Order of Man - Treat Your Family Like Your Business ｜ FRIDAY FIELD NOTES

00:00:00.000 You're a man of action. You live life to the fullest. Embrace your fears and boldly chart

00:00:04.880 your own path. When life knocks you down, you get back up one more time. Every time.

00:00:10.220 You are not easily deterred or defeated. Rugged. Resilient. Strong. This is your life. This is who

00:00:16.780 you are. This is who you will become. At the end of the day, and after all is said and done,

00:00:22.200 you can call yourself a man. Gentlemen, what is going on today? My name is Ryan Michler.

00:00:27.120 I'm your host and the founder of the Order of Man podcast and movement. Welcome here today.

00:00:32.780 If you've been with us for any amount of time, you know, it's my goal to equip you with information

00:00:37.420 and tools and resources that you need as a man to thrive. And today I want to talk with you about

00:00:43.780 some of the ways that we as men generally tend to be fairly good when it comes to business,

00:00:49.100 but not so good when it comes to the family. I have some theories as to why that is. I know why

00:00:54.900 it is in my case. And we're going to talk about that. And we're also going to talk about how we can

00:01:00.600 take what works well on the business front and make sure that we're incorporating some of these

00:01:06.260 concepts on the home front to be more effective, to show our families how much we love them

00:01:11.320 and to lead them effectively. Before I get into that, I just want to mention that we are going to

00:01:16.360 have our exclusive brotherhood, the Iron Council, open back up in March. Middle of March,

00:01:22.040 we're opening it up, excuse me. And I want you to be able to have the first crack at being able to

00:01:28.020 sign up for that exclusive brotherhood. So if you go to orderaman.com slash Iron Council,

00:01:32.960 you can watch a very short video, learn a little bit more about what we're doing and get notified

00:01:38.120 or sign up to be notified when we open it up in mid March. Again, that's orderaman.com slash Iron

00:01:45.080 Council. So guys, let's talk about this. I can't remember why I decided to talk about this.

00:01:51.220 I don't remember if it was an experience or something spurred it for me, but there's a real

00:02:00.740 need for men to obviously step up within the walls of our homes. Now, I want to be the first to tell

00:02:06.140 you I'm not perfect at this. A lot of what I share here on the podcast is more, it seems like for my

00:02:12.020 own personal benefit than it might be for anybody else's. And what's nice is I get to actually think

00:02:17.860 about and ponder and do research on the subjects I'm talking with you about. So I learn a lot and

00:02:22.920 I got thinking about why in my life I've been as successful as I have on the business front,

00:02:28.500 but then the home front seems to suffer. And there's a lot of reasons for that. But I think

00:02:32.680 the biggest is that we not only believe, and I think this is accurate, that our job is to bring

00:02:40.180 home the bacon. Our job is to put food on the table, to be the providers. And so oftentimes that's

00:02:46.740 a financial provision. Obviously it goes deeper than that, but that's the one that we gravitate

00:02:52.080 towards. And I think the major reason for that is that it's very tangible. It's very goal-driven,

00:03:00.240 goal-oriented, specific tasks, specific projects, specific ways of operating. We can actually look and

00:03:08.120 see the results. Do we have more clients? Is income coming in? Is growth and revenue up?

00:03:13.120 It's very tangible. But when you talk about the family, it's hard to measure what it means to be

00:03:18.500 a good father, what it means to be a good husband. And then we also have our wives who are doing other

00:03:25.600 components of the family dynamic. And so sometimes, at least this is in my case, is the responsibilities

00:03:32.800 oftentimes gets dumped up on her. She does such a wonderful job with so many different things that

00:03:38.580 I tend to believe that that site is all figured out. And I can check out in a way and assume that

00:03:43.200 it's all going to be taken care of. And as good a job as she does, it's not always going to be taken

00:03:48.240 care of. So what I wanted to do is, as I was thinking about this, what are the elements? And of

00:03:53.900 course, this is not an exhaustive list, but what are the elements of business that I incorporate,

00:04:00.620 practices that I incorporate into my business that I don't necessarily incorporate into the family

00:04:06.200 life, but that I think would help? And the first one is having a mission statement. Now, whether you

00:04:12.160 are your own boss, you're self-employed, you have your own company, or you work with an organization,

00:04:18.460 work for a company, usually that organization has a mission statement, a very clearly stated,

00:04:25.300 well-articulated goal or desire or outcome for that business. At a minimum, the way that it's

00:04:33.160 supposed to operate. But can we say the same thing about our families? No, we have a general idea

00:04:38.680 of what we're supposed to be doing. We have a general idea that we'd like our families to be

00:04:44.080 fulfilled and happy. We have a general idea of what we should be doing as fathers, but it's not

00:04:48.940 clearly stated. And even if it is clear in your mind, how often do we actually articulate that

00:04:55.280 to our family members, our spouses and our children? And do we give them an opportunity to participate

00:05:01.440 in what that vision or that mission statement looks like? Probably not. So if you know that in

00:05:09.320 your business, you have a mission statement, then I'm going to go ahead and suggest, and I'm working on

00:05:13.580 this too, that we go ahead and we begin to articulate what our family vision is. What is it that we want

00:05:20.240 to be doing this year? Is there a word or a theme that we're working on? Is there a code of conduct?

