DailyJim: Helping families by helping individuals

Hello everyone, welcome to another Daily Gym. This is the episode for Monday, November 18th, 2024. Today I want to talk about helping families by helping individuals.

I think often how I have framed the work that I do is that I help individuals, I help people get better at such and such, often dealing with emotions, dealing with conflict, dealing with themselves, whatever it may be. I think maybe I have done myself a disservice by saying that it just helps individuals.

I started to think about what is maybe one of the hardest things that people are going to go through nowadays in the U.S. And maybe around the world, but especially in the U.S. post-election, is seeing their families during the holidays. It's going to Thanksgiving, it's going to Christmas, it's having conversations with family members that may be somewhat distant or they may be very close family members, but have become more and more estranged over time. Often we blame it on politics, but I don't think it really has that much to do with politics. It's just the one thing that we can talk about emotionally, because culture doesn't let us talk about other things emotionally.

And I started thinking about, I'm not really trying to help individuals, I'm trying to help families. How many families are going to feel more disconnected, more separated, and may not even celebrate the holidays together because people just don't want to deal with it anymore. I imagine there are many people now in the U.S., like I said, but even around the world, there are wars going on. There are highly divisive issues that come up in societies, and there are just really hard family conflicts that we don't resolve because it's hard to live in a family. We don't choose our family the family's chosen for us most of the time and even if we do choose our family that over time, we may not always choose things change, things evolve and sometimes we grow more distant we have different desires and so the conflicts become real and really hard to talk about and resolve so, Yeah, I think coming into this holiday season, I think a lot of people are going to be, I think I read something that said there was a survey that almost like 25% of people said they're just going to avoid their family on the holidays this year. And 60% or 65% felt anxiety and stress about it.

What if just one family member learned how to deal with these situations better? What if just one family member learned how to apologize and learned how to forgive and learned how to see that the people in the family are trying their best, to see that they're trying their best? What if just one person in each family learned some of these skills? I mean, how would our families look different? How would our society look different if just one person in these families tried? Tried not tried i mean we're trying but learn something different tried a different approach um really kept fighting when other people just wanted to give up.

Lifted each other out of this this conflict avoidance that we're in and yeah i think when i frame it that way and i think when we start framing things in that way it's it's less about the individual gain and less about the private gain and more about something that's like semi-public or even more public families are kind of semi-public i guess it's if what is a community except groups of families built together um or at least even if we have communities where our families are involved directly they're still indirectly involved if we go to work what's happening at home and the family matters. It impacts how we work. Now you can say how we work impacts the family and that's true as well.

But I think some of our deepest, closest, most intimate relationships are with our family. That's with our parents, with our children, with our spouses, with our siblings, with uncles, aunts, grandparents.

These are some of the closest relationships we have. And if those start falling apart, we can't repair those. How can we repair the other ones? So and conversely if we can repair those if we can build deeper relationships with these people how is that going to affect not only our work but the other communities we're in and the culture that we have and ultimately the politics that we we um believe in the politics that we support, so it's going to be a rather short one today i just wanted to get that message out there that focusing on helping families by helping individuals may, one, makes me feel a lot more hopeful that the impact goes a little bit farther.

Two, helps me see that this impact could cascade into a larger level from families to communities, societies, whatnot. And three, maybe it makes it easier for the business model I've talked about before, because.

The idea is i want to help these families you know if i if i have if i can help a father and by helping the father that helps the son that helps the the wife man why would i need to charge that person why would i try to charge them directly this is more of a societal impact if we could have healthy families we could have well-knit honest loving, families that know how to fight for each other and not give up on each other how would that impact so much of our lives so that's what i'm hoping for that's my focus right now um i feel pretty excited about it but i'm curious to hear how you all you all react to it so i'll talk to you all tomorrow bye.