00:00 Chris
Welcome to the lion within us, a podcast, serving Christian men who are hungry to be the leaders. They are predestined to be. I’m your host, Chris Granger. The let’s jump in. All right guys, today, we’re going to be talking about this week. It’s just the area itself and building a family culture. That’s grounded in Christ.

Okay. So I brought in with me, Mr. David Freeman, who’s the CEO of culture wise. How are you doing today?

00:25 David Friedman
I am doing fantastic, Chris,

00:26 Chris
great to deal with you’re. Absolutely, absolutely. So far for the listeners out there, I saw David. I was at a, a, it’s called a Vistage meeting for leadership. He did a speech around culture.

It grabbed me and we were able to talk during the lunchtime. And I thought, you know what? We’re talking about culture from a business stand. But there’s a family culture that we all have. And so I asked David to come on and share his ideas and because I think some of his principles could really apply and help us in our lives as we grow.

And the scripture guys, you know, that we’re, we’re talking about this week is first. Four through five. And I’m just going to run through that here real quick for you. He must be one who manages his own household. Well, keeping his children under control with all dignity, but if a man does not know how to manage his own household, how will he take care of the church of God?

So keep that scripture in your, in your minds and your heart guys, as we walk through this conversation. So David, maybe get a start. And when we talk about culture and family culture, how can we recognize what that actually is? Right.

01:28 David Friedman
Yeah. So, so here’s probably the easiest way that I can frame this for you and for your audience, Chris.

And I think about it. I I’m going to make a really gross oversimplification, but I think it’s useful. Um, and when I think about how most people, parents, I think that there, that we can break parenting into three large groups. Um, in terms of parenting styles, let me call it that. I think that there is one group of parents whose parenting license should be revoked, like who let them be parents cause that like there’s something going on here that they shouldn’t have been able to be I’ve kids.

Cause this is like a, a travesty what’s going on here. Those are there’s some percentages. Then there’s this group in the middle and I would count myself in how I parent it. So just to give your audience some background, uh, I’m 60 years old, I have two, two grown adult children. One’s a son, who’s 31, a daughter is 29.

So my kids are I’m an empty-nester now, but so I can look back at what did we do as my kids were growing. I’m not in the stage where my kids are young. Um, so I think there’s this middle group of parents. That many people, most people fall into. And I certainly did. And probably many of your listeners do.

And I would characterize this as we try to set a good example for our children. We know that our children are watching us all the time, consciously and unconsciously. And so we try to set a really good example for them. And we also, beyond that, we try to use life circumstances to teach lessons about life.

So for example, My son doesn’t make the, you know, the all-star team in the little league and we use it as a chance to talk about. So what does that mean for life? You’re not always going to be selected. And how do you deal with that? Or, you know, the, the, your daughter has a problem with a friend at school and okay.

That’s a life lesson. And so we take the situations that occur and we try to, to broaden them into something about life that we can be. For Christian men, perhaps much of that may be biblical lessons and how that ties to biblical principles. So I think that’s the second group, but I think there’s a third group that, that is an opportunity for us that, that not many take advantage of.

And the third group is what if we had a set of principles for how we wanted our family to be and how we wanted to raise our children. And we had a structured systematic way to practice those principles over and over and over again, so that they were internalized in our children. That’s a whole different level of play as a parent.

That I wish I knew about when I was younger. I mean, my kids are doing great and they’re fine, but had I known what I know now and what I’ve thought to so many others in the business setting and it’s applicable in the family settings. We’ll talk about, had I known that back then? When my children were little, I would have done some things differently to be much clearer.

These are the specific set of principles for how we, we are as a family, how we relate to each other and what I want my children to learn and what I want to practice as a family. And I’d have a very systematic way, which we’ll talk about for how I would teach those things. Yeah. That’s a different level of play than what I did

04:47 Chris
and what most people do.

I mean, into the work that jumps out to me is this intentionality. I mean, you have to be real, intentional, real. Focused on that. Whereas that second group being a good example, you know, leading by life circumstances, that’s a little bit more reactionary, you know, you’re, you’re, you’re in the moment type deal versus, you know, that intentional.

I

05:08 David Friedman
think that, I think that’s a good distinction to draw precedent. I think you’re right on that. It’s the difference between being really intentional and just reactionary your life happens and you try to use those moments. And I, and I, and to add to what you’re saying, I’ve often said that when I look at what separates, and I think you and I may have talked about this before, but what separates the really successful at anything, whether it be an athlete or whether it be a musician or whether it’s just a person in life or a company.

