Dad of 16 REVEALS Parenting SECRETS to Lead Your Family
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
196.09196
Summary
On this episode of Father's Day, we have a special guest on the show, John Henry Gallagher. John Henry is a Catholic father of 8 kids, a CEO of 8 companies, and the author of 8 books. He has been married to his wife for over 40 years and they have 16 kids, 8 boys and 8 girls.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
I threw the cell phone on the ground, and I handed him my axe, and I said,
00:00:03.880
this phone is causing you to sin. Break the phone, son.
00:00:09.080
Hey, my friends, there is a new book on parenting. I know you're going to say,
00:00:13.120
oh my gosh, another book on parenting. We've seen so many. You know what? It's really funny.
00:00:17.240
This guy is someone who really knows what he's talking about. As a dad of eight children,
00:00:22.420
I can tell you he really, really knows what he's talking about because he's the only guy
00:00:26.160
I've ever seen in my life that I could say, wow, you've got twice as many kids as me.
00:00:32.480
This guy is the head of TAN Books. TAN Books is probably like the most, if you don't,
00:00:39.140
if you're a Catholic and you don't know about TAN Books, re-examine what you're doing. TAN Books
00:00:43.000
is where you'll find all the great books, and you're going to want to stay tuned for this episode.
00:00:47.680
Connor Gallagher, so good to be with you. It's a pleasure, John Henry. Thanks so much.
00:00:50.740
I'm a big fan of your show. So is my wife. So are my friends. It's nice to actually be here.
00:00:55.220
Praise God. Let's begin as we always do with the sign of the cross. In the name of the Father,
00:00:59.940
and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen. Amen. First of all, congratulations. And to your
00:01:05.280
wife, to your family. How? Okay. I have to ask right away. What's the age spread? What are your
00:01:10.180
top and bottom ages right now? So 23 down to about nine months or so, eight months, something like
00:01:16.560
that. Problem is, is they always, every year they change their age. So it's kind of hard to keep.
00:01:21.500
Yeah. But even cooler than having the 16 kids and eight boys, eight girls. Okay. So it's kind of
00:01:28.460
cool. Yeah. So I planned that perfectly. You know, I was really strategic on that, you know,
00:01:32.960
but, and actually they're, all the girls are on the bottom end. So I got in touch with my feminine
00:01:37.340
side as, as I got older, you see. So that's what happened. That was, see, that's my problem.
00:01:42.280
I had six boys, two girls, and I was never able to get in touch with the feminine side.
00:01:48.160
Yeah. So I got older. I just, I just got soft in my age, I guess. I don't know. But what's cool,
00:01:53.000
John Henry, is I got two grandkids now, which is great. So my oldest two children each have a baby,
00:01:58.680
good marriages, good little babies. And so my wife and my daughter were big pregnant together.
00:02:05.480
And, and my daughter gave birth first. So my grandbaby is a couple months older than my baby,
00:02:12.520
which is just awesome. So I got all these pictures of like two granddaughters, one in each arm,
00:02:17.780
and then my baby in the middle. And I, I just, every time we're together, I take those pictures
00:02:25.260
Yes, indeed. And I guarantee you, they will be forcing, is your, your last one, him or her?
00:02:31.320
Her, her little girl. They will be forcing her to say, you're calling me aunt, even though they're
00:02:35.880
younger. Yes, that you got it. You got it. It's awesome. It's a, it's, it's very blessed. We're
00:02:40.720
blessed, but you know, it was no competition. You got a ton of kids and I always make the disclaimer,
00:02:46.280
John Henry, right? Like if you got one kid, your full-time mom or full-time dad, you know,
00:02:51.160
and I'm just, my time's just split up a little differently. We're very blessed. It hasn't been a
00:02:55.460
race. It hasn't been a game. We're not trying to have as many kids as we can. We've taken each one at a
00:03:00.420
time prayerfully consider how my wife's doing. And I think people have been in the modern church,
00:03:06.820
very abusive for the use of NFP. I think a lot of Catholics use it as contraception. So I think
00:03:13.280
that's a real flaw, which you understand, but you know, we've just been very open to life,
00:03:18.420
but very cautious and prudent each time to make sure my wife was physically, psychologically in a
00:03:23.380
good state. And God has blessed us, you know, tremendously. And you know, it's not, it's not due to us.
00:03:28.260
It's just what he decided to do with us. Yeah. Beautiful. Now you're a CEO of various companies
00:03:34.060
and it's interesting because in your book, this comes across in a big way, but it also, I think,
00:03:39.840
will be fascinating for people to get how to order, you might say, a family, let alone a family of 16
00:03:49.600
children. But because that will take a stupendous amount of organization because it's hard enough with
00:03:57.260
one or two or three, but as you get up there, it, it really does require some principles that I think
00:04:06.740
would help everyone, but you don't really think of that so much when you, you're not, you know, as,
00:04:13.120
well, you know, and you also don't come from that business background. So I, I think that's the
00:04:18.540
fascinating part of your book. You have this, it's called, by the way, the well-ordered family
00:04:23.760
available at 10. Uh, but give us some of that. Uh, first of all, maybe you can tell us what inspired
00:04:31.640
you to, to write this other than having lived it, but what inspired you to write it?
00:04:36.280
Yeah. So first of all, being steeped in philosophy, I have my master's in philosophy and my law degree.
00:04:41.740
I very much fell in love with the idea from Thomas Aquinas that says, grace perfects nature.
