Newsletter Apr 12, 2024

It was a Friday night. My last day in the office before a holiday …

As any leader can relate, I didn’t want to be the bottleneck for anything while I was away, so while preparing dinner with my wife, I was also checking my laptop - doing my best to close things out. Let’s say I was semi-present, which, of course, made me insufficiently present in two places simultaneously! It’s a dilemma of our modern work/life hybrid life …

I was not the only one with a dilemma that night. Our youngest daughter, a radiant seven-year-old, decided that Fish Tacos were a “Yuck!” that day. (One of two possible options; more on that below.)

So, dinner found itself extended as we all sorted out our issues. For me, it was a slow gravity that seemed to pull me back to my laptop, where I might catch that one last (!) work email to prevent issues while I was gone …

“Sweetie, you’ve been on the computer the whole afternoon. Can you come sit with us?” my wife lobbed over.

Pushing through a moment of resistance, I peeled my eyes from the screen and wandered over to sit down. Of course, whatever it was, it could wait.

My little one started talking about something that had happened a few minutes earlier, and it just struck me. It wasn’t the content of what she was saying; she’s at the age where she is just having fun finding new ways to interweave words and ideas to make herself and us laugh. Instead, it was how she was changing right before my eyes.

Now, fully present with her, I just relaxed in my seat, listened, and played along with no impulse to change anything about what she was doing or how she was being. It was one of those moments … if you’re a parent, you can relate: When you see your child getting older and subtly but surely shifting into a new phase. It’s as delicious and awe-inspiring as it is fragile. At that moment, the only thought running through my head was a phrase I’d read a few days earlier in a book on parenting.

“I just love to watch you play.”

Such a simple phrase perfectly triggered the shift in mindset I needed to step away from the details, logistics, and pressure to get things done. This phrase captured the feeling of being with her without any need for her to be any different than she already was.

The book that quote came from was Raising Empowered Athletes, and I had the opportunity to sit down with Kirsten Jones a few days earlier to talk about the intense, confusing, and expensive world of youth sports. Having grown up as an athlete in a very different time and with kids who are not (or perhaps not yet) into competitive sports, it was a fascinating conversation about how this world came to be, the pitfalls so many parents fall into, and what we can do to peel our eyes away from the scoreboard and get back to having fun.

Maybe you can relate, or maybe you’re thinking, “Jonathan, what do undesirable fish tacos and pre-vacation emails have to do with me?”

Well, perhaps you have a co-worker who, for whatever reason, isn’t happy with what’s on their menu at work today. And maybe, if you’re a manager, it might cause you a bit of frustration; you might want to click away from their concern to focus on something important to you. What if you didn’t?

What if, sometimes, not every time, you put down the thing at the front of your mind and proactively went against the voice that has your focus chained? What if that simple act alone—slowing down enough to watch someone play (or work!)—would deepen your relationship and maybe even serve as a source of ideas and innovation you can’t find in task mode?

Every moment is an opportunity to move beyond individuality into something larger. Ironically, the moments that we find ourselves the most shackled in thought are the ones that can become the most profound.