I hate meetings, and unless you’re a glutton for punishment you do too. Yet it seems like much of my professional life tends to drift towards…you guessed it, meetings! The problem with meetings is most meetings don’t work, and here’s why:
Success never just happens. It may show up in a moment but it takes a series of moments to cultivate. It’s like the marriage that falls apart. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard someone say, “My marriage fell apart last night.” My response? No it didn’t. It may have shown up last night but you’ve been working at wrecking that marriage for a long time. In light of that principle, this is a time of year that I try to do some reflection and evaluation on what I’m cultivating in my life, how it’s affecting people around me, and where what I’m cultivating is leading me. Some of this stuff comes natural to me, some of it has been formed into me through painful experiences, and some has come through coaches speaking into my life. It’s not exhaustive or infallible, and I hope that it improves over time, but it’s a process that works for me. Here is a list of categories that I use to evaluate…
In his book Revolutionary Parenting, George Barna writes the following:
“Millions of parents have accepted the idea that they have to make a choice. They must either give up careers and self-fulfillment and spend a lot of time with their children, or spend limited but deeply enriching time with them while maintaining the same level of vocational involvement. Over the past 15 years, various studies have shown that this switch has diminished the impact of parents. And the lie about the choice involved has hurt both parents and children, leaving a large proportion of young adults feeling as if they were not adequately parented and a shockingly high number feeling that they lacked a father figure in their lives. In fact, when we asked young adults what they felt were the most significant mistakes that America’s parents have made, the second highest ranked mistake was not spending enough time with their children.”
“The typical American family registers less than 15 minutes of direct parent-child conversation each day.”
In today’s fast paced world most parents are stuck doing their best imitation of a taxi cab driver. They’re escorting their children from one event to the next, pounding down some fast food, chatting it up on their cell phone, and dropping french fries under the seats that will be petrified by the time the minivan gets cleaned 2 months later. There is the revolving door at home where things seem more like Grand Central Station than a home at times. And oh yea, all while mom and dad are trying to advance in their career and let’s not forget trying to carve out a little time for some romance. Things just don’t seem so romantic now after rattling off a list like that. At that breakneck pace, how relationally deep can anyone go with their kids? While we don’t always do this right by any stretch of the imagination, the following are some examples of what has worked well in the Alexander house.
I help churches make vision real. I am a pastor, speaker, strategist, and ministry consultant at The Unstuck Group.
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