When I look at what separates the really extraordinary from the pretty good, the really extraordinary oriented. But, you know, that they, the great athletes, you know, look at Tom Brady and, you know, there is a, a S you know, just retired, but he’s a, a sixth round draft pick 190 ninth person in the draft chosen.

And how did he get to where he got to it? Wasn’t just physical gifts. It was the level of intentionality about every aspect of what he did. You know, the best athletes are looking at how they’re eating, how they’re sleeping, how they’re working out, how they study film. Every part of it is incredibly intensive.

Where other athletes are just really good and they work hard and it’s not that they’re lazy. They work hard and they try the best they can and they do well. But the difference between that and being really extraordinary is that level of intentionality. And I think that’s true in all walks of life, whether it’s parenting or whether it’s athletics or music or anything else.

Right.

06:32 Chris
Right. So, I mean, let’s, let’s, let’s give our listeners some advice here on getting, getting started. So if we want to be intentional, we want to work towards that third level, you know, where we’re, we’re teaching our principles and we’re, we’re living in those principles. And be intentional about that.

So what are some ways to get started? How do we start moving this?

06:50 David Friedman
Yeah. So, so let me talk a little bit very briefly about how this framework works in a company setting, and then we’ll apply it to, so how do we take the same ideas and apply them in a family setting? So very briefly. What I teach people in leadership is that the culture in any company or family or sports team or any other group of people has this enormous influence over how everybody does, but the same kids in a different family, they’re going to perform differently.

Put the same students in a different classroom. They’re going to perform differently, et cetera. So that environment that we create. Has this enormous influence. And so therefore we as company leaders, as coaches, as parents, we should be intentional about creating the right environment. How do we do that?

Well, in company settings, I organize the steps that it takes to do that around a framework that I call the eight step framework. But essentially if we cut to the chase, there are two steps that really are the biggest drivers. The first is how we define, what do we want the culture of this group of people to be, and define those in clear, specific behavioral terms.

And I’ll come back to the. And then secondly, how do we create, I call them rituals, but routines around taking them one at a time and practicing them over and over and over again, because the only way we’re going to get to get good at anything of course is to practice. Right? So in a company setting, what that looks like is defining a set of behaviors, actions that people do that when people do this, this is what success looks like.

Examples of behaviors and companies are things like honor commitments, practice, blameless, problem solving, get clear on expectations. These are actions that people do. So we create these actions. And then we, we get companies taking one at a time, one each week and throughout the week, focusing on them through a series of practices that we call rituals.

So simple idea is you define a set of behaviors and then you take one every week and you practice it in a variety of. So let’s take that concept to a family setting. Cause the same is true again, in a family and a classroom and in a team or anything else. So in a family setting, the way we, if I were starting this over, my children were young.

What would I do? Here’s what I do. My wife. And I would sit down and we would develop a set of family behaviors. I, my name for them, I call them fundamentals. You know, these are the things that we want to. And what we would do is we would define them really clearly. And let’s just say for argument’s sake that there might be 10 of them.

And even while we’re talking, I’ll pull out a sample list of I’ve worked with some CEOs to help them with their families and come up, button them up, pull out a sample. I’ll give you some ideas of what might that sound like fun. But what I would do is I’d create the set of fundamentals for my family. And let’s just say for argument’s sake, there were 10 of them.

What we would do is we would take one every. Then we would focus on throughout the week and the way we’d start focusing on it is we might do something like this. We might take our Sunday night dinner conversation and over dinner, we would talk about, we would each talk about this week’s family fundamental and how we’re going to apply it in our upcoming activities throughout the week.

Now the conversation of course, with change over time to stay very age appropriate at one age. How is my son talking about this on his little league team and my daughter and her brownie troop. And what am I going to do this week in my activities, my wife and hers. But if we were to talk about it like that throughout the week and what we’re going to do and how we’re going to apply.

And we do that week after week after week after week. And we just keep cycling through them this week. We’re on number one and next week or two in the next week, number three, and we keep cycling through them sooner or later, these behaviors are just going to become our language. It’s going to be the way we think it’s going to become internalized by our children.

And I always joke about this, but not withstanding a few years in the middle when they’re teenagers and they roll their eyes and think dad, do we have to do this stupid stuff? We’d still keep doing it anyway. Right. And eventually. I guarantee not only when they go off to college, perhaps if they do, they would, these would be internalized in them.

