Jay Papasan:
On Monday, we dropped the first four lessons of the seven lessons I learned on leadership from a parenting expert. And that parenting expert is Dr. Becky Kennedy, who is the author of Good Insight. Fabulous book, fabulous program. You should definitely listen to it any chance you get. Today we’re going to cover the second half of those lessons, lessons five, six, and seven. Just as impactful for you as a leader, as a parent, as someone who just wants to have better, deeper relationships. I hope you’ll enjoy it as much as the first episode. Here we go.
I’m Jay Papasan and this is The ONE Thing, your weekly guide to the simple steps that lead to extraordinary results.
All right, lesson five, the power of repair. Now, this is huge in relationships, especially with our children, but the idea of the power of repair also is powerful in the context of leadership. So, I’m going to start kind of heavily on the parenting side, and then lead you into the leadership side because I had to really digest the parenting side of this, and also having been a former child part of this before I could really put it in context of leadership. But I know that she went deep on this on the Mel Robbins podcast. It’s also in the book, Good Inside, that I keep referring to that I just thought, “Wow, this is the best parenting/leadership book I’ve read in a long time.” But she talks about our triggers, our stories from our past playing out in the present.
So many things that trigger us as parents are actually us reliving moments that are unresolved from our own childhood. So, if our parents were constantly yelling at us because we were late for the school bus, guess what we’re likely to be triggered with our kids, right? They’re dragging their feet. Why? Why can’t they just tie their shoes and get ready? I’m gonna be late for work. And they kind of start pushing our buttons, but they aren’t the buttons that they created. They’re the buttons that we showed up with.
And those triggers, those stories from our past that are kind of playing out in the present kind of lead us to some of our most emotional behaviors. And those are often not our proudest moments. Like, we all know what… I mean, I hope you’re aware of what your triggers are. I know what some of mine are. And I know what some of mine are with my mom. I know what some of them are with my wife. I know what some of them are with my partners, right? We all have triggers. That’s just part of it.
We don’t even have to go to our therapist right now and figure out exactly why, but awareness starts in knowing when those triggers, those buttons get pushed. Maybe on the wrong day or with too much frequency, it tends to yield to big strong emotions that are not completely under control. That’s the days that we yell at the cat, we yell at the kid, that we might be a little inappropriately emotional at work. You never know it. But this idea that the stories from our past are playing out in our present, and that’s where triggers come from, was a big one for me.
If you’ve had employees, if you’ve had a team that reported to you, you know why I’m spending so much time on triggers. Like you sit around with a bunch of people that run big teams, and if we’re talking about leadership of people, at some point you get to these hot buttons, “Oh, I hate it when someone does this,” or whatever. Triggers show up in the workplace too. As leaders, just like as Dr. Becky would coach our parents, can we be aware enough to separate our feelings about the trigger from our feelings about the employee. Like, we can be unhappy that this situation is happening and separate it from our feelings about the person who triggered that.
They hit the trip wire. It’s a booby trap, not just for us, but for them as well. They didn’t create the situation that’s triggering with us. That happened before. That’s not their fault. So, they shouldn’t also feel the full brunt of our emotions around it. So, the simple lesson here is awareness that these triggers, they’re not so much about the person that you think is triggering you. It’s probably something from the past. That rang very true for me. I hope that it’s a connection for you.
And our takeaways are, now, how do we get to repair? Someone triggered us. We have undermined connection and trust because of how we responded to that trigger. There’s a three-step repair process she teaches to parents. And I think a lot of this is true. We teach a lot around accountability. It’s one of the core principles in The ONE Thing. You can be accountable for your life or a victim of it. And being accountable means taking ownership. Her three-