what is truly important to you. I invite you to reassess on a regular basis, and consider, as one colleague reminded me yesterday, how much time you spend working IN your family as opposed to working ON your family--and/or your life. Sometimes, we get so caught up in everything that needs to be done that we forget to take time to decide how we want our family and our life to be and what steps we need to take to get there. One of the things I love about coaching people is designing a relationship with them to work on creating goals to focus on what is really, truly most important--to that person. This is powerful and fun work at the same time.
One way to spend more time focusing on what's important to you and motivate you through some of the everyday maintenance activities is to make a dream board. Go here for a cool product that not only helps you visualize what you want to achieve, but also supports the flow of the process by providing a way to move your dreams over to the reality column when they've been accomplished.
Meanwhile, listen to yourself (which often requires the cessation of internal chatter--I like yoga for this--do what works for you), take time to make meaningful goals, stay underwhelmed, and consider the zen of syrup bottles.
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