00:04:48.960
But, you know, my dad always told me in his folksy wisdom, Southern folksy wisdom, he said,
00:04:55.120
son, God will feed the birds of the air, but he don't put the food in the nest. And what he meant
00:05:01.000
by that is you have to go and, and he would also say, you have to work like everything depends on
00:05:05.620
you and pray like everything depends on God. You know, he told me, don't be so heavenly minded.
00:05:10.720
You're no damn earthly good. Like, so he had this sense of, you got to take care of the natural order
00:05:17.100
because the natural order is of God natural laws in place. And if you neglect that, it's very hard
00:05:23.920
for grace to flow through an unnatural vehicle. Right. And that's what Aquinas meant by grace
00:05:29.060
perfects nature. So I have seen, as I'm sure you have very well-intentioned devout families that
00:05:35.960
pray the rosary, go to mass, take their kids, send their kids to Catholic schools. They do all this
00:05:40.220
stuff, but the unnatural society that we live in, the unnatural technology, the unnatural social
00:05:47.180
order of things, the, the, the unnatural influences that they're receiving from pop culture, it ruins
00:05:57.300
it. And so the grace from the sacraments, like don't have any place to land, you know? So it's,
00:06:03.060
it's very hard. I think families sometimes miss the natural order because they say, Oh, we're just,
00:06:07.800
we just pray and everything will be okay. We studied the catechism. No, God has an order and
00:06:12.940
structure to the universe. And so over time, my wife and I were very conscious to try to make sure
00:06:18.720
that the natural order of our household was, was running smoothly. And my, that's mostly my wife's
00:06:24.220
credit. She's really good at that. And at business, John Henry, as I learned business principles,
00:06:30.580
well, one of my earliest books was called if Aristotle's kid had an iPod and I took Aristotle's
00:06:36.420
Nick and me, Ken ethics. And I applied it to like raising kids in a digital world. I saw parenting
00:06:41.880
advice in the writings of Plato and Aristotle. I just see it there. That's if I have one unique gift,
00:06:48.520
it's, it's the ability to like connect philosophical dots to everyday real life. That's kind of what
00:06:54.400
I'm good at. I'm not very good at many things, but that's one thing I'm good at. So when I was
00:06:58.420
studying philosophy, I saw business principles when I studied business, because I ended up buying tan
00:07:04.060
out of bankruptcy and I had to learn how to run a business. As I studied all these business books,
00:07:10.080
I saw, okay, Oh, this is how I run my marketing department. This is how I run my finance department,
00:07:14.040
my operations, HR, all this stuff you got to do to run a business. And I also saw, well, this applies
00:07:19.180
to my family. This applies to home life. So that's kind of what I do is I connect these dots that are
00:07:25.660
kind of unconnected. And so when people would say, Oh, I have two kids and can barely handle it.
00:07:30.400
How do you do it with 10, 12, 13, 14, whatever it is over time, I ended up saying, well, look,
00:07:36.920
I don't really raise 15, 16 kids. I manage environments just like I don't really manage
00:07:44.280
every employee that I have. I manage systems and environments so that each person can flourish.
00:07:50.800
Now, when each, if an employee needs something, I zoom in like a hawk and focus on them. If a kid
00:07:56.480
needs something, same thing, but can I build a system and structure and environment, a natural
00:08:01.700
order in which two things are happening? One, it enables me to focus on what I need to focus on at
00:08:06.600
any given time. And it allows God's grace to flow like a tsunami because the natural order is in its
00:08:12.420
place. So that usually leads to an interesting conversation with families about, you need to
00:08:18.720
think about building environments and the structure and order of your family life, not just your kitchen
00:08:24.220
and not just getting the laundry done, but the educational structure, your religious or your
00:08:29.040
church structure, your worship structure, your liturgical life, the devotional life, society,
00:08:34.000
technology is a whole thing. You need to manage like a business executive. You got to manage that
00:08:39.600
sucker or it'll eat you alive. So all of these things, John Henry, are environments that all come
00:08:45.400
together to make an ecosystem that are feeding off each other. And that's what I've tried to help
00:08:50.720
people do is get order and structure to all of that so that God's grace can flow like a tsunami.
00:08:57.480
And it will if you provide that environment for it to do that.
00:09:01.980
So let's take the technology one because that one seems to affect everybody today. What's your
00:09:08.860
advice there? Because a lot of parents are just at a loss and don't know what to do. They've got a
00:09:13.840
bunch of kids and they're infected with this stuff and it's just, they feel like helpless.
00:09:19.620
It's a really great question. And so like, practically, what do you do? And we could
00:09:23.660
talk philosophy all day about the dangers of technology and statistics. And I guess what,
00:09:28.020
everyone knows that. So the question is like, what do you do tomorrow? And here's the answer.
00:09:33.100
I created the most practical thing in the world. It's called a digital policy builder. Now,
00:09:37.360
the well-ordered family business model is tool-based. It's worksheets, tools or worksheets.
00:09:43.280
So you can go, I'm not trying to just hawk it, but you can go to wellorderedfamily.com
00:09:48.240
and go to the toolbox on the website and you can download the digital policy builder. It's a simple
00:09:54.080
worksheet. And here's the thing, John Henry, your family is different from mine. I'm not going to
00:09:58.660
tell you how old your kids have to be to have a cell phone. Like that's not what I'm meant to do,
00:10:03.780
right? What I want to do is say, you have to ask certain questions. You have to ask certain questions.
00:10:08.760
What technology is allowed? When is it allowed? With whom can they communicate? And where can they
00:10:15.100
use the technology? And from experience, I've learned that the where is actually the most
00:10:19.960
important question to ask because they're probably not going to be watching, you know, adult movies
00:10:26.560
at the kitchen table on their laptop. Okay. But they might be behind closed doors if you don't have
00:10:32.360
the right constraints on your technology or anything. So the where is extremely important,
00:10:36.840
you know, transparency. So fill out the tool. Parents go to the website, get the tool and just
00:10:44.060
fill it's free. Just fill the tool out. I just ask basic common sense questions and you have,
00:10:49.880
here's the thing, conflict with teenagers, John Henry, usually doesn't come out because
00:10:55.700
the kids just lie and cheat and steal against, you know, mom and dad's rules. That's usually not the,
00:11:01.440
if that's the case, you got a bigger problems. Usually it's the teenagers taking an inch,
00:11:07.660
taking a little more, taking a little and breaking the rules slightly. You as mom and dad kind of
00:11:13.460
loosen up the rules a little bit. It starts slipping away. And then, you know, a month later,
00:11:19.480
everything's out of whack. So you need crystal clarity on technology. And I'm not like a detail guy,
00:11:25.020
but on technology, you need precision, like nuclear reactor oversight precision. Okay. It's like the
00:11:34.560
people looking over the nuclear reactors, every detail is critical. It goes kaboom, right?
00:11:39.880
So with the digital technology and your teenagers and middle schoolers hands, you need complete and
00:11:46.280
total precision because it's that important. Their soul, their eternal soul is on the line.
00:11:51.280
So you got to measure, you got to track, you have to have crystal clear rules.
00:11:56.260
You have to love your children and you also have to not trust them. And that sounds hard for people,
00:12:00.980
but you know, I have every right to take the device out of my teenager's hand who lives in my house and
00:12:07.020
take a look and check his history and see what he's doing. And if you start that young, you realize
00:12:11.920
it's, it's not like an invasion of their privacy because they don't really deserve privacy in their home and
00:12:17.780
in my home. It's not a question of like individual rights by some liberal judge. It's not bad at all.
00:12:23.940
It's, I am here to help you remain virtuous. That's why I'm here. So have the policy and then
00:12:30.580
look over their shoulder constantly, take their device, check it out. Of course, put the filtering
00:12:35.560
technology on there. That's very important, but you have to have the guts to take the device out of
00:12:41.440
your teenage girl's hands and look through her stuff in order to help her stay virtuous. And a lot of
00:12:47.560
parents have a very hard time doing that. Wow. Yeah. It's good advice. It's essential.
00:12:53.360
You're right. It is. It's like a nuclear reactor because the same damage that can be caused from
00:12:58.320
a nuclear explosion is the same as the, in a spiritual sense, the same as what can happen here
00:13:04.200
can lead to destruction, worse than destruction, eternal destruction. So yeah, fascinating. Thank you
00:13:10.420
for that. And you, you better bet I'm going to your website to download that immediately after we get
00:13:15.560
off. Secondly, in, in your book, you have these, um, six components of a well-ordered family management
00:13:22.680
system. What are the advantage? Well, tell us about those and what are the advantages of those
00:13:27.120
principles? Yeah. So I'll kind of take you around the wheel real quick. It's six parts. And again,
00:13:31.100
these are parts that I found that work in business. And so I think they work in family
00:13:34.420
because it's kind of like natural law. It applies to every organ. By the way, what's a business,
00:13:38.240
a business, it's a group of individuals coming together to try, try to accomplish a certain goal.
00:13:43.340
And that's real. I mean, and your goal, thank God is, you know, something with the Catholic faith,
00:13:47.220
but that's a, that's a particular, you actually, in the most general sense, have the same goal as
00:13:51.700
the LA Lakers. It's a group of individuals coming together to try to accomplish a certain goal.
00:13:56.340
And that's what a family is like at the most general, that's what every team is. Every organ,
00:14:00.780
every institution of people is just, our goals are different. So I think at the most fundamental
00:14:05.760
natural law level, the same rules apply to an athletic team, to a church, to a family. I just
00:14:13.680
do. Now, so those six components are vision. It starts a vision. Like, what do you, what are you
00:14:20.440
really trying to accomplish? And I help people answer the question, why did God create the Weston
00:14:27.160
family? Why did God create the Gallagher family? For what purpose? Right. And of course, for you and me,
00:14:33.260
that has everything to do with our Catholic faith. Right. But, but, you know, families have to grapple
00:14:38.040
with that question and write it out. And I have tools to help you do that. I also have coaching
00:14:41.680
services that like help people do this. The second part is unity. You know, the great Jim Collins,
00:14:48.900
he's a great business author. And he said, 1% of success is vision. 99% of success is unity around the
00:14:57.180
vision. Right. So, you know, it's, it's one thing for you and your spouse to know that you're on the
00:15:02.340
same page. It's another thing to stay on the same page day in and day out. That's where,
00:15:06.120
that's where the going gets tough. You know, that's hard. How do you keep a teenager
00:15:08.860
focused on your family vision? I got tools to help with that. It's hard, but you can do it.
00:15:13.380
The third part, by the way, so unity, that's where I, I encourage family meetings and like put them on
00:15:19.920
the, when anything's really important and your health is important, you have a meeting with your
00:15:23.860
doctor. You know, when money's important, you got a, you got a meeting with your accountant or,
00:15:28.920
you know, business is always important. So you have meetings, meetings, meetings, but we don't
00:15:32.900
have family meetings, you know? And I think we need that. I think human beings need that
00:15:36.960
accountability. People respect what you inspect. And we do that through meetings. So part three
00:15:42.580
is systems. This is the big macro system, John Henry, of like, what's the organizational of our
00:15:50.340
whole life, our school, our education, our social life, our recreation, how does sports fit into your
00:15:55.700
family? If at all, like these big, the technology, these big factors, that's a big macro system.
00:16:01.520
And then micro system is like, how do you get the dishes done? How do you get the chores done? How do
00:16:05.580
you pay off debt? How do you pay the bills? Ah, you know, all these things. That's the stuff that like
00:16:10.400
brings a lot of stress into your life. So that's systems. Part four is metrics. Okay. Again, people
00:16:15.140
respect what you inspect, what gets measured gets managed, right? So what's on my scorecard at home?
00:16:21.080
Well, we're a Catholic family. We measure how many times a week we prayed the family rosary and we
00:16:27.960
don't pick seven nights because life gets in the way, right? So we actually have like four is our
00:16:31.960
goal, you know? And so we should hit four. And if we don't hit four or something wrong, you know,
00:16:36.080
but seven's a little unrealistic for us. We also try on our, on our scorecard, it's get everybody in the
00:16:41.340
family to confession once a month. And like, if, after you go to confession, check, you check the
00:16:46.260
scorecard. The scorecard is hanging on the wall in our pantry. And so we check that off,
00:16:50.220
you know? And so we, we track, we track certain things there. Um, we have also like, you know,
00:16:57.140
we give kids financial penalties when they don't do their chores well. And so like on the scorecard
00:17:02.160
is like, how many times did you get dinged with a financial penalty? And like, we try like, so our
00:17:06.800
goal is like less than four dings a month or something, you know, we never make that, you know?
00:17:11.820
And so, you know, you're tracking these things. And so it becomes real putting them, by the way,
00:17:16.640
when it neurologically, John Henry, if I give you a concept, you can kind of ignore it. But if I,
00:17:24.020
so if I said like, how fast can you run? That's a, that's an, that's a vague idea in your head.
00:17:28.760
But if I say, can you run a five minute and 37 second mile, like your brain focuses in a whole
00:17:35.740
new way. Cause there's a number like numbers do that to the brain. It forces the brain to focus.
00:17:40.660
So put important stuff on your scorecard. What's important to you might be different than me,
00:17:45.560
but put the numbers on a scorecard. The fifth part of the system is relationships because,
00:17:53.220
you know, family life would be super easy if it wasn't for all the people involved, you know?
00:17:58.120
And so you, but I talk a lot about the Greek temperaments, which you're probably familiar
00:18:02.140
with. I talk about different assessment tests that management uses all the time, strength finder
00:18:07.500
and all these different things to see like, what is this God given personality here? And how do we
00:18:12.580
apply that to children? Hey, it's fun. Spouses love doing assessment tests. Teenagers love assessment
00:18:17.520
tests. Let's see who God made versus who I wish he made, you know? And so that's the relationships
00:18:23.380
component. And I have a lot of conflict resolution tools. Like when you are having the same darn conflict
00:18:29.360
with your spouse over and over again, there's probably a reason. So let's try to figure out what that
00:18:33.680
is. And then lastly, part six is discernment. This is decision-making and problem solving,
00:18:39.420
but with a spiritual bent. And so when you are trying to decide between A, B and C, like buy this
00:18:45.160
minivan, buy this 12 passenger van, buy this school bus, you know, you're trying to make these decisions.
00:18:51.540
There's real good business tools to help you make those decisions. Investors do it all the time.
00:18:57.940
Cost benefit analysis, decision matrix, where you're, you know, weighing different factors.
00:19:04.120
So families have to make decisions, whether it's go on this vacation or do I take this new job or do I
00:19:09.540
buy a new car or do I let the kid get a cell phone? You know what I mean? These little decisions become
00:19:14.780
very stressful for us and mom and dad just churn it in their brains and it creates conflict and stress.
00:19:21.840
And then we go to work and we're really good at making decisions at work because we take it
00:19:25.760
seriously and we go home and we're dumb. So I want the decision tools that business executives use every day
00:19:32.280
for good or bad purposes. I want to take those tools and apply it to family life.
00:19:36.940
That's discernment. That's my six part system. Sorry. It takes a little longer to go through
00:19:40.500
than I intended, but that's the six part system. It's amazing. I, I, I'm,
00:19:45.280
the one regret I have about it is that I'm most of my kids have left home at this point,
00:19:50.720
but that's incredible. Well, and, and so give everybody the website again so that they can get
00:19:56.760
it. Wellorderedfamily.com. Wellorderedfamily.com. Yeah. I mean, obviously, I mean, at this point,
00:20:03.560
I think everyone's interest is piqued. Um, and, uh, thank you for doing that because I think that
00:20:09.180
is, uh, hugely going to affect a lot of people. For us residents creating will has never been easier.
00:20:16.200
Thanks to my legacy will an online platform free of charge. You can now create your own will and
00:20:23.080
choose to include life site news in it. Specify where your funeral will take place, the number
00:20:28.180
of masses to be offered for your soul and how your estate will be distributed. We would be deeply
00:20:33.760
grateful if you remembered life site news in your will, visit mylegacywill.com slash life site news.
00:20:41.480
Thank you for your support and may God bless you. You're changing lives here because this
00:20:46.060
is a huge thing that so many parents are dealing with and they're well-meaning is just
00:20:52.420
what book can you trust on parenting? I mean, it's, it's hard because there's lots out there.
00:20:59.560
There's a ton out there. And, um, thank you for coming at it from experience and fidelity. That's,
00:21:05.520
that's what people are looking for. They're looking for the experience and the faithfulness
00:21:10.180
in once that's there. Now you've got them across the gamut, right to 23 and married and out of the
00:21:17.920
house, uh, which is really beautiful. The, what struggles have you seen and have you overcome
00:21:25.620
those? Um, you don't have to be super specific, but I'm sure there's been a lot of struggles that
00:21:31.740
you had to deal with that were very, really serious. How did, what's basically some of the
00:21:36.620
best ways, you know, to overcome those or get through those? Yeah. I can't really relate.
00:21:40.280
All my kids were perfect. Born without original sin. We've never had any problems. I don't know
00:21:43.980
what you're talking about now. No, man, it's been brutal. It's, it's been a, it's been a, you know,
00:21:49.220
blood, bloody knuckle, you know, fight for a long time. It's hard. It's really hard. And so I think
00:21:55.520
some of the, um, the hardest, I mean, we've dealt with all the normal stuff. Uh, my kids are
00:22:00.920
exceptional. I mean, I, I do. We're very blessed. We don't struggle with a lot of the same things that
00:22:06.080
everyone else does. Part of that's because we've homeschooled. I mean, that's been a major blessing
00:22:10.400
in our lives. It's not for everybody. I'm not saying everyone has to homeschool, but for us,
00:22:13.960
it's, it's shielded our kids from a lot of negative influence and we can be very particular in who that
00:22:18.260
we, we associate with, but some of the most painful, you know, I have the stories of like,
00:22:23.960
when my, my little kids have gotten hurt, we've never had a serious drama, but like one kid,
00:22:28.780
when he was two, he broke his femur. It was like, you know, ER ambulance all night long agony.
00:22:35.820
Like it was one of those, it's one of those things. And so as a parent, I was able to look
00:22:40.040
at this kid laying in a bed and know if I could snap my finger like that and somebody snapped my
00:22:48.920
leg in half in order to make this kid's leg get better. I would have done it without hesitation.
00:22:53.140
That gave me John Henry, just the slightest indication of what our Lord felt for us. Um,
00:23:00.380
and why he sent his son to die for us. I mean, it just gave me the slightest sense of
00:23:05.520
true paternal love of self-sacrifice. But as the kids grow, I think whenever you deal with
00:23:11.380
dishonesty and lack of transparency, like it's easy for me to deal with a kid that loses his temper
00:23:17.520
or whatever. But if you have a kid that struggles with honesty and transparency,
00:23:21.620
and then it's like a game of like, can you catch them in the act kind of thing? Or can you figure out
00:23:26.840
what they're lying about? I think that's like the most, uh, damaging to the family unit.
00:23:32.680
And we've dealt with it some, not a lot, but I know that that's the thing that really hurts
00:23:37.820
parents the most, which I can relate to a little bit. And so finding ways to keep the open line of
00:23:45.380
communication with your kids to where even they're telling you things that might make you a little
00:23:50.160
uncomfortable or you get them like a little comfortable, you know, maybe, maybe it's uncomfortable
00:23:55.400
for you, but they're telling you some of their shortcomings are telling you their challenges.
00:23:59.720
Man, it's better than hiding. It's better than the lack of transparency. And so,
00:24:05.340
you know, as my kids have gotten older, I've gotten more transparent with them and they've
00:24:09.540
become more transparent with me. I find that very healing and helpful, but lies and deceit are the
00:24:16.200
most toxic in a family. That's my experience. And then just also a lot of that has to do with
00:24:21.580
technology and our technology policies have improved over time. And kids can get around any safety
00:24:27.100
device, any, any safety protocol, you know, that you install. So you have to stay on top of that.
00:24:33.320
And I'm not talking just about like pornography. Okay. I'm just, I'm also just talking about if the
00:24:37.700
kids are talking with their friends too much. So one day, just as a little story, people like this
00:24:42.760
story. You know, I had conflict with my son who continually was talking to a girlfriend that I
00:24:47.400
didn't want him to, that we didn't want him talking to as much on his cell phone around the hours he
00:24:52.540
was supposed, he was just, he was just, you know, texting and, and talking too much. And I got so
00:24:58.360
damn angry that he was not being honest with me about it. It wasn't the, it wasn't so much breaking
00:25:03.060
the rule. It was just the constant dishonesty. I got so darn angry that I took him outside to the barn
00:25:09.800
with his cell phone and I threw the cell phone on the ground and I handed him my ax. And I said,
00:25:15.680
if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out. This phone is causing you to sin against your God and
00:25:22.440
me by being dishonest. Break the damn phone, son, right now. And he did. And he took an ax and he
00:25:27.980
shattered it. Now, a week later, I had to go buy him a new phone, but the symbolism will never leave
00:25:34.400
his soul. It is better to shatter a $400 stupid iPhone than it is to lie to your father. Don't lie to
00:25:42.220
your father ever, ever about anything. So, you know, I think that kind of, that's what comes to
00:25:49.040
mind. We've had the normal, normal things, but, but parents do everything you can to keep honesty
00:25:54.860
and transparency. And you might get a little angry when your kid makes a mistake this big, but get,
00:25:59.980
get 10 times more upset about the dishonesty. And that's what you have to go after. That's the,
00:26:05.480
I'm not saying get, I'm not saying yell and get upset. I'm saying the thing to focus on is truth
00:26:10.520
and transparency in a family more than anything else. That's, that's what will enable you to help
00:26:15.060
them grow in virtue as time goes on. But if they get in the habit of being dishonest with you and
00:26:21.140
they beat you in that, then you're not going to be able to help them when they become young adults.
