Creating New Family Traditions – Episode 480

This transcript was auto-generated and may contain errors.

[00:01] Welcome to the Prosperity Podcast. Prosperity thinkers, on this episode of the podcast, we’re going to be talking about family traditions. We’re going to be sharing maybe a different angle, different approach. So, Kim, are you ready to get surprised by the family traditions that I’m bringing on today? Yeah, I love new traditions. Yeah, a dichotomy there, but bring it on. Yes, so I’ll give a backstory of how this came about and why I think it’s important. So, recently I was on a fishing trip up in Alaska, and I was with a group of friends and our sons. And one of the questions that I heard someone ask, and I may have read this in a book months ago, which is to ask others, what are the family traditions that they have?

[00:55] Because every family does something a little different. And for example, a book I was reading, and then I was listening to a podcast, one of the traditions that the family had is that every Sunday morning they make waffles and have waffles together. I thought, okay, that’s neat. So I asked one of the guys that we’re fishing with, what are some of their family traditions? And he said one that we had not been doing, and we implemented right away and got immediate results. It’s cool. So the family tradition is that every evening they say prayer as a family, and that’s how they wrap up their day. Now the tradition, and we already do that, so this is adding in the new habit. The person that’s giving the prayer, everyone else will give praise to them.

[01:41] They’ll say something they’re grateful for, or they’ll say something that they really admire about that person. So we’ve been doing this for several days now, and it came to Ellie’s night. And you could tell she was like, she was really excited. And afterwards she’s like, I love this new tradition we have, like immediately. So I know it’s stuck. And I think it’s easy for us to find those traditions, but maybe we just don’t ask or don’t look. So Kim, I would love to hear what are some family traditions you guys have? Well, I will enjoy sharing. And before I do, I just want to comment on incredible validity that we give to a human being when we can point out some positive things. And all human beings need that, want that.

[02:33] And we can be as stalwart as they come, which I certainly consider myself very much that way. And yet having somebody compliment us, help us pull the good out, highlight one of our strengths is so, so valuable. So what a cool addition to a tradition. And what you said is very accurate. It’s really just a habit, and that’s all that traditions are. And I know for myself, my Colby profile is 4492. We’ve talked about Colby in lots of different places. That nine quick start is the third number, and it indicates that I am very, very future focused. And so the whole idea of traditions just used to really bother me. Like I would never really want to go to reunions. And when people talk about tradition, sometimes I just didn’t really like the idea because they seemed past based.

[03:25] And like you brought up earlier, so many of them seemed to surround food. And I get it. You know, food is a biblical basis of love and generosity and sharing. And I understand the value of that. And my husband really enjoys food and uses food very well in our events to help people congregate and develop new relationships and deeper relationships. So intellectually, I get all of that. But just humanly, I guess, if you will, or in my own heart, I just resisted some of it. I don’t like the over focus on food, and I don’t like the idea of repeating something over and over and over again. And it’s why I said to you like, oh, new traditions. Like you put the word new in front of it and I’m in. And so I think the idea of having traditions be a tradition can help those that are in our listener audience that also think like me create new and alive and fresh traditions.

[04:32] So it’s almost like the fact that you have a tradition is the tradition and what the actual tradition is becomes less important. Now, that being said, we absolutely have some family traditions. We have some food traditions and other aspects that I absolutely love sharing and I’m so happy that maybe somebody else can pick up with them and enjoy them. And one of them is very much like your friend added to your family prayer time. And that is a positive focus. And it’s interesting because right now, as we are recording this, I’m preparing for our team meeting that will be in October. So it’s the end of August. And so Kim’s definition of preparing is usually make it up like a few minutes before.

[05:19] So it tells you the importance of that team meeting if I’m already preparing for it. Well, our team meeting has some traditions also. And so this positive focus, which you heard me talk about in many different ways, I want to liken it back to the commentary that you gave about singling out a particular person and being super specific about the good that they bring into the world. And maybe it is just about that day’s good. Maybe it’s more of like, oh, in the last year, I’ve seen this or in the last week or last weekend or what have you. But again, I really want to highlight the specificity aspect of it because it’s super easy to be like, oh, this person’s always, you know, fill in the blank.

[06:07] But when we’re specific, and ideally if we can give an example as well, then we get even better results. So I’ll share a story that an example of this, and that is that our family and extended family, so this is including like spouses and cousins and that kind of thing, work hard to speak very positively about each other. And yet, as all families deal with, because family is kind of like a team, right? There’s dynamics at play that cause challenges. And so I’m going to be generic in my story so the family members don’t get called out. But there was a very specific situation that created a comment of and, so there was good spoken of, right? And then the word and, which we work hard at using, and I got this from the comedy people in Chicago that teach business owners.

[07:06] Improv comedy. Thank you. Yes. How to use the word yes and in their sentences. It’s actually the title of a book. So and the person wanted to see skin in the game of the other person. And so this is a tradition that we use in our family all the time is awesome. And how can we have skin in the game? So it’s whether we’re asking that question of ourselves, or we’re asking that question of somebody else. Love the idea. Yes. And how can we have skin in the game? So that’s a tradition that you might not even put under the category of traditions that our family uses to help each of us get better results and to help each of us know what the other family members are going to be contributing. I like that.

[07:56] I think even the and and yes, like having that in your language, not quite tradition, but it’s very intentional there. And then the skin in the game, we can call that one tradition. That’s really good. I like that. Okay. I would love to hear some more traditions. I know that as you are at the home alone as a couple, there may be certain traditions, be it, you know, on the weekend, there’s movie nights, and then there’s ways that we will have alone time and think when family comes in, there may be different traditions. I’m wanting to find the additional good that people do because I think too often, we forget to share some of the good. You know, we get so wrapped up in the bigger cause, but we forget that it’s the foundational things that have have got us there.