Isn’t that what we want for our children, but I’d be willing to bet that they do the same thing for their children someday. Um, because it would just become internalized for them.

11:14 Chris
Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, it’s such a great practical principle right there and, and an action that we can take rather.

Did he see that it’s so easy to do, right? You know what what’s, maybe some of those lists that list looks like for stuff CEO’s you worked through? Cause when I looked at your fundamentals, you know, David has a couple of books, guys go out there to the, to the show notes, check that out. They will be featured as the book of the week.

This week are the books of the week, this week, rather because a couple of things jumped out to me, like keep things fun, uh, communicate to be understood. Uh, take responsibilities. Those are. Even out of the family, we can let them have, but curious what you, what you came up with. So

11:52 David Friedman
I’m pulling them out as we’re speaking.

So I’ll actually read them to you and I’ll send these to you so you can put them in show. Absolutely. So I created this with a family. Uh, I know they don’t mind me sharing this. It was a family named Evans, but nobody knows where they are. Um, and they gave me permission to put it in my book. So I’m sure they’re fine sharing this.

And what I had done in this particular case is I sat with the, the, the, the husband and wife, and I just listened to them talk about what was important to them. And I just extracted out of that, uh, set of family fundamentals values. So here, there were 13 of them. Okay. So that works nicely. You go through them every quarter.

So once a week for 13 weeks and just cycle through them. So here’s the 13 of them. The first one is. Uh, it says, fill each other’s buckets regularly. And it’s all about how we support each other in the family. Number two says, take responsibility. You can do and be anything. What you make of your life is up to you.

Um, that was number two. Number three says your attitude is always a choice choose wisely so we can spend a lot of time talking about our attitude. Number four says, be yourself not someone else’s expectation of you. A lot of life lessons, number five says go the extra mile, make it your best. We can always talk about how we’re looking at what we’re doing this week and trying to do it the best way we can.

Number six says get uncomfortable. That’s how we learn. So it’s a chance to really push ourselves into yeah. Go for something that you’re not comfortable with. Number seven says, learn from your experiences. There’s no such thing as bad. And, you know, we all have experiences good and bad. And we learned from all of them.

Number eight says kindness is contagious. Go out of your way to help others make it talk all day long about how we’re doing that. Number nine says honor, your commitments. Do what you say. You’re going to do a lot of life lessons there. Number 10 says be flexible things. Don’t always go as planned. Roll with it.

That’s right. Number 11 says beep thanks. There are always those with more and those with less appreciate what we have. Number 12 says be a good listener, learning to understand others starts with listening and number 13, the last one says laugh every day. Don’t take yourself too seriously.

14:19 Chris
What a wonderful list.

I think it’s a good list. I mean, just the way that I could totally see that being implemented in a family. We’re going to take a quick break and then come right back and we’ll unpack this a little bit more. Cool.

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all right. So we’re, we’re back here with David. He just went through a wonderful list and I’ll tell you what, when I thought through that list, they’ve had several jumped out. I like that. Get on. You know, I even wrote now contentment cause you were talking about and you know, just, just being, you know, understanding where we’re at and then that listener, you know, being able to listen.

So I think there’s so many for me, biblical Taz back through that list that you walk all through and for our listeners out there, maybe you want to take your, take your Bible as you lead your family. And. Prey, listen, and see where guys leading you to make your own family fundamentalist. But I think that was a wonderful framework.

I’m just curious. What was that? How long did it take them to sit down and do that was that of course of a, of a night or a few weeks or

16:28 David Friedman
the way, the way we did that is I had dinner with the couple and, um, I just, I asked them about, so tell me about what, what are some things that are important to you? And I just let them talk and I just made my own notes.

And then like in the next day or two, I wrote those. Um, so I wrote those for them after listening to them, I just, I was, my job was to extract out of their conversation. They couldn’t articulate. This would go, we tucked in a, in another podcast about gifts and talents. And one of my gifts is to extract the main ideas out of things.

So I just listened and distilled what I heard to these 13 principles. So I wrote them over a weekend.

17:11 Chris
So then for them, you said Sunday night dinner, they talked about those a lot. I mean, so would they, cause I can envision so many different ways you could do this as a, as a, as a, as a leader of your family.