00:26:25.300
And because I've been through some of those struggles with teenagers, now that they're adults,
00:26:29.540
our relationship is more open and pure and wonderful than ever before. And now I'm reaping a lot
00:26:34.860
of rewards from being tough on them. Uh, when they were teenagers, I'm closer to my adult children
00:26:40.400
than I ever was, even when they were teenagers or little kids.
00:26:44.100
What's truly fascinating. I've had the occasion to, um, throw an iPhone into the lake, but nonetheless,
00:26:53.460
It was me who did it. Getting them to do it is actually, wow.
00:26:58.080
And my wife was like, you just wasted 400 bucks. And I said, no, it was the best 400 bucks I ever spent.
00:27:02.820
I mean, I knew I was going to have to go get him another one at some point, but it's the,
00:27:07.440
it's the moral of the story. He would come on here and tell you it taught him something. So
00:27:12.920
parents look for those little symbolic moments, look for the symbolic moments that are long lasting.
00:27:20.120
And I think, I don't know. I think that's the same stuff. Parents deal with it. Whether you have
00:27:24.200
one or 16, you struggle over the same type of these human beings, man, it's human beings, but
00:27:28.900
I am experiencing a reward with having married children, adult children, and having a closeness
00:27:35.820
with them. That's sweeter than I ever imagined.
00:27:39.420
Wow. The investment, that, what you said there, that's so huge. That, that $400 cell phone,
00:27:47.940
it's so worth it. On the other end of the problems that can accrue from all that stuff,
00:27:55.240
you would pay not only $400, not only $4,000 to, to get that back. So that, that really is an
00:28:02.400
incredible investment. You said something fascinating in your book about, and I really
00:28:06.200
love this. I want you to unpack this for us. You, you recommend that parents envision each family
00:28:10.340
member 10 years in the future, taking into consideration their family members' traits
00:28:15.900
and temperament. So how does this exercise work to prepare children for what lies ahead in their
00:28:22.320
lives? How does it work for parents? What is this? This sounds great.
00:28:25.380
So what do you do as a business manager, right? You guys go, you go on some strategic retreat,
00:28:30.300
you know, uh, maybe the spouses get mad because it's a golf trip and they're like, you're not
00:28:34.460
playing golf. You're working, you know, or you're not playing, you're not working. You're just
00:28:36.900
playing golf. Like we all go on these business retreats and we say, okay, where do we want to be
00:28:40.720
in 10 years? What's the picture 10 years from now? And that's great. It's envisioning,
00:28:44.400
by the way, if you look up the word vision and the Oxford English dictionary, you know,
00:28:49.400
the big 13 volume set, you realize that traditionally the word meant vision is seeing
00:28:55.060
that which is not there yet. Sight is, I see the screen. I see this microphone. Vision is like
00:29:02.720
being a visionary. Like Catholics have visionaries. They see an apparition. They see something that's
00:29:07.960
not kind of physically there in the same way as normal sight. So actually when we say we have
00:29:12.700
2020 vision, we're wrong. We actually have 2020 sight. Um, vision is the ability to see beyond
00:29:20.720
the current surface. And so that's what being a visionary is. So mom and dad, you guys got to be
00:29:26.260
visionaries for your family. And thankfully my wife says, okay, Hey, Connor, you're the visionary.
00:29:31.920
She's more of the nuts and bolts. I'm the visionary. We kind of stay in our lanes. Every family's a little
00:29:37.140
different, but, but so I'm the visionary for my family. And so I did, I did an exercise first about
00:29:44.780
five years ago. And now I try to repeat it once a year at our annual family meeting. And I say, okay,
00:29:50.600
what's going to be going on in 10 years from now? So, so when I first did it five years ago,
00:29:56.160
John Henry, I said, well, in 10 years, oh my gosh, I might, my kids might be married and they might
00:30:03.640
have a kid, which means I'm a granddad, which means I'm going to be climbing in bed with a
00:30:07.960
grandma. What's going on here. Whoa. You know, and it was like my, my world was like, you know,
00:30:13.180
it just made it feel really, really normal. And my wife's the most beautiful grandma in the world.
00:30:18.020
I mean, you would never know she's a grandma, but you take on a different identity. Like since when
00:30:22.960
am I a young guy married to a grandmother? What, what is that about? It's just strange. So, so I,
00:30:29.060
but I then said to myself, here's a practical example of how it helps. If my kid has a kid
00:30:35.360
in the next 10 years, I have to raise my child to be a parent. So I was like trying to help my kid
00:30:43.640
get a, go to college and figure out his career. No, I have the most important thing I can do with
00:30:49.860
my teenagers is help them figure out how to be a husband, how to be a father, how to be a mom,
00:30:56.640
how to be a dad. Like that's be an accountant, be a financial planner. Come on. That's not
00:31:01.640
important compared to being a spouse or a parent. So it, it really did say, okay, I'm raising a
00:31:06.900
parent. Oh, I'm not raising kids. I'm raising a parent. I'm raising a grandparent. One day that
00:31:13.640
kid's going to be a grandparent, a great grandparent. So I started looking for opportunities to show my
00:31:19.860
kids, Hey, this is my imperfection. I'm not a very good dad in this way. And that way, I want you to be
00:31:25.640
better than me. I want you to be a better father, a better husband. Look at how I've let your mom
00:31:29.560
down in these ways. You need to be better than me. You need to be better than your mother. She's
00:31:33.420
amazing, but you're called to be even better than either one of us, you know? And so, you know, I was,
00:31:39.180
I, I changed my focus from raising kids to raising adults, raising parents, raising spouses.