00:05:27.240 Is there a way that we behave, a way that we show up? I have it over here on this wall. You can't see

00:05:33.240 it's just outside of the frame of this camera, but that's my code of conduct that I have with my sons.

00:05:39.280 And it's admittedly been a while since we reviewed that, but we have a code of conduct

00:05:43.740 and we very infrequently look at it. So I'm going to pull that off the wall tonight. I'm going to sit

00:05:49.160 down with my children and we're going to read through it. And we're going to discuss what exactly

00:05:53.020 that means. The benefit of this, of course, is that everybody's on the same page. There's no guesswork

00:05:58.560 about where we're going, where we're trying to get to, how we're going to conduct ourselves,

00:06:03.240 what success actually looks like. And it's amazing. I'm thinking about this, that we have these

00:06:07.880 things in business, but very rarely do we do them with our family members. So let's make sure that

00:06:13.040 we have these vision statements in place that we have articulated to our family members, what we see

00:06:18.940 that we take into consideration, of course, our spouse and allow our children to participate in

00:06:25.080 that process. Because if they do, it's a larger and greater ownership than if you just regurgitate

00:06:30.020 a bunch of information that has no real deep connection or meaning to them. Number two,

00:06:35.700 one thing that we have in business is that we have meetings, right? For better or worse,

00:06:42.280 some meetings are relevant and important. Some meetings are irrelevant and a waste of time,

00:06:47.100 but we do have meetings and we do have a way that we communicate, whether it's through a schedule.

00:06:52.600 Sometimes we use programs like Slack or Discord or internal emails, but we're constantly communicating

00:07:00.760 within business. We're having group get togethers where we're talking about a certain project or a

00:07:07.340 goal or just trying to get an alignment. But do we do this with our families? You can look at the

00:07:13.460 amount of families that actually have family dinners together and it's dwindling. And outside of that,

00:07:19.260 even just meetings in the morning, that might be a prayer meeting. It might be a meeting over breakfast.

00:07:24.380 It's something simple. You sit down, you have prayer, maybe you read scriptures and you have

00:07:29.940 a conversation about what's taking place throughout the day. What are people, not people, your kids

00:07:35.040 engaging in? What activities you and your wife get on the same page? Think about from a money

00:07:40.420 perspective, how often do you sit down with your wife and go through a budget together? So you all know

00:07:45.740 what you have coming up as far as expenses, what income is coming in, what your financial goals are,

00:07:51.840 what things you want to accomplish throughout the year. We do it in business. We do it all the time

00:07:56.320 to a detriment even. And yet when it comes to our family, we don't do it. It's like haphazard and

00:08:02.920 people's schedules are all over the place and nobody's on the same page and nobody's communicating

00:08:07.360 together. And there's no check-ins. You're not asking how your kids are doing. Your kids are not

00:08:11.900 asking how you're doing. You're not checking in with your wife. Of course, that's going to be super

00:08:16.600 inefficient. And a lot of the times I think we have good intentions and we say that we want

00:08:21.820 to do these things, but life just gets so busy that we don't take the time to actually sit down,

00:08:27.420 take a deep breath, go through a plan, go through your mission statement. Like we were talking

00:08:32.080 earlier, talk about our goals and our ambitions and desires, and then come up on the same page.

00:08:36.840 Speaking of family, my youngest son just popped in. What is it, bud? Okay. Awesome. I'll come take a

00:08:43.940 look at it later. I'm doing a podcast right now. Okay. Close that door. So speaking of communication,

00:08:48.600 he came in to tell me that his bag that was wet had dried. So there's some communication right

00:08:54.360 there. Hold on. I got to close this door. All right. There we go. Well, that's one thing that

00:08:59.520 we could definitely communicate about and we have in the past, but it sounds like it's time for a

00:09:03.540 revisit is that if the door is closed, that means dad's in the middle of doing something. So we'll have

00:09:08.660 to bring that up in one of our meetings, but that's actually a good point is that you got to make sure

00:09:14.780 everybody's on the same page and there's no guesswork about what's going on and what's

