In this episode of the L3 Leadership Podcast, Doug Smith shares how he and Laura are leading their family team.
ABOUT DOUG SMITH:
Doug is the Director of Development at Light of Life Rescue Mission and Founder and CEO of L3 Leadership. He is the author of his eBook, “Making the Most of Mentoring”, a step by step guide to help you build and cultivate relationships with mentors. He blogs at dougsmithlive.com, he is the host of the L3 Leadership podcast, and he is sought after public speaker. He is married to his high school sweetheart, Laura, who currently works as an Account Executive at Ivalua. Together, they love family, personal growth, travel, working out, and serving others.
CONNECT WITH DOUG:
6 Key Take-Aways From Episode 276.
LINKS MENTIONED IN EPISODE 276:
Intentional Parenting - Phil and Diane Comer
In this episode of the L3 Leadership Podcast, Doug Smith shares how he and Laura are leading their family team.
ABOUT DOUG SMITH:
Doug is the Director of Development at Light of Life Rescue Mission and Founder and CEO of L3 Leadership. He is the author of his eBook, “Making the Most of Mentoring”, a step by step guide to help you build and cultivate relationships with mentors. He blogs at dougsmithlive.com, he is the host of the L3 Leadership podcast, and he is sought after public speaker. He is married to his high school sweetheart, Laura, who currently works as an Account Executive at Ivalua. Together, they love family, personal growth, travel, working out, and serving others.
CONNECT WITH DOUG:
6 Key Take-Aways From Episode 276.
LINKS MENTIONED IN EPISODE 276:
Intentional Parenting - Phil and Diane Comer
[inaudible]
Speaker 2:Hey, podcast, family, and welcome to another episode of the[inaudible] leadership podcast, where we are obsessed with helping you grow to your maximum potential and to maximize the impact of your leadership. My name is Doug Smith and I'm your host. And today's episode is brought to you by my friends at bear tongue advisors. If you're new to the podcast, welcome, I'm so glad that you're here and I hope that you enjoy our content and become a subscriber. And if you've been listening to the podcast for a while, thank you for listening. And I hope that you're a subscriber as well. And if you've enjoyed the podcast, it would mean the world. To me. If you would leave us a rating and review on Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts, that really does help us grow our audience and reach more leaders, which is our entire mission here at L three leadership. So thank you in advance for that. In today's episode, you're going to be hearing a personal lesson from me and I'm going to be teaching how Laura and I lead our family team of five right now. And I think this will be beneficial for your leader, but it may be even more beneficial to you if you're a parent. And so I hope this adds value to your life and that you'll take a lot away from it. But before we get into the lesson, just a few announcements. This episode of the L three leadership podcast is sponsored by bear tongue advisors, the financial advisors at bear tongue advisors, help educate and empower clients to make informed financial decisions. You can find out how bear tongue advisors can help you develop a customized financial plan for your financial future by visiting their website@beartongueadvisors.com. That's B E R a T U N G advisors.com, securities and investment products and services offered through Waddell and Reed, Inc member FINRA, and SIPC bear tongue advisors, Waddell and Reed, and L three leadership are separate entities. And I also want to thank our sponsor Henny jeweler, their jeweler owned by my friend and mentor John Henney, my wife, Laura, and I got our engagement and wedding rings through Henny jewelers. And we just loved them as an organization. Not only do they have great jewelry, but they also invest in people. In fact, for every couple of that comes in and it gets engaged and gets their engagement ring through Henny jewelers. They give them a book to help them prepare for marriage. And we just absolutely love that. So if you're in need of a good jeweler, check out Henny jewelers.com and with all that being said, let's dive right into the lesson. Here's how we lead our family team enjoy well, Hey leaders, today, I'd like to talk to you on the subject, how we're leading our family team. And we talk a lot on the podcast about leadership and specifically in the context of leading at work. But today I want to talk about leading at home. And I believe that if you have the opportunity to lead a family team, that it's probably the most important and the most critical leadership assignment that you'll ever have in your entire life. And so we have to get this right leaders, we have to learn to lead at home. And so let me just set up some context for you as we get into the lesson. Um, as far as our family team right now, we're a family team of five at the time of this recording and Laura and I have three kids. We have a, five-year-old named Olivia, a three-year-old named and a four month old named Caleb. And let me just tell you this about us. We are not perfect and I'm not doing this podcast cause I, I think I'm an expert on parenting or Laura is an expert on parenting. We're just simply sharing what we've learned and what we're learning, because I certainly appreciate when others share what they're learning with me. And so I hope that you'll just come with a learner's attitude. And let me just say this as well. Um, when you're listening to this, don't feel parent