00:31:47.280
And so the 10 year vision made that it just smacked me in the face. And guess what? It didn't take 10
00:31:54.200
years. It took like four and two, two of my kids were married and they had kids. And all of a sudden
00:32:00.320
I'm a grandparent. So you have a five-year-old right now in 10 years, they're going to be a raging
00:32:07.160
hormone at 15 years old with technology, trying to figure out their way in the, in the quasi adult
00:32:12.780
world. You got to prepare that kid now for that. What can you do now to help with that? So I think
00:32:18.800
envisioning the future now, 10 years from now, my 23 year old son's going to be 33.
00:32:23.940
He might have four or five kids. Now he's going to, I know what he's going to go through at 33.
00:32:28.140
He's going to have a ton of bills. He's going to be in the middle of major career decisions.
00:32:33.340
His wife is going to be strung out on four or five kids. Like it's stressful. Like he's entering
00:32:37.900
the most stressful time of his life. How can I help him right now to prepare for that?
00:32:42.220
So visionaries aren't stuck in the present. They live in the future and help pull the present
00:32:49.720
into the future in the right way. I think that's why we do the 10 year, 10 year envisioning exercise.
00:32:56.640
Your children deserve that type of leadership out of you.
00:33:00.500
Get into this temperament thing a little bit. I think a lot of people still don't know much about
00:33:05.900
temperaments. What are they? Where do you have some resources for us on that? And what do you
00:33:10.900
recommend for an approach in not only addressing their temperaments, but also taking advantage of
00:33:15.360
it? We released a book yesterday called Piety and Personality, and it's about the saints and
00:33:20.820
their temperaments. Okay. So there's historically, there's four Greek temperaments, choleric or choleric,
00:33:27.140
sanguine, melancholic, and phlegmatic. And Hippocrates, you've heard of the Hippocratic Oath,
00:33:33.160
which they removed abortion from, you know, that whole thing. LifeSite News would,
00:33:37.180
if anybody would know about that. And, and so, but, you know, I think it's the most
00:33:41.760
accurate personality assessment test because it's the most ancient and it has stood the test of time.
00:33:47.120
And I think that God just instilled four possible temperaments into the universe. And we, we,
00:33:52.720
we are one more than the other, sometimes a combination of two. So I find that there's a lot of,
00:33:59.100
there's a lot of assessment tests out there. There's something called the Colby index. There's
00:34:02.240
something called working genius that Patrick Lencioni has recently come out with a good Catholic guy.
00:34:06.160
who's a business consultant. There's a strength finder. There's a lot. My favorite is temperaments.
00:34:11.440
And my wife and I have found that it's the best way for us to kind of diagnose, uh, you know, what,
00:34:18.000
uh, like what each child is and each spouse is. So I'm melancholic choleric. Well,
00:34:24.620
kind of drives my wife bonkers because I can be, I'm, I could be inclined towards depression.
00:34:29.740
That's that melancholic in me, but I also have deep thoughts and I'm passionate about things.
00:34:35.400
Melancholics are kind of the dreamers and, you know, they write great poetry, but then they also
00:34:40.860
die early deaths. So it's like, that's the melancholic and then cholerics. My wife is choleric
00:34:46.860
and she makes the trains run on time, buddy. And thank goodness I married that because we would be
00:34:51.760
living in the streets if we didn't. So she's very strong. Um, and she has a secondary of sanguine,
00:34:57.480
which makes her fun to be around. So, and sanguine is kind of that fun loving class clown. Um, but
00:35:03.900
this, you know, you love having a sanguine around because they make the life, life fun. And we got
00:35:08.860
a couple of those, but then they can also be so lighthearted. They don't take things serious
00:35:12.940
enough, you know? And so each one has a strength or weakness. And then phlegmatics, steady Eddie,
00:35:18.100
the most reliable, but they're also the hardest to get going. Right. So, so it sometimes, you know,
00:35:23.840
that kid that's like, if they start it, they'll go and they'll go, but, and you don't have
00:35:27.460
to do anything once they start going, but to get them up and moving is like, you know,
00:35:31.980
a monumental feat. So phlegmatics are the peacemakers. They hate conflict. So they're
00:35:36.140
wonderful to have around them. In fact, we do an assessment on every single employee. They take
00:35:40.780
about five different tests and this, I mean, I'm not going to show the details, but I, every person,
00:35:45.480
every person that's an applicant, uh, has to take five different tests. And, and, and the temperaments
00:35:51.100
is one of them. It's quite interesting because without intending, we found out recently that like 80%
00:35:57.440
of our employees are phlegmatic and they make wonderful teammates because they're nice,
00:36:03.360
they're kind, they're peacemakers. They, they do what you tell them to do. It's, it's great,
00:36:07.440
but they're kind of lacking the big engine. Like, so I'm now looking for collar. It's like,
00:36:12.280
where's my lions. I need some lions to go hunt and grow and bar, you know, where are those people?