00:09:20.000 happening with the family. We do it in business. Very rarely do we do it with family. The next thing

00:09:25.160 is goals. You know, business goals are easy. Financial goals are easy. I'm not saying they're

00:09:33.680 always easy to complete and accomplish, but I'm saying they're easy to come up with because they're

00:09:38.760 usually very tangible. Increase sales revenue by dot, dot, dot. Your financial goals pay off this

00:09:45.680 much date or this much debt by this date. They're very tangible. They're very easy for us to wrap our

00:09:52.080 heads around, pick up a certain amount of clients, do a certain amount of revenue, reduce your bottom

00:09:59.840 or increase your bottom line. Very tangible. But again, in family, you can't say, I want to be a

00:10:06.880 better dad and expect that anybody knows what that is, including yourself. What does it actually

00:10:12.080 mean to be a better dad? How does a better dad show up? How are you going to know if you're being

00:10:16.900 better than you were last month? What is a better husband? What is an engaged husband? What is an

00:10:21.740 engaged father? We don't know because we don't take the time to define these terms. So when you have

00:10:27.580 your goals and your ambitions and your desires for your family, because it's so convoluted and it's not

00:10:35.040 really thought of, you just want to be a better husband and father in general, it's no surprise to

00:10:40.080 me that we don't really work towards those very effectively. And we think that just showing up is

00:10:46.340 enough. Well, it's not. And you've got to be able to measure being a good dad. How can you measure it?

00:10:52.660 Time. One thing I've done in the past is surveys, asking my wife or asking my kids how I've done,

00:10:59.720 how I'm showing up, how I'm performing, what's going well, what isn't going well. And of course,

00:11:05.320 being able to create the margin or the space for them to answer me honestly, even though it might

00:11:11.940 sting at times, answer me honestly so that I can actually improve in those departments.

00:11:17.320 So how do we quantify this? Well, you take whatever the loose goal is being a better father

00:11:23.120 and you start to identify what is a better father. Well, a better father is somebody who

00:11:29.340 engages with his kids. A better father might be somebody who isn't as impatient as he's been in

00:11:34.900 the past. A better father might be somebody who's coaching his son's baseball team. A better father

00:11:41.160 might be somebody who is taking his daughter to practice or taking her on weekly date nights for

00:11:48.600 father and daughter. These are all more concrete, measurable ways of showing up and improving your

00:11:56.060 performance as a father. The same can be said as a husband. Date nights, undivided attention,

00:12:02.380 alone time with your wife, the level of conversations you're having, the level of trust where that is.

00:12:08.480 Again, if you don't know what it means to be a good husband and father, then it's no wonder that

00:12:12.800 we're not performing to the degree that we're capable of. So we have to quantify it.

00:12:17.580 We have to begin to take that abstract concept of good father and good husband and break it down

00:12:24.760 into realistic goals that are obtainable and will inevitably make you a better father and husband.

00:12:32.180 We got a lot going on in the house today. We got an air horn going on. I don't know if you heard

00:12:35.760 that one. I got kids coming in here. So needless to say, there's some things that we need to work on

00:12:41.280 with regards to the family here. So first again, mission statement. Second is your meetings. So you're

00:12:47.120 all on the same page. Third is tangible goals. Number four is dedicated time. When we come up

00:12:57.160 with our goals and we come up with our desires in business, we know how much time we're going to

00:13:03.360 allocate towards certain things. They're time sensitive. It might be a project and this is

00:13:07.260 going to take three weeks, or it might just be how much time you're going to spend on a particular

00:13:11.820 project or how many emails you're going to send out for the day or how much time you need to do

00:13:16.180 research on a particular project. The same is true with the family, or at least it should be.

00:13:22.360 How much dedicated time, intentional time are you getting with your family? I know in the past,

00:13:27.940 I've been guilty of getting done with my work day. Now I work at home, so it's a little different,

00:13:32.420 a little bit more convenient, which is sometimes good and sometimes presents its own share of challenges.

00:13:37.900 But I have been guilty of just plopping my butt on the couch and thinking that because everybody's

00:13:44.280 just sitting around watching the latest cartoon that we're actually connected as a family.

00:13:48.760 That's not true because that's not intentionality. But I'll tell you what,

00:13:53.400 as I started to cook dinner and do one night a week and breakfast one day a week with my daughter,

00:13:59.880 that's way more intentional. I have way more time dedicated specifically to her,

00:14:05.120 my youngest son who just came in here several minutes ago. Legos is his big thing. And so it

00:14:10.980 might not be very much, but if I can take 20 or 30 minutes every single day and dedicate to each one

00:14:16.800 of my children, I know that inevitably we're going to have a better, more deeply connected relationship.