I mean, you could have them laminated on refrigerators and you know, maybe you can have little wristbands made. There could be all sorts of ways you could go with this and any, any tips there on Kool-Aid the roll it out to a family.

17:34 David Friedman
Yeah. I mean, I’ll send you, um, we actually have a graphic. If I remember right.

I think they created the graphic for it. So I wrote them all. And so when I send this to you, I’ll share with you, you can put it in the show notes, the graphic that this was put under. So it’s just a nice looking thing that you could easily make posters or other things out of. So, yeah, I mean, I think there’s endless ideas from refrigerator magnets to posters, to wrist bands to, so I do for my work in our, our, what we call fundamentals, which are our behaviors that we practice in our.

I actually have a little wristband that I wear actually see it, if we’re doing video. Um, and I have one made for each one of mine, we have 30 fundamentals in our company and we practice one each week. So I had a company make wristbands for them and I changed mine every week. So every Sunday night I switched to the next week.

And so my wristband has always my behavior. I think a great thing to do with these for family. So imagine if everybody in the family wore on. This week’s family fundamental. So all throughout the week, you’re seeing it and it would cause others to ask about it. Oh, what’s on your wrist. Oh, tell me more about that.

And it just gives you a chance to talk about a little bit. Yeah. That’d be a cool thing to do on a

18:52 Chris
family and brings a level of ownership as you talking about the behaviors, you know? Cause when you’re talking with kids, you know, sometimes it can, it’d be a struggle just to convey and get things. You know, you can’t say it once a week.

I mean, but I guess that’s not in business either. You have to really repeat it over and over and over and repetition

19:09 David Friedman
is everything. That’s right. Yeah. And something I would, I would emphasize for your listeners here is that repetition is really, really important. And not to let children, I have a strong belief that parents are supposed to be parents and children are supposed to be children.

That doesn’t mean we don’t listen to our children. They don’t know as much as we do. We’re supposed to be adults here. We’ve learned a few things in our lives. And so if my children were to say, dad, we’re tired of doing this. Do we have to, we’ve done it enough. I’m not going to stop. I know that repetition matters.

That’s the only way you get great at things. Just through lots of repetitions, the fact that they’re bored with it, or don’t feel like doing it tough. That’s what we do here. And it’s a great chance to demonstrate for our children, what consistency looks like that. Yes, there are times that’s another life lesson.

There are times when I don’t feel like doing things when I’m bored, when I’m not interested, but the way we get successful is consistency. Right. We do it over and over and over again. So even, even beneath the, the, the lessons themselves, there’s an underlying message of consistent. That just the demonstration that we do this every single week.

And even when we don’t feel like doing it, we do it anyway, that we’re consistent that this is what we do all the time. That underlying message has so much unseen value to children, for them to learn that and to grow up, seeing and experiencing that is so valuable. So I say that. Yeah. Yeah. There’ll be times you don’t feel like doing it.

Tough luck do it anyway, because this is what we did. And I hear that even, you know, uh, I’ll make a comment about that as it relates to the business, but we’ll try it back. The family, um, I sometimes in business, we’ll have a company, they practice what I call fundamentals, these routines, where they’re focusing on one of these behaviors each week.

And they’ll ask me about, so, okay, we’ve been doing this for a couple of years. How do we like mix it up some, how do we. And I, and I say to them that I can give you some ideas that, you know, if we can come up with some ideas that enter, you know, that, that inject a bolt of extra enthusiasm once in a while and refresh it.

That’s great. But I say to them, I don’t want you to think this doesn’t work. If you don’t, there’s value to repetition. And I sometimes use, as an example, you go get on an airplane and the pilots say certain things in the cockpit and they, and it’s how it gets. And they don’t say, you know, we’re kinda tired of doing it.

Why don’t we do it a different way today? Or I don’t feel like doing it this, right? No, this is how you do it. Right? The doctors and nurses get into the emergency room to the operating room and they go through a series of things they say, and this is how it’s done. And they don’t say, oh, I’m tired of doing it that way.

No, this is how it works. Obviously, you know, you know, better than that. You go to a church service, there are certain things, there’s a liturgy about how things happen. There are rituals that happen in a church service and it happens this way and there’s value to that repetition, right? It doesn’t mean it’s not nice once in a while to change some things up, but I never want people to think that unless we can mix it up all the time, it doesn’t work.

Right. There’s tremendous value to consistency and repetition.

