171: Power to Change Friday Book Club: Part 1

So if you did the homework.

Did you do the homework? If you read part one, who not do? And if you're anything like me, one line there just kind of stops you cold, right? Who am I trying to become? Not what am I doing on a regular basis? Let me tell you about the moment this clicked for me.

And of course, I always bring it back to my successes and failures as a parent.

A while back, and I've shared this in a blog story before, but I feel like it really resonates.

A while back, we were all about checklists with their chores.

Every night, they had checklists that they needed to go through to fix their chores.

And one of them was clean your room.

They would show me the checklist.

And because of that, I just assumed that it was done correctly to my standard.

And then one day, I decided to audit the situation.

This shirt's jammed into drawers and clothes wedged into the closet and blankets scrunched into piles in the corner and, you know, trying to sit in the gap and trying to be patient.

I said, hey, guys, this this is not clean.

At least it's not my definition of clean.

And they looked at me and they're like, what do you mean? Like we cleaned our room.

And then that second, I realized they weren't lying.

They weren't lazy.

At least I was trying to assume the best in them.

They were just doing.

They were like, okay, this is a task.

This is on my checklist.

I'm just going to do it.

I'm going to check the box and clean my room.

The problem was they had no picture of...

the type of person you need to become to keep a clean room.

There was no identity.