00:14:24.240 So what kind of time are you putting in with your family? And I'm not talking about sitting on the

00:14:30.120 couch, all watching a movie. Nothing wrong with that, but it can't always be that, especially if

00:14:36.420 that's the default. I'm talking about undivided attention towards each one of your children.

00:14:40.840 And I'm talking about undivided attention with your wife. Do you have the time allocated?

00:14:46.980 Are you dedicating enough time, energy, resources towards those relationships?

00:14:51.280 The problem with not doing this is that we might actually deceive ourselves into believing that

00:14:58.440 we're doing well. And then all of a sudden we wake up and we realize that maybe we aren't doing as

00:15:06.300 good as we thought we were and that we can do better. I would like you to be proactive. I am trying

00:15:12.380 to be proactive. I don't want to wait until there's a hole in the boat before I start addressing

00:15:18.120 the leak. I want to deal with it now as quickly as I possibly can. So it doesn't turn into a large

00:15:24.480 problem later. And guys, the last point that I wanted to make today. And again, of course,

00:15:29.280 this is not an exhaustive list. These are five things that I pulled out that I, that I do in

00:15:34.220 business that I should be doing more effectively at home. But the last one is delegation and roles

00:15:40.480 within the walls of your home. Everybody has a part to play. We all have chores. We all have projects.

00:15:46.280 My wife, for example, takes on the overwhelming majority of the homeschooling. I take on the

00:15:52.760 exclusivity of providing for the family's finances and resources that way. But our kids also have

00:15:59.480 responsibilities between my daughter helping me make dinner a couple of nights a week or one night

00:16:05.600 a week and one breakfast per week. My kids, my boys helping out with inventory for the business

00:16:12.780 and merchandise and doing other chores and keeping their rooms clean. But one thing that we need to

00:16:18.200 be very deliberate about is who's playing what role. And we need to know what everybody is doing.

00:16:24.300 Another one I recently started taking on was on every Wednesday, I teach the science lesson for

00:16:30.380 my children. We've communicated that. We've articulated that. It's my responsibility. And my wife knows that

00:16:37.140 she can rely on me to do that. So I'm coming up with all the supplies. I'm ordering on my Amazon or getting

00:16:42.940 them at the store if I need to. And I'm ready on Wednesday to be able to teach that science class. We've

00:16:49.160 communicated it. There's no guesswork. It is what it is. And she can rely on me to get that done. I can rely on

00:16:54.800 her to get her things done. We should be able to rely on the kids to get their things done. But it's very 1.00

00:17:00.140 clearly articulated. It's well communicated. And there's consequences for not doing what every

00:17:06.440 one of us should be doing. So that's a quick overview. I think that if we spent more time

00:17:13.480 dedicated, committed, intentional with our families, we have a lot more success as husbands, as fathers,

00:17:23.020 as the patriarch of our homes. Families would be more successful and we would be more fulfilled.

00:17:28.880 I think our relationships would improve as well. So if you have other thoughts and other ideas,

00:17:36.880 how we can take why we're so good when it comes to business and maybe even money,

00:17:41.100 translate that over to these more, I'm not going to say challenging, but harder to define

00:17:46.380 goals and ambitions and desires we have as family men. If you have ideas on that, please share them with

00:17:51.500 me. Send me an email, send me a message, comment on this video on YouTube. By the way, if you're not

00:17:58.280 watching on YouTube, you can, it's at order of man and comment and let me know what you think.

00:18:03.420 But guys, I think it's time we step up in our homes as much as we're willing to within our businesses.

00:18:10.040 Businesses come and go. Companies come and go. People get laid off. People quit. But your family,

00:18:16.240 that's important. So let's make sure we pay them the attention they deserve and do the best that we can.

00:18:20.780 Again, I talked about mission statements, set up meetings, tangible goals, dedicated time and

00:18:26.480 attention towards them, and the delegation and roles and responsibilities within the walls of

00:18:30.940 your home. I hope that helps, guys. Let's go out there. We got to become better family men. We really

00:18:35.140 do. We'll keep talking about it. If you guys have questions, thoughts, ideas, or solutions,

00:18:40.640 please let me know and I'll share those as well. All right, guys, we'll be back next week. Until then,

00:18:44.820 go out there, take action, become a man you are meant to be. Thank you for listening to the Order

00:18:49.760 of Man podcast. If you're ready to take charge of your life and be more of the man you were meant

00:18:54.540 to be, we invite you to join the Order at orderofman.com.

Order of Man - February 24, 2023

Treat Your Family Like Your Business ｜ FRIDAY FIELD NOTES

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript