"Don't Break Him, He's Perfect"

October 24th, 2012, exactly 7 days after my third son was born, at a routine follow-up visit, Dr. Silverman told me “don’t break him, he’s perfect.” What are you thinking, my wife and I have two boys, 8 and 9, and I haven’t broken them yet?  Does she think I’m incapable of taking care of a newborn for a few hours? What does that mean?

Here we are seven years later and I am finally making sense of her advice.  I’ve taken a big step, I now see it as advice and not criticism, chalk one up for “making sense of experience” one of the steps in my own leadership development program.  Let me explain. 

After coaching and working with kids through the Emerge Coaching program where we focus on strengths, finding out what is right with people and doing more of it, leadership development and a peak performance mindset, I realized that “don’t break him” didn’t refer to me dropping my newborn or creating physical harm (thank God), but it referred to the “words matter” mantra that I also coach adults on.  Parents come to me to coach their children on how to use a positive mindset to maximize their performance in school or in athletics, but it is the parents, myself included, that often need the coaching, because our words and emotions are what “break” our children.

As a parent or manager of people, we often “break” our children and employees through our reactions and discouraging language that we use.  How many times have we asked our children after striking out, having a suboptimal lap or bringing home a bad grade “what are you doing out there, what the hell is wrong with you, toughen up, get over it, practice harder, you’re wasting my time, my money…" and as a result we go on to say “you can’t do this, you won’t go there, or you’re can’t succeed.” Sound familiar? Ok, maybe you won’t admit it, but maybe you’ve heard a friend say these things.

As a manager of people, have you heard similar things in the workplace, “what is wrong with you, why did you do that, why did you do it that way (in an irritated tone), what is wrong with this person or that person…?"  According to Gallup's State of the Global Workplace report, 85% of the world's workplace is not engaged or actively disengaged, mostly because we are always focusing on what is wrong with people. Assuming we don’t have that same measurement for parents, I bet our children are actively disengaged in a similar fashion, more so as they get older, leading to their participation in the workforce. 

We break our children and our employees by focusing on what is wrong with them or a particular situation. It’s time to “flip the script” and start asking what is right with an outcome. These days, it is popular to say “we learn more from our mistakes”, but the science shows that it is more effective to study what is right about our kids and employees.

Every training session I do, I ask the group “what’s wrong today?” And everyone raises their hands to answer, but when I ask them to tell me “what is right with you today?” It takes a long time for the attendees to answer.  In fact, the last two student training programs I've done, the kids couldn’t think of a single answer.  Have we “broken” them to the point that they cannot identify what they do right?  Of course not, but it is time to think about how we react to our children when something doesn’t go as planned before we break them and send them into our workforce contributing more to the 85% of global employees who are disengaged. 

Thanks to the advice from Dr. Silverman, it all makes sense now! 

How will you make sense of your experience?  Remember, people are perfect, especially kids, we as adults are the ones breaking them!

gf