00:36:16.560
I don't have enough of those, you know? Um, and so it's just very helpful. I highly encourage
00:36:22.720
mom and dad. You, I talk about the temperaments in my book. Tan just came out with piety and
00:36:27.740
personality. Great book about the temperaments in the saints. And our friends at Sophia have a
00:36:32.780
tremendous book by Art Bennett called the temperament God gave you a fantastic book. I,
00:36:37.380
Sophia is a wonderful publisher like Tan. I love them. Um, good friends with, um, Charlie McKinney,
00:36:43.620
you know, a wonderful publisher saved that company. So there's plenty of resources, but here's the
00:36:49.100
thing. Take there's online tests, go find them. Just Google it, Google the temperament test
00:36:54.180
and take the test sitting around the table together. It's fun. You'll have so much fun doing
00:36:59.420
it and get spouses taking it for each other. And you'll start talking a language that really helps
00:37:04.980
you diagnose why we do certain things. And it's non-threatening because there's strengths and
00:37:09.760
weaknesses to both. So it's a very disarming thing. I highly encourage it.
00:37:13.960
What a great idea. It's a great idea. Not only because it's great to do and a good thing,
00:37:19.700
but it's a great idea because it makes for a fun family activity. That's not a movie or video
00:37:25.480
games or God knows what else. That's just great. And speaking as someone who is still stuck in
00:37:30.680
winter and really no possibility of going outside to do things. That's such a great idea. That is
00:37:37.040
wonderful. And there's a lot of assessment tests, take advantage of them, go find them.
00:37:41.540
And just the whole point of the whole thing, John Henry, I'm sorry to interrupt, but the whole point
00:37:45.940
is to learn to appreciate the man or woman, boy or girl that God made and stop with your prideful
00:37:54.520
self, expecting them to be what you want them to be. Appreciate and fall in love with who God made.
00:38:01.260
And when you do that, it makes their imperfections all the more easy to deal with.
00:38:08.340
Connor, I could keep talking to you all day, but we've got to close. Give us your final thoughts
00:38:13.380
and we'll close up because I want you to give us where we can get your book from and
00:38:17.880
tell everybody in detail how to get it. Because a lot of people are going to be super interested
00:38:21.060
right now. But give us your final thoughts first. I think the final thoughts is that your family,
00:38:26.300
if you're a mom and dad out there, that your kids deserve your absolute very best. And I want to
00:38:30.660
talk, I'm a man, I'm going to talk mostly to men for just a second. And it's this, if you're anything
00:38:36.840
like me, gentlemen, you've gone to work and you've tried very hard to be your very best peak
00:38:43.040
performance, impress your boss, impress your employees, your clients, your patients, whoever
00:38:47.920
it is. And then we go home and we're on our B game, our C game. We think it's because it's our
00:38:54.280
place of rest, which it is, that we can kind of get lazy. And what I found in my life, gentlemen,
00:39:01.840
is that I was so concerned about performing at my A game at work. Why? Because money and reputation
00:39:07.720
was on the line. And I'd go home and I was something far less than my family deserved.
00:39:14.600
And so to be the spiritual head of my family, I learned that I could bring some of the principles
00:39:20.520
of business that I've learned and that I do every day at work and being an executive at my office.
00:39:25.160
And I can bring some of those home and try to lead my family in a way they need. So I want to go home
00:39:31.120
nowadays and show my wife what I'm good at, as opposed to going home and acting like I'm the oldest of the
00:39:37.540
children waiting to be told what to do. And so I want my family to see me on my best game,
00:39:44.240
not my worst game. And it's time to start paying attention to your family in that way,
00:39:49.580
as if they're your most important client, as this, they're your most important customer.
00:39:53.860
And if you do that, you're going to perform at your highest. And you'll get to sleep in heaven.
00:39:58.640
You'll get to rest in heaven. And you don't worry about always having to relax and just let your
00:40:03.600
hair down. No, go home and work. Go home and impress your wife. Go home and lead your children.
00:40:10.080
You read these leadership books for your employees at work and not for your children. You know, so we
00:40:15.880
have a major flaw in our culture where men have forgotten how to go home and be that leader at the
00:40:21.700
house for both their spouse and their children. We do it at work every day. Men go home and be your
00:40:27.340
very best at home. And if my product can help you, so be it. If not, find something else. But don't
00:40:33.060
just be on your A-game at work. Be on your A-game at home, because that is how God is going to judge
00:40:42.260
Wellordorfamily.com. And then also, you know, I've started my own podcast. So, you know,
00:40:46.220
it's the Connor Gallagher Show, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube. You can just look for the Connor
00:40:50.620
Gallagher Show on YouTube. It'll be launching soon. And right now I'm on the Tan channel,
00:40:55.320
but I'm actually moving over to my own channel on YouTube. But, you know, yeah,
00:40:59.780
please follow the podcast. And I talk a lot about family stuff because it's what's near and dear to
00:41:03.000
my heart. But never listen to the Connor Gallagher Show in place of the John Henry Show because it's
00:41:08.120
great. So I joked with him before the show started, listeners, that I start this new podcast and I come
00:41:15.200
home and say, honey, did you listen to the podcast? And she's like, well, no, but I listened to John
00:41:19.000
Henry Weston. Anyway, you do a great job and LifeSite News is a beacon of light in a troubled
00:41:26.200
world. Thank you for everything you do. I really appreciate it. Praise God, Connor. Thank you so
00:41:31.120
very much. God bless you and God bless all of you. And we'll see you next time.
00:41:35.320
Hi, everyone. This is Fr. James Altman for LifeSite News. We hope you enjoyed this video. For more
00:41:45.480
content like this, check the links in the description. You can also connect with us on
00:41:51.100
social media to stay up to date with the latest news on life, faith, family, and freedom.
00:41:58.320
Thank you for watching and may God bless you all.