shame, right? Just, I always like to say this when you're listening to something, eat the hay and spit the sticks. What does that mean? Take what's good and apply it to your life and whatever you don't want to apply for your life or you don't like just spit it out and just move on. And so as I'm going through what we're doing to lead our family team, just ask yourself what would work for our family, what wouldn't work for our family. And I hope that you all apply some things, and I hope that you will ignore some things, but don't shame yourself. None of us are perfect parents, none of us and Laura are certainly no exception to that rule. Secondly, I would say this learned to learn from everyone. You know, I interviewed Jeremy prior a few months back for the podcast and we'll put a link for that in the show notes. Um, but he said something that I thought was so profound. He said, most of us have only had one example of what family should look like in our life. And I thought that was so profound. And he said, we need more models. And when I think about the way I grew up, I had my family model and that was the main motto I had from the time I was born to the time I was 17 years old. And then I met Laura's family and their family became another model where I learned how family operates. And then I met pastor Larry Betancourt and he showed me what a godly husband and a godly father looked like. And then I met other families at our church. And so all of a sudden I was getting exposed to all different types of families. And I learned from all of them, some of them, I learned things that I want to apply when I become a parent, some of them, I learned things I never want to do when I'm a parent. And so learn from everyone and try to find as many family models as you can. And hopefully they're good models. So get around other families, um, ask lots of questions. If you see a family that you look up to ask them questions, ask them out to lunch or coffee and just say, Hey, I really admire the way that you lead your family team. Do you mind if I take you out to coffee and ask you a few questions, you'll be shocked at how much you could learn. And then obviously research resource yourself with lots of books. I'm going to be recommending a few here in a minute, but read books, listen to podcasts, do everything you can to learn how to lead your family team. Well, before we dive into the lesson, let me just recommend three resources that have significantly impacted Laura and I, when it comes to our view on family and how we lead our family team. The first one is a book called intentional parenting by Phil and Diane Komer. We just read this recently. It was a game changer. We've been sending it to all of our friends. It's a must read. So make sure you get that intentional parenting by filling Diane Komer. The next one is family revision by Jeremy Pryor. And in fact, he has an entire ministry called family teams that I'd recommend. They've really helped shape our vision for family and our mission for family. So make sure that you get his book more importantly, make sure you connect with family teams. And I actually interviewed Jeremy for the podcast. You can go back and listen to that as well. And, uh, we'll make sure that we have a link for that in the show notes. And then the last book is one. We just recently read called tech wise family by Andy crouch. And it was really, really good, really challenging. Cause we obviously live in a world of screens and this really helps set some, some strong boundaries, uh, when leading your family team teams when it comes to screens. And so those are the three books that, uh, I'd recommend that are probably impacted us most. And so I hope that you'll go get those. So with that being said, let's dive right into the lesson. The first thing I want to talk to you about when it comes to leading your family team is vision. You have to have a vision for leading your family team. For us. We really shaped our vision from the book family revisioned by Jeremy Pryor and in the book, he basically argues that in Western society, family has become all about the individual. We raise individual kids, go do their own individual things and find their identity in the things that they do rather than them finding their identity and families. And he argues that if you read the Bible, you won't find that view of family anywhere in the Bible. A biblical view of family is a multi-generational family team on mission. I'll say that again, a multi-generational family team on mission. And that means that that family teams find and individuals in a family find their identities and their family first and everything that they do contributes to the family team. So when they go out and follow their calling, it's still all about the family team. And so for us, we develop this vision of we're a family team on mission and team Smith wants to have generations of family teams that live for God and make a difference for him, our family team. Isn't just about our kids. It's about our grandkids and our great, great grandkids and our great, great, great grandkids and kids that we will
Speaker 3:Never meet hundreds of years from now generations. We want to
