Home Improvement Magazine Kitchen Fashions Fall 2017 | Page 17

«As you attempt to put yourself in a position to
acquire all the things that money can buy, don’t
sacrifice the things money can’t buy.»
- Earl Nightingale
• Without electronics
put their relationship ahead of their work – an issue I see
dividing a lot of working parents from their children.
• Doing a fun activity of their choice, with some
open communication saved for the end (this
step is the basis of experiential education.)
Missing two days of school per year is a small price to
pay for real connection between parent and child.
With the Board Meeting Strategy, children get the
respect their business-owner parents usually only give
to their key team members or largest investors.
Each Board Meeting I come back to work more energized,
more productive, more focussed. To steal Steve Covey’s
analogy “the saw has been sharpened”. I’ve given time
and space to people that mean the most to me.
I’ve done the strategy for years, and it works extremely well.
I even wrote a book about it and shared some personal stories
and breakthroughs I had with my adopted sons as a result.
The longer I do these Board Meetings, the more I want to
keep doing them. One of the greatest things about doing
these Board Meetings is that I often get to pull my boys out
of school to have one. It’s great doing a fun activity during the
week when every one else is grinding away. There’s something
special about breaking this routine and having an experience
with your son or daughter. If you’ve done it, you understand.
A lot of people don’t understand this. They see it as
irresponsible beyond belief. They say, “You pull them out
of school to spend a day at the beach with you? Don’t you
believe in a good education and the value of school?”
Of course I do. I like my boys’ school, too. However, I
believe in the importance of our relationship more.
On occasion we need to break the normal routine to
remember what’s most important. Work and school can easily
dictate our schedule forever if we let them. I refuse to let this
happen. Therefore, two to three days per year each of my kids
will miss school and I’ll miss work to have a Board Meeting.
This makes perfect attendance loyalists and workaholics
want to throw up. They are usually the first ones to say
to me, “What kind of example are you setting?!”
This is something I’ve thought on a lot. It’s something
that takes me back to the gurus I saw on stage. They were
successful in the eyes of the unimportant majority but
unknown and disconnected to an important minority.
I believe the example I’m setting is this:
When my kids grow up they will have a habit instilled
within them to play hooky from work and school
every 90 days to spend time with their most important
relationships – without remorse and without guilt. It
will also prove to their own kids that they can and will
Showing this type of, “irresponsibility” putting work
and school 2nd, helps marks the time and ground the
most important relationship. Most people – and society
as a whole - would be better off if more people took the
responsibility to be what most would consider irresponsible.
Without fail, every New Year’s we reflect back on our
year as a family and ask the boys for highlights. Every
Year they always talk about their Board Meetings.
I have a simple goal in all this. When my children turn
eighteen and leave the house to start the next phase of their
life, I plan to hand each of them a yearbook of our Board
Meetings over the years – a short log I’ve been keeping
since we started the practice. It will include the dates, a few
details of the fun adventure they chose for that day, a photo,
and notes of reflection from the conversations we had.
Four meetings a year for 15 years commemorated forever.
Visualizing this day keeps me committed to
my responsibility to be “irresponsible.”
Let me ask you: if you had received a log like this from
your father on your 18th birthday, do you think you’d
have said, “I can’t believe I missed those days of school"?
I can't speak for anyone else but I know what I would say. I
didn't have this with my father growing up and I wish I had.
Thanks to some great mentors I learned how to have a
great relationship with my dad. I’m one of the lucky ones,
but like the gurus on stage I know hundreds – perhaps
thousands – of people who never learned this skill and now
have a huge void within themselves. They were taught to be
responsible, to put school and work first and to wear this
commitment like a badge of honor. Now they’re alone and
unfulfilled. Their children barely know them. If they had
only taken the time to be a little more irresponsible…
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