Giving Control.

I am a fixer and a bit of a control freak.  I like to help where I can and have been guilty of taking over on many an occasion.

During a training session the other day we were watching the video  by David Marquet about greatness. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqmdLcyES_Q

I have watched this video so many times during the training I have delivered for various Agile teams.  Yet this day while I was reflecting on how I could encourage more independence and greater maturity in my daughter, I was truly able to take in the message.

I want my daughter to be better with her manners, but I have not sold the vision, I have not sold the why and although I have told her over and over again what to do, I have not made sure she is actually competent in each of these and given her the practice situations.

So I have a few questions to ask myself to reduce my own anxiety and desire to fix.

1. If they don’t ask for help – don’t offer.
2. If they ask for help – ask myself – is this mine to fix?

In addition to this I am also going to try and work through the following with my daughter.

I came up with this visual to help me make a plan.

 

I am going to start with explaining what I want and why I want it, what’s in it for her.

Then I am going to get her to help work through what she needs to know and how that can be measured and actioned.  Therefore building up her competency.  We can then practice which will help her know if it is the right thing to do in each situation.

Book review – The journey to enterprise agility.

How can you prove that this technique works?

You can’t just copy others models. You need to go through the journey to get the value from these models. Your journey creates the value and knowledge for the team and makes it their own.

I enjoyed this book and wish I could review it more concisely, but much like what I have said above, I think the value is in the journey through the book.   On discussions with my partner we all want to be told what the next step is, how do we do it,  give us a step by step guide we can follow to succeed.  Many books these days focus on trying to open up our minds so that we can progress along the journey and learn and grow as we go.

In that way I think it’s more about following so much of the advise from many agile books these days.  Know your end goal and measures of success.  Take your first small step, reflect and get feedback, then adapt and pivot to learn. Repeat until you get to where you want to go.

Parenting pillars

During mediation lately I have had to battle my emotions and mama bear instincts and my own wants and needs and desire to win at all costs by having it my way.  It’s been a rough journey and the thing that has really helped me to move forward and actually think about decisions in an objective way is by defining the pillars that I want all decisions to be based on.

For me parenting is around:

• Protecting my child – making sure she is safe.
• Teaching my child – helping create an environment for her to grow and develop into a successful member of society, giving her the best start in life we can.
• Building relationships – helping her to connect with people and have fun.

So from this I have my 3 pillars.

Safety means:

• How she is picked up/ dropped off, her transportation to school and other activities, places
• Her safety online and with devices.
• Who looks after her when parents can’t
• Being home alone
• Who looks after her on teacher only days, sick days.
• The activities a parent can do while looking after her.  e.g not getting drunk as need to be able to drive in the event of an emergency.

Environment for growth means:

• Providing access to counselling
• Afterschool activities
• Homework assistance and time
• Hygiene
• Etiquette
• Learning and development
• Setting her up to be well rested and able to focus on her school work.

Fun and Connection means:

• Regular contact by parents
• Time with wider family members
• Birthdays, Christmas, mothers and fathers day
• Holidays
• Friends and social activities.

My aim is to make things simple.  Our daughter is split between our care, when she is with one parent, the other parent no longer is the primary caregiver.  This is causing concern for both of us around what the other is doing with her when she is in the other parents care.

To help keep this simple and to help build a little more trust again.  I believe we have to think in terms of these pillars and agree that any decisions we make with our daughter while she is in our care needs to be aligned with these pillars. The other parent will then be informed of the decision and does not necessarily have to agree but will not block.  Any decision that breaks or doesn’t quite meet the pillars need to be jointly decided and agreed by both parents for it to go ahead.

Fingers crossed that this provides us with a foundation that we can move forward with.

Book Review – the infinite game by Simon Sinek

Simon Sineks latest book has some great stories to help explain the difference between a finite and infinite game.  To me its all about perspective and I know I am as guilty as anyone else of getting stuck in the finite game, getting stuck playing the rules of the short term game and forgetting why I am playing at all,  What is my long term goal again?

It is when I am stuck in these finite games that I am not at my best.  I am playing by other peoples rules and am not being creative or thinking out of the box or with a growth mindset and more importantly I am not playing collaboratively, with trust or with kindness.   Whereas an infinite game – there is no winning, the goal is to keep playing the game.

” No one is crowned the winner of careers”

Its about looking for ways to do something new, embracing the challenges and changing that fear to excitement.  Looking for all possibilities that will keep you in the game.  We need to make decisions on what will benefit everyone and focuses on the infinite vision, and builds up our resilience.

I have been going through mediation with my Ex around parenting our daughter and have come up with 3 pillars that I believe cover off what we need to remember when making any decisions relating to parenting.  I will cover these off in another post.

It is this book and the reminder that I need to be playing an infinite game and not just to win that is helping me through this process and enabling me to help us move forward.

My other reflection on this was that finite game sounds very much like a fixed mindset and infinite game sounds very much like a growth mindset,  Its just looking at things a little differently and hopefully it helps explain these viewpoints and mindset to others that may not have got it from Carols book.