Speaker 2:Generations that are living for God and making a difference for him. And in fact, in the book, intentional parenting, they said that a generation is actually marked by 300 years and they use the example that if you have four kids and each of those kids have four kids and so on and so forth all the way down 300 years, you would actually populate more people in the earth than the population of New York city over those 300 years. Now imagine the impact that you can make generationally if all of those children and great-grandchildren, and all of your descendants were living for God and making a difference for him. There was actually a study done in the 17 hundreds of two different men who started families and that were studied Jonathan Edwards and max juke. And I want you to listen to the outcome of this study of these two families. Let's let's hear what happened in the Duke family study. Juke was not a Christian and he lived an ungodly life. He married a woman of similar character. They studied 1026 of his descendants lives. 300 of them died. Prematurely. 67 died of syphilis. 190 had public were public prostitutes. 100 of them were alcoholics 280 living in abject poverty, 140 received government aid. 150 were criminals of which seven were murderers incarcerating, 150 of them cost the state more than$1.2 million and juke himself made no contribution to society. That's a generational impact of a family. Let's look at the Edwards family. Edwards was a godly man and married a woman of light character. They studied 729 of their descendants lives. 300 of them were ministers. 65 were college professors, 13 were university presidents, 60 authored books, three re congressmen. One was vice president of the United States and the family has not cost the government. A single dollar Edwards was used to spearhead. One of the most influential moves of God in American history, the great awakening to different families, to different legacies throughout their descendancy. What, what legacy do you want with your family team? I don't know about you, but we're aiming for what team Edwards did. We want to have a generation of people who were world changers and that's really our vision. And that's what shapes and drives everything that we do to lead our family team. And now that we've laid a foundation with vision, let's talk about some practical ways that Laura and I are leading our family team. Number one, we're doing our best to model the way that we want our children to live. We're doing the best we can daily to model how we want our children to live. Why here's what I know you don't reproduce who you want. You reproduce who you are. I'll say that again because that's huge. You don't reproduce who you want. You reproduce who you are. Your children are just going to be little yous and, and that's either a good thing or a bad thing. See, you could want all day for you, to you, your children, to be men and women of character. But if you're not a man or woman of character, you're not going to raise men or women of character unless they get influenced by someone else to be that because people do what people see again, you don't reproduce who you want. You reproduce who you are. You are a model 24 hours a day for your children, and you need to be aware of that. You need to take that seriously and model the way that you want them to live. And so a few ways to Laura and I do that, we model our love for each other. We have date nights. We should try to show affection to each other in front of the kids and show them that our most important relationship is our marriage, because we want to model loving each other. Well through that, we ask for forgiveness, whether it's Laura and I asking each other for forgiveness, or if we have to ask the kids for forgiveness, because we mess up, we ask for forgiveness, we have hard conversations. I'll talk a little bit about more of that. But again, in everything that we do, we try to be models for the way that we want our children to turn out. And that's absolutely huge. The next thing I want to talk to you about when it comes to leading your family team is really a decision that Laura and I have made and continue to make. And that's the decision that we should both work. Laura and I both have full-time jobs and we're both in leadership positions. And I'll talk a little bit more about how we do that in a second, but this, this question is going to come up in every family team, you know, should we both work? Should someone stay home full-time and the other person work? What should we do? And let me just speak into that issue for a minute. Uh, both, both decisions are good. Both decisions can work. God can use both decisions, whether you both work, full-time, someone stays home. Full-time et cetera. God can use both. So what's my encouragement to you and making that decision be led and do what's best for your family. Pray about it, process it with each other and really say what is best for our family. And listen, if you're listening to this and you're in a family team where both parents work, stop feeling guilty and be wise, make the most of the time where you're not at work with your family. And Hey, if you're a parent listening and you stay home, don't feel guilty, but be wise, do what is best for your family. Again, I just want to reiterate both can work. Both are good, and God can use, use both decisions in a godly way to honor your family team. So because Laura and I have made the decision to both work, how do we actually make that work? Well, one, I just want to reiterate that with every child that we have, we have three children right now. We may go more. But with every child that we have we talk about in between each children, does it make sense to continue to both work? Are we okay with this? And do we feel like this is what God is leading us to do? It's so important to continually