22:27 Chris
No doubt. Yeah. And I’ll speak one thing to the, to the dads that are listening, know your dad’s or your, your kids they’re watching. So. There’s a saying there’s more, there’s more caught than taught. You know, where you can, you can try to teach and just, you know, and speak one thing, but your kids are gonna ultimately gravitate to how you actually behave.

You can put it back to your point of the behaviors. So, you know, if we’re going to make it a family fundamental and we’re going to make this a behavior, we want our kids, we have to be on guard all the time and making sure that we’re ready to act and that we’re actually living out what we say, as important as the leaders of our family.

23:06 David Friedman
Absolutely one thing I would add to what you’re saying there, Chris, I agree with everything you’ve said, that’s something I would add to that is that sometimes people could hear that and think, well, I’m not going to be perfect. I mean, I’m going to mess up. So, and that’s actually fine. Not only that I was going to happen anyway, it’s fine.

And this is true in both leadership and in family. That sometimes when we fall short, it’s the best opportunities to demonstrate leadership. You know, the ability to say, you know what? Um, I say that we should honor our commitments. That was one of our family fundamentals. And I messed up. I told you I was going to do this thing by Thursday and I didn’t, and that’s not the way we want to be.

And I’m working on that and I need your support as we all coach each other and help each other to try to be this way more connected. The fact that we fall short and own up to it and work on it and ask for forgiveness and support is a wonderful example of leadership. Now, clearly, if we keep falling short every single time, at some point we’re setting a lousy example, we’re not gonna have any credibility.

Right. So if I constantly talk about honoring commitments and I almost never do, I have no credibility, but it’s even better when we fall. And own up to it and ask for forgiveness and support. Then when we think we have to be perfect, that’s right.

24:25 Chris
And it gives a, you know, the word that comes to mind when you were walking through that, David was just grace, you know, and we have to have grace in our families and we understand that, you know, we’re never going to get it right.

We’re all flawed. You know, we, we, we’re all sinners. We all have things that we’re trying to fight. You know, Satan is trying to tear families apart that we can get centered on the fundamentals and we can make those fundamental centered on. There’s so much strength in that and building those rituals around.

I mean, I just think if the rituals in our family, you know, from prayer time to Bible study, to devotion, uh, to things we do at church on, on Wednesdays and the areas that we serve, you know, and, and there are many ways, those rituals that, like you mentioned at churches, you just, you feel like you’re checking the boxes sometimes, but at the same time, it’s important to check those boxes and it’s important to let those kids.

Yeah, we call it big church like us for our church. When I think they get to third grade, they can sit in and the big in the regular church service. And that’s a big deal for, for, for kids as they get to that age. So they will get to sit in, in the big church service for the first part of, of church during worship.

And then after that, they go down for the children’s center. It’s teaching them the rituals and showing them how that works. And then as a dad, if we’re sitting there and we can actually intentionally show them, okay, we’re doing this, this part of the service for this reason, we’re doing this part. And then maybe you take it and you show him, okay, we’re doing the, uh, the lower supper.

And here’s what that represents. And then you’re not ready for that because you know, you haven’t accepted. Maybe, maybe they’re they’re they’re, you know, they hadn’t got to that point where they have accepted. But it’s a good chance to show him what the rituals mean. I think he just applied that at home.

26:05 David Friedman
Exactly. Yep. And again, I can’t emphasize strongly enough the importance of that consistency that even when we don’t feel like doing it, even when our children say, do we have to still keep doing this? We get it or whatever. No, that’s what consistency is. That’s how you get success. As you do the same thing over and over that.

There’s a, there’s a saying that I use sometimes in company settings. And I say that when I look at, at what makes people and companies really successful, I sometimes frame it this way. Say they don’t do anything. That’s so amazing or unusual. They do what I call ordinary things with extraordinary consistency.

They do these basic things over and over and over again. And that’s how you get successful. I can’t emphasize strongly enough. What, how important consistency is?

27:00 Chris
Absolutely. Absolutely. So let’s take a quick break and I want to dive into one more area with you, Dave, around family culture and we get back.

Sure.

27:07 David Friedman
Sounds great.

27:11 Chris
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Our guys we’re back. David has been unpacking some wonderful things that we can consider when we talk about our family culture. And I don’t want to lead this conversation, David, without talking. Maybe how we can apply this to strengthen our marriages. Cause you know, kids grow up, they leave the house, he ended up with the emptiness you’re there now.

