Laying down the law without getting consensus leaves teens feeling like they're in a straight jacket.

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What you will discover this week:

• The importance of explaining "why"
• Two keys for getting cooperation

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Transcript for this weeks message:

Welcome to this week's ‘You Are Destined For Greatness.’ I appreciate you taking your time to be here with me today. Coming to you from HQ, The Horsemanship Journey headquarters here.

You may heard we've, you've heard and I've heard that people say that we're all salesmen, right? And I used to sometimes wonder exactly, what do you mean? It doesn't seem like sometimes I'm a salesman, but we certainly are with our kids, okay? Or if we're not, we need to develop some sales skills. Here's what I mean. Have you ever said to your kids, or heard from your parents even, “Because I said so.” In other words, “I need you to do this.” “Why?” “Because I said so.”

Okay, here's the deal with that. Kids and adults, all of us, want to have autonomy. What that is, is to be able to govern ourselves, to be able to make decisions for ourselves. We want our own independence, our own freedom. We want to be able to manage ourselves. And kids are in a hurry to grow up and to be in charge of themselves. So, they're not until they are, and so how do we manage that?

One way that we can get kids to come around to our way of thinking is if we, if they can understand and agree with the why, okay? And there's research that's proven that this is a fact, that you have more cooperation and more compliance with the way that you want things to be or with making agreements or even setting consequences, if your kids understand why.

Okay, here's an example for us. When they first enacted the seat belt law, a lot of people said, "Well, you're not going to tell me, you know, what I'm going to do in my car." And then a lot of people heard, "Well, if you do wear your seat belt, you're reducing the odds of you dying in a car accident." Okay, well, if I understand that, I may agree to wear my seat belt a little bit easier. That may make sense to me. And that maybe something to do because I want to make a decision for me based on what I think is good without you telling me the way that it's going to be. We all like that.

Kids sometimes feel like, if we're not careful, kids feel like we're just wrapping them up in a strait jacket, and that this can be the way it's going to be as long as I'm here. And then I'm going to bust loose and do whatever the hell I want. So the more that we can get agreement, okay, and get compliance and get cooperation the better relationship we're going to have .And the better behavior, probably, and the better outcomes that we're going to have in the long run. Kids need to agree on the why.

So, the biggest thing that we can do, okay, we can reason with, we can sit down, we can involve them in the discussion of the consequences and the agreements or the rules that we have, and the consequences for breaking the rules or the agreements that we come up with .We can go through the reasons, all the reasons why, and we can try to have them agree with that.

But here's the deal with that, okay? This is the point of today's message. The biggest impact that we're gonna have on their agreeing with our agreement or our rule, okay, is the example that we set. Now, we all know that we need to lead by example, and that kids learn more from example than they do from words. Okay, but really, okay, when it comes down to when I go to him to make an agreement or to establish a rule to establish a boundary or to establish an agreement, it's going to have consequences. If I want cooperation, okay, rather than just a poor attitude, and if I want the best outcome that I can have with this, the most important thing is how I am, okay, my example that I'm setting. Because if I have a lot of resentment, if I have a lot of anger, if I have a lot of stuff stirring around in me… And if I'm, you know, unhappy a lot, if I feel like I'm acting out, if I feel like I'm reacting a lot of stuff… Kids are like, well, I don't want to be like that, you know, doesn't look good in this.

So let me make this clear. This doesn't mean that things don't go wrong, and things are happy all the time. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about a peaceful, calm, confident leader that most of the time, 'cause things aren't gonna be good all the time. But even when things are not good, that comports themselves and sets and displays and presents and shows up like the calm and confident leader that our kids need us to be. That's really what's going to make the difference and get the cooperation.

Hey, appreciate you being with us. Those are some of the things that we delve deeper into individuals, pieces, and circumstances of stuff like that in Stable Living. Anyway, until next time, remember You, and your kids, Are Destined For Greatness.

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