Hearts > Outcomes

My youngest turned four months old last week. When she was born, I took some time off to focus on one of the other primary forms of work in my life, parenting. 

Whether it’s a week of vacation at the beach, a long weekend in the mountains, or paternity leave, I’ve tended to benefit from significant learning when I step out of the normal day-to-day. This three-week stretch was no different, but I’ll be honest, it was a tougher learning moment than most.

Here is the punchline:

🤜 My work of parenting was focused on outcomes and I was missing the heart 🤛 

Paternity leave left me with three crucial learnings that hope can encourage you to enter this week with your best foot forward.

1. Learn to prioritize hearts over outcomes

2. Embrace inefficiency to win hearts

3. Winning hearts results in true flourishing

Prioritizing hearts over outcomes

When I talk about the work of parenting, prioritizing hearts might not be easy, but who would argue that a child’s heart isn’t worth that work? That is why it was such a gut punch when I realized how I was failing to do this during paternity leave.

For the last week of break, Carolyn and I took walks around a park after the boys went to school. Our conversations centered around the behavior of our boys, especially our older one, Luke, who had just started Kindergarten.

While that type of conversation isn’t uncommon for us, or most parents, something was different about it this time. My emotions were heightened. I hadn’t realized just how high my expectations were for Luke to step up when his new sister arrived.

I was looking for him to demonstrate a few key behaviors:

1. Be helpful - step up and help the family while we adjust to life with three kids

2. Be a role model - listen well and set a good example for his younger brother

3. Honor mom - be respectful and kind to his mom

What I was missing was his heart. What do I mean by that? Well, when I wasn’t seeing these behaviors, my parenting work centered around corrective actions. This generally looked like trips to his room, where I’d emphasize why obedience is important and he would argue and get frustrated. These battles would continue until I’d finally wear him down, he’d apologize, and then we’d go back to normal life until he acted out again 30 minutes later. Each time my patience would dwindle and frustration would creep in.

No matter what type of work we are doing, the reality is that getting to the heart of someone’s behavior requires sacrifice.

• Sacrifice of your energy

• Sacrifice of your time

• Sacrifice of your to-do list

And more often than not, sacrifice can feel pretty inefficient.

Embracing inefficiency to win hearts

Whether you are thinking about the work of a parent or the work within your career, inefficiency is not something we often put on the shortlist of desirable characteristics.

Imagine going into an interview and saying, “I think you should hire me because I’m great at inefficiency.” At face value, you’d get laughed out of the room.

But what if they listened long enough to hear the next sentence, where you said, “I help people unlock their greatest performance by investing my time to enable them to connect to their hearts, and there is nothing more powerful than a team with full hearts. I’m so good at inefficiency, that I generally end up producing the most efficient teams wherever I go.”

Said differently for the Friday Night Lights fans out there:

Inefficiency isn’t a sexy tagline, but if the purpose of work is to grow the people, then we better learn how to rebrand that word.

Winning hearts results in true flourishing

🌟 YPT’s mission is to unlock human flourishing by producing thought-provoking content and conversations around the purpose of work 🌟 

That is why this conversation is so important. If we want to unlock human flourishing, we have to embrace the inefficiency that comes with the pursuit of people’s hearts.

Work comes in all kinds of forms, but one constant remains: our first job is to grow as human beings. It took me a while to realize that my struggle with Luke during paternity leave was just selfishness over my time, energy, and comfort.

So as you go into this week, I’ll challenge you with a few questions:

1. Which relationships in your life are you more focused on the behaviors vs the heart behind them?

2. What would it look like for you to intentionally create inefficiency this week so that you can pursue someone you work with at a deeper level?

3. Who is someone who has embraced inefficiency to help you flourish in your life? If you are able, give them a call and say thank you.

I’ll close with this. Sometimes it can feel pretty inefficient for me to spend a few hours of my week writing this. I’d imagine it might feel a little inefficient for you to read it on a Monday morning. While there are things we both could have spent our time on that might have created more immediate results, I have great faith that every bit of inefficiency will be worth it for the flourishing we are pursuing.

As always, please respond to this email if you’d like to talk and discuss anything from this or prior posts! And if you have any friends who you think might derive value from this - I’d love for you to share it with them.

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With Hope and Gratitude,

Alex