[08:53] So Kim, let’s hear some additional traditions if you’re comfortable sharing those. Oh, of course. So you picked up on the family movie night. I’ll share traditions that we do when it’s not movie night. So when I was growing up, my parents were teachers. And so we had a very distinct cadence in our family of school nights versus not school nights. So, obviously, Sunday night, Monday night, Tuesday night, Wednesday night, Thursday night are school nights. And so I have loosened that grasp a little bit and don’t call Sunday night a school night anymore, which means Sunday night can be a movie night. But that begs the question, what do we do on, quote, school nights, even though we do not have any children in our home that are dealing with school?

[09:43] It’s work related, right, or, you know, game on, whatever you want to call it. And so we have these red chairs in our living room. They’re comfortable chairs and they also allow a computer, if that seems appropriate. Although I will tell you that one of our traditions of Mine and Todd’s is we try to stay off the computer for, say, evening. But sometimes whatever it is that you’re working on is, you know, might even be a personal project, but it requires a computer. So that’s really the secondary part. But red chair time is the name of the tradition. And it means that we’re going to be in the living room where there does happen to be a TV, but it’s on the wall and hardly ever used. There clearly is no TV on. Emma Dogg, of course, is on her bed, which is right in the middle of the living room and frankly takes up the entire carpet.

[10:36] Because the chair circles on the smaller side and so Emma’s on the bigger side and consequently she takes up the carpet. And sometimes I’m in my red chair and sometimes I’m on the floor with Emma Dogg, but it’s basically reading time. And I may read a book on a Kindle or Todd may be on his tablet reading some of the technical things that he enjoys reading. But it is so important, I think, to make sure that there is time for that kind of activity. A good two, three, four nights a week. So pretty much Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday night. That is what we’re doing is red chair time and we’ll call it out because there’s exceptions. Of course, we’ll occasionally watch a movie on a Tuesday night or have red chair time on a Saturday night.

[11:22] Just depending on what’s going on and what’s important to us. But when somebody says red chair time, it’s clear that that time is spent in quiet. There’s not music on. Sometimes it’s an hour or two or even more, two and a half of after dinner and quiet time. You could call it spiritual time, meditation time, reading time, you name it. And it’s a joy. And I look forward to it just as much as I do movie night. Oh, I like that. That’s so good. You’re intentional again. And, you know, our last episode that we had, we talked about the importance of intentionality. And now more so than ever, we’re getting pulled apart. I mean, I think one of the saddest things that I see is when I go to a restaurant and I’ll see a couple each on their phones.

[12:14] Or you see a child and it’s a baby with a phone right in front of it or a tablet. And they may be intentionally trying to not have a certain conversation or intentionally trying to occupy themselves. But long term, that intentionality is really going to hurt. And so your red chair time, the movie time, the time of talking with the family, finding and having a positive focus, that intentionality is so critical. The traditions that we have are what will matter. I’ll share one other piece and then I want to I’m going to grab one other tradition in there. I have a friend whose wife just passed away. She had cancer. And we all know someone that has gone through that. And as I was talking with him, I said, right now is the time that you want to spend with your son and be helping him.

[13:13] And I said, it doesn’t really matter what you say. It’s how he’s going to feel. I think traditions go that way. Maybe, you know, looking back, the red chair time that you had last October, you’re not going to remember what book you were reading. But you remember how you felt being there with Emma and with Todd. That’s what’s important. So do you have a final tradition or maybe some advice that would be helpful for our listeners so they can start to implement more of these in their life? I do. And this will come as no surprise to our listeners. But that is that our traditions include talking about money. And it started when the kids were one and two years old. You know, that first shopping cart experience where the child’s grabbing for the candy or the toy or whatever it is.

[13:59] Our family has talked about money openly. Sometimes I think embarrassingly openly because the capability of sharing and being comfortable sharing is different for every single person. And so I remember one time there were some things that I shared about a cousin’s situation. And I think I should have asked him first if it was OK because he was maybe not as used to it. But now the family kind of knows that when we get together, which does tend to be around the holiday time, either the week before or the week after Christmas, that money is going to be a part of the conversation and that we’re all there to learn and we’ve made mistakes. And that’s another aspect of traditions that we absolutely share are mistakes that we’ve made, failures that we’ve had in the learnings that have occurred from them.

[14:49] And so, you know, maybe it’s related to money, maybe it’s not. But those are actually two that I would add in the mix of traditions that are just conversations. They can be done without judgment and they can be done sometimes without solution. But they’re conversations. We’re always talking about them. Oh, that’s so good. And for you as a listener, if you’re looking for specific traditions or questions to ask conversations around money, the book that Kim has written, Perpetual Wealth, is specifically for families. It will bridge that gap. And I found that listening to this podcast, I walk away and it helps me to have better conversations with my kids about money. And on top of that, if you’re looking for that guide that will help you, definitely check out Perpetual Wealth.

[15:43] We’ll put that inside of the show notes so that you have a link and you can go directly there. Great suggestion. Yes, thank you, Spencer, for that up. And we’ve developed both a workbook and a game to go with that book in an effort to help people implement the suggestions that are contained within. Perfect. We will have a link to those resources in the description of this episode. And thank you for being a loyal listener. If you haven’t already gone on Spotify, if you’re a Spotify listener, you can go on there and you can rate the show. And we love all of those five star ratings. And if you’re an Apple listener, you can definitely leave a review from your device. And we would love to hear your feedback on there as well.

[16:32] So thank you for being a loyal listener on the podcast. Thank you for listening to the Prosperity Podcast. To take control of your money and have it work for you, visit Prosperity Thinkers. .com.