evaluate that. And we evaluate that even when things are going well, because we just want to make sure that we're on the same page and the word alignment. We feel like we're being led by God now in a practical sense, what we've decided to do with our children and us for the first year that we have a child, we have, we hire a nanny for that child because we think that first year having the cuddle time and the affection time of an adult is extremely important. So we want that one-on-one time. And then after one year we put our children in daycare and for us in our experience in five years of doing this, uh, we really feel like daycare has been beneficial. It's an opportunity for our kids to learn structure. It's an opportunity to learn things that we wouldn't be able to teach them. It's an opportunity for them to learn how to connect with others. And there's so many more benefits to daycare. And so again, daycare has been beneficial for us and we would recommend it. And so if that's the way that your family team feels led to go, we would really encourage nanny for the first year and then daycare that's worked really well for us. And I hope it will help you too. And the next thing I'd like to share with you when it comes to how Laura and I lead our family teams is this. We try to be as consistent as possible. We try to be as consistent as possible. And this really came from my father-in-law. I asked him, how did you raise three awesome kids? And he just said, be consistent, be consistent. Which reminded me of one of my favorite quotes of all time from my high school football coach, Jim Rankin. And he said this, he said, day-to-day intensity week to week. Consistency builds champions. And it's going to be the same thing when it comes to leading your family team. Day-to-day intensity, week-to-week consistency builds awesome family teams. So what are some things that we're consistent in? One is routine pretty much all of our days look the same. We pretty much always wake up at the same time. We get dressed at the same time, we have quiet time. At the same time we have, we exercise the same time, have dinner at the same time. And so we want our kids to experience structure and consistency in our daily lives. I mentioned quiet times, this is more modeling, but Laura and I have quiet times every time, every day in the morning. And we model that for our kids. And so when they see that happening, they started having their own quiet times, which is amazing. We also work out consistently and now our kids are starting to work out with us. So again, just consistency pays off. Another thing we're consistent in, in is dinner. We have dinner together every single night and every single night we share what our wins are and what our celebrations are from the day. And I think dinnertime is absolutely huge and leaders. I really want to challenge you. You know, I, I met a great leader once who raised a great family. And I said, how did you raise such an awesome family? And he said, I didn't play golf. I didn't play golf. Now, as you're saying, the golf was bad. No, but he was saying, I don't, I didn't let a hobby interfere with my family time. And Lauren, I do not have many nights out. And if we do we're with our family team. And so that's really, really important for us to be consistently together on a daily basis. Another thing we've been consistent in is reading to them. We've read to them every day and every night, pretty much since they were babies. And, uh, this is crazy. It might be an anomaly, but Olivia taught herself how to read when she was four. And, uh, and we didn't teach her how to read. She just taught herself. It was crazy. But read your kid, read, read, read, limit, screen time. This is another thing we're consistent in. You know, at most we let them watch one or two episodes a day, maybe 30 minutes at a time, maybe one hour at most. But, um, we really try to avoid screen time and specifically at nighttime after dinner, when it's time for bed, that's our kid time. And so let's turn off all the screens. Uh, we also are consistent with baths. We, we base our kids every single night and again, we just want to be consistent with that. And then we prayed together consistently, uh, before meals. We pray each other with each other at night before school, et cetera. Again, more than anything, just be consistent. The next lesson I'd share with you when it comes to how we lead our family team is this. We plan weekly to stay organized. We plan weekly to stay organized. Now, if you were to ask Laura what her favorite part of the week is, and again, she's not here, so she can't defend herself, but I would tell her, I would tell you that her favorite time of the week is our weekly family team meeting. It's she looks forward to it. She loves it. And every Sunday we get together, it could be a Saturday and usually takes about an hour. Uh, but we go through several things. First, we have a family calendar that actually was produced by family teams, the ministry it's really, really awesome. And so that's a tool that we use that we'll link to in the show notes. Again, that's a family calendar and we go through that and then Laura and I both use Michael Hyatt's full focus planner to help plan our daily lives. And we couldn't live without those two tools. And so we bring both of those to the table. And then our agenda for our family team meeting is very, very simple. We go over our calendar and just look over the week and the month ahead and just create action, steps and plans. Based on that, we