So, you know, I really try to, as I coach man and try to get them thinking, Hey, it’s great. When we need to be the spiritual leaders and lead our kids as, as diverse as tech talks about this week. But it’s also, I think we need to put some intentionality. You know, the fundamentals around our marriage and that’s the most important partnership we have, you know, here on earth is, is, is our, is our spouse.

So any ideas on how we can actually start working that into our marriages as well?

29:03 David Friedman
Yeah. I mean, I, I go back to, and as I, as I listened to you say that, and I agree a hundred percent. I think boy, I could do a lot better than I’ve done in that regard, honestly. Um, so I can’t, so I’m going to say, I’m going to speak from.

The perspective of what I think we can and should do not what I have been doing and I can improve. Um, so, uh, Yeah. I, I think that the exact same principles certainly hold true. I don’t, I don’t know that I would come up with a different set of principles because I don’t think you want to have, well, we got this for kids.

We got this for us. I think there’s a set of principles that this is how we operate. So if I think about the ones we talked about, fill each other’s bucket regularly. Well, I can be doing that. That could do a better job of filling my wife’s bucket regularly. Take responsibility for things, making sure I’m paying attention to my head.

Being myself and not somebody else’s expectat. I mean, all the things that I just gave as examples would be equally applicable in almost all areas of our lives. We’re just applying them in, how am I in, how has our relationship together and how are we, how are we building our marriage around those? So we would just give different examples.

So I think. I w I would not recommend that people have a different set for their marriage that, that we rather practice the same things just with each other in more adult mature ways. I also think that the rituals we do may there may be additional rituals. So there are certain things, you know, I mentioned, all right, let’s say Sunday night, we have our dinner time conversation, the family fundamental the week.

Well, there may be additional things about. You and your wife do before bed, what you say to each other or how you get up in the morning or how you greet each other at the end of the day, or I’ve heard people talk about, um, I’ve heard good examples again, I feel guilty. I haven’t done these very well myself, but I hear people use good examples of, um, I was, I, Chris, quit, Chris Quinn was talking about.

I have certain things that they do at dinner and something that they’re grateful for each side about something they’re grateful for and something else that they appreciate, or there’s some routine about that, that they talk about every single night, a day. Yeah. I think those are really healthy things.

You hear people talk about, you know, having a regular date night, if that happens to work for you and making a ritual around that. So there are, I think there’s plenty of opportunities within a marriage to create rituals around what we do with each other. And, and there’s so many opportunities to be,

31:37 Chris
but I mean, great point though, on don’t rewrite the fundamentals, you know, as you write them, you know, they need to be in mind as well to strengthen your marriage.

Maybe it’s just different contexts. And as you’re talking about it,

31:50 David Friedman
w you know, in, in company settings, when we talk about this in a business, I often say we’re when we’re writing what I call fundamental. We don’t write a different set for the sales department than the guys in the plant than the service department or finance.

It’s the same principle, but it’s just taught to people in a way that’s relevant for their context. So when we talk about one of my fundamentals is called, be a fanatic about response time. We’re just crazy about how fast we get back. And so I want everybody in my company. If you’re in sales, I might teach it to you in a way that relates to sales.

If you’re in operations, I might teach it to you in a different way or in finance, but the principle is still the same. Everybody’s a fanatic about response, right? So the same thing be true here. These principles are the way we want to be to your point. You’d give it context of different context. If I’m talking about the brownie troop or the little league team, then our relationship with each other as husband and wife.

But it’s still the same principle. If we’re going to honor our commitments, we should all be honoring our commitments and we can talk about the commitments we make to each other or in our lives that may be different than ones that our children are involved in. But it’s still the same principle,

33:00 Chris
absolutely same principles.

So, I mean, I think guys, you know, you take away. Start acting you really just sit down and have these conversations. I think David’s framework the things he’s talking about here. You know, defining what that culture needs to be coming up with those fundamental behaviors that you want as a family, you know, and then start making them into a ritual, you know, whatever that looks like for you.

I think we gave you some great tips on ways to get started, but you got them, you got to own it. You got to lean into this and I will point people back to David. Your book’s particularly fundamentally different because there are so many things. Chapters there on the diff those 30 fundamentals that I think really you can modify in some ways to, uh, to, to fit the family structure

33:43 David Friedman
very easily.

33:45 Chris
Very good. Very good. David, this has been wonderful. Anything else that you’d offer up to our listeners here?