walked through all of our, to do's on house projects and other things we need to do for the kids, et cetera. We run through our finances. We do a quick check-in on how we're doing in marriage, how we're doing with our kids, how we're doing with our mental health, how we're doing with our physical health and how we're doing with our spiritual health. And then we always just ask each other, is there anything broken or is there any next step that we can take that would make our family team better? And we just try to make little improvements weekend and week out to make our family team better. And that weekly team meeting has made all the difference. And so if you don't have a weekly team meeting with your spouse, and again, I think when our kids are older, we'll include them, but they're a little young now, um, please put this on the calendar. It can be a game changer for you. The next thing I've shared with you also has to do with time management and the lesson is this. We try to free up as much time as possible to be with our family team. We try to free up as much time as possible to be with our family team. What does that look like in our lives? Well, we finish work at a decent hour, so we have time with our kids and each other, every single night, we try to keep our weekends free of things that would take away from family time. We hired a cleaning company to clean our house. Again, that saves two or three hours a week. We, uh, we get our groceries delivered. That's also been a game changer and outside of L three leadership, we really don't have a lot of hobbies. And, and those are a little small things that really have made a significant difference in us being able to spend time together. And so really look over your life and what takes up time and see if there's things that you can cut or hacks that you can make to make that time easier. Like getting your groceries delivered. I'm telling you it's worth it for the family time. You'll never get that time back two more lessons ago. The next thing Lauren I do to lead our family teams, as we do our best to help our kids grow, we do our best to help our kids grow. Here's just a few ways that we help our kids grow first is teaching them conflict resolution skills. This is absolutely huge. And let me just say this, this isn't for the kids. This is also for me and mommy. This is also for me and Laura. We need to constantly model conflict resolution and peacemaking in our house. And so when our kids have conflict, whether with us or with each other, we sit them down and we simply ask them to express several things. Number one, what did you want? Or what do you want and get them to talking about that. And then how were you impacted? How did that make you feel? And we have them express their feelings, and then if they offended one another, we have them ask for forgiveness and then the other one will provide forgiveness. And then they give hugs and kisses. And it's amazing to see a three-year-old and a five-year-old start to have better conflict resolution skills than I had when I was 25. It's incredible, such a gift. I wish I would've had that growing up. The second thing we do to help our kids grow is we have a character chart and we got this idea from the book, intentional parenting and largest made a poster board with the fruit of the spirit on it. And those are just characteristics of godly character that are in the Bible. And, and whenever one of our children display this, uh, we give them a star and they get to put a star on the chair, the character chart. And when they get 10 stars, they go lollipop and we've made this a lot of fun on the character chart. Uh, when we award stars, we actually turn on the song, the Olympic fanfare, which is the Olympic theme music. And, uh, and then we announced the star and why they're getting it. And it's just a lot of fun, but the character chart's been great. We also have a chore chart. This is from Dave Ramsey and, uh, it's, it's been great. It just has a list of chores. And if they get, if they do each chore, they get paid X amount of money. Usually it's, you know, a quarter. And then every week there's a pay week and they get paid and they can save their money and ultimately buy toys. But that's how we're working through chores. We also get the kids connected to church, and obviously that's been challenging with COVID. And so they were watching church online for about a year, and we're just starting to get back into church. But church was going to be a big part of helping our kids grow. We also watch and pay attention to who their friends are and how they behave. And if we see some of their friends misbehaving, we'll actually talk to them about that. And that's led to some really good growth opportunities. We also once in a while, do something fun called the lessons of the day, and this is just where we've been teaching them manners. And so I'll just literally say a 10 John and they come running over and they stand at attention. And then I decide it's time for the lesson of the day. And, you know, a basic example of a lesson of the day would be, Hey, when you meet someone new, here's how you introduce yourself. And here's how you ask questions, you know, ask them what their name is, ask them how old they are. And we just try to teach them lessons of the day on a consistent basis to help them grow. And another way we help where kids grow is through correction. And for us, correction looks like a bunch of small tweaks consistently day in and day out. And so we have conversations with our kids daily. When we see behavior that we don't like, we just sit down with them and we have a conversation and we just say, Hey, in life, you can make good decisions. And when you make good decisions, there's good consequences, or you can make bad decisions. And when you make bad decisions, there's bad consequences. And so we just have a conversation about that over and over and over again. And when they make good decisions, you know, like the character chart they get awarded for when they make bad decisions, there's bad consequences like this conversation and other forms of correction. And so we just have that conversation with them and it goes really, really well. And it's actually really awesome to hear a three and a five-year-old talk about good consequences and bad consequences. And they get that, uh, that concept at such a young age. And that's really going to set them up for success in the long run to be teachable. So very grateful for that. But correction is definitely one way that you can help your kids grow and develop. And then we're just exposing them to a lot of experiences and then paying attention. And what we're looking for is how did God wire them and how did God get them? And again, this is something that they'll continue to discover years and years and years from now, but it is awesome to see, you know, let them try and do they like soccer and do they like sports? Do they like dance? W how does, how did God wire them? And the sooner we can see the way that God wired them, the more that we can help shape and develop them. And so I just wanna encourage you. Those are just some things that Laura and I are doing to grow our kids. I encourage you to come up with a growth system. The biggest thing here isn't necessarily to copy what we're doing. It's just to be intentional in developing your children, be intentional with their growth. And now the last thing we're doing to lead our family team, we're trying to have as much fun as possible. We're trying to have as much fun as possible. We are team Smith and we do have an absolute blast together. A few things we do to have fun. One, we have a weekly Sabbath. This is a day where we just completely unplug and just spend time with each other. And we'll actually, we do this on weekends, but on the Sabbath, we'll actually get together. We'll huddle around a piece of paper and just say, what do we want to do today? And then we just make a list of as many fun things as we could possibly think of. And then we check those things off the list. And it's a ton of fun, obviously, to have fun. We plan lots of fun activities with our friends. There's a great YouTube channel. We'd recommend called art hub for kids. And it teaches kids how to draw. And it teaches adults how to draw too. Laura always jokes that she thinks I like it more than the kids do, which may be true. It is awesome. And, uh, and then we just plan out our year. You know, I'd really encourage you in those family team meetings, sit down and say, dream big. What do you want to do this year? Where do you want to go? Uh, we want to go to Disney world. We want to go to Kennywood. We want to go to a pirate game, you know, list out things and be intentional when it comes to having fun. And, uh, the only thing else I'll share when it comes to having fun, you know, we're talking about leading your family team every night. When we pray, we pray a prayer. And then afterwards, we all stick our hands in on top of each other. And Sophia usually leads us off and we all go team Smith. And, uh, it's just so much fun. And again, we're consistently communicating this vision that we're a family team together, and the kids have really bought into that. And it's been so much fun. And so I really hope that this podcast added value to your life. Hey, I mentioned in the beginning, I want to learn from you. What are some things that you're doing to lead your family team, make us better? Did you hear a process that I can make better? Let me know. Am I missing something? Let me know. I want to grow. I want to be a better leader of my family team. Hey Lauren, I love you so much. We're praying for you. We're praying for your family team go lead. Well. Well, Hey leader, thank you so much for listening to my lesson on how we lead our family team. I hope that it added value to your life, and you can find links to everything that I discussed in the show notes@lthreeleadership.org four slash two seven six leader. I really want to challenge you. If you want to TEDx extra growth this year, then I really want to encourage you to launch or join an L three leadership mastermind group. Mastermind groups have been the greatest source of growth in my life over the last six years. And I cannot imagine my life without them. If you're unfamiliar with mastermind groups, they are simply groups of six to 12 leaders that meet together for at least one year consistently in order to help each other grow, achieve their goals to do life together. So if you're interested in learning more about launching or joining an L three mastermind, go to L three leadership.org forward slash masterminds. And as always, I like to end with a quote and I'll quote, Jeremy Pryor, who wrote the book family revision. And he just said this. So simply he said, design each part of your life to be lived with family. And I love that leader. I hope that you'll go lead your family team. Well, and I hope this podcast episode encouraged you, Lauren. I love you so much, and we will talk to you next episode.
Speaker 4:[inaudible].