33:51 David Friedman
I think just, you know, if I were to synthesize what we’ve said, The culture, the environment you create in your family has an enormous influence over how your children live, what they grow up with, how they look at the world, it shapes your shaping, how your children look at the world and it will influence how they raise their families as well.

And so we can either leave that to accident and hope that as they observe us, and we try to set the example, we hope that they’ll figure out the right thing. But honestly, they’re also going to be influenced even more by their peers. And so, you know, I’ll make this one other general comment and then tie this up.

Uh, I had a chance. Um, I was, I remember this, I went to, I went to the college of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. And, um, there’s a good friend of mine, a woman who was for many, many years, the head of residence life there. Um, and she’s, she and her husband had been good friends of mine for many.

And I was with her a number of years ago. And I asked her an interesting question. I said, all right. So you’ve been working with these college students that come away from home, they’re there in the dorms. And like, what’s, what’s something you’ve learned that you might not have ever thought of. But the biggest thing you’ve learned, and she said to me, I always remember that she said the power of peer pressure.

And she said that kids, she would see young adults come to college. Who in other settings were wonderful people that came from great families and they do really stupid things when they’re with their peers. That peer influence is significant. And the reason I raised that is that if we’re just going to set a good example and hope that our kids watch us and figure out from our example, what we want them to get out of that when they spend more time with their peers than they do with us, that’s a scary problem.

That we’re turning over the growth of our children, to their peers instead of the us. That’s scary. And so the antidote to that, the opposite of that is establishing. This is what our family is about in very clear terms, and then creating a structured through these rituals, creating a structured way to teach those principles over and over and over again, so that they become internalized in our children.

And we hope that in the moment. You know, they do the thing that we most want them to do. And, and I’ll, I said, I was gonna say the last time, we’ll give you one last other question by night. So when my children were little something that my wife did, and, and this was something that I don’t know where she heard this, but I think it was a great practice.

So I give her all credit. Issues to do something that she called temptations. And what that meant is that before bed, my kids would be all excited. Can we do temptations tonight, tonight, mom? And what that meant is she would describe situations to them that they might someday find themselves in where there would be a temptation you’re at your friend’s house.

And they say, Hey, let’s get into our dad’s liquor cabinet. And what would you do? And we would talk them through. And the thinking was, and I think it’s true that the more we talk about these things, the more they get internalized the higher, the probability is again, where there’s no guarantees here. Peer pressure is big.

There’s no guarantees that our kids are always going to do the right thing, but we’re stacking the odds in our favor heavily. If we talk about them all the time, right? If we’re talking about this all the time, there’s a better chance that when faced with a moment of. And somebody says to our children, how about we do this now?

That’s not what we do in our family. They’re going to remember that. And so that’s why this repetition is so that we’ve been talking about is so important that the more we talk about this, the greater, the probabilities, that in that moment of truth, they do what we hope they would do instead of what their peers talk about.

That’s

37:44 Chris
beautiful, beautiful advice. And I mean, I think it really speaks to what we’re trying to teach you guys here on the line with Ennis. To your kids to embrace it, to, to live a life, to be the disciples that were trying to raise them to be now, we need to be living that out daily and we need to make that a ritual.

You know, it doesn’t need to be, it can’t just be a Sunday thing. You know, you’re getting your kids get to see the same dad Monday through Saturday that they see on Sunday. So I mean, David, this is, this has been a ton of wonderful insight here. I’m going to take us back to our scripture because there’s so many things that, you know, first Timothy three, four through five, he must be one who manages his own hassle household.

Keeping his children under control with all DDT. But if a man does not know how to manage his own household, how will he take care of the church of God? So guys start building those fundamentals, put them in place. The question I want you to think about this week is name one change that you can make that would impact your family culture, that centers around glorifying Christ.

So guys, I mean, there’s things that we can do. So David, anything else before.

38:45 David Friedman
I think I’ve given you all.

38:46 Chris
I guess this is great. This is great. So guys, go check out the show notes. There’s a lots of ways that you can find the books that we talked about here today. They will be featured on this week’s fun Friday, definitely as, as, as the resources that we highly recommend you guys checking out, you know, share this with other lions out there, send a text message, push it out, go to the line within that us get, you know, check out all our resources from the Bible, study all the information on our coaching program.

And guys, thank you again. Don’t don’t leave this in your pocket, share with other people. So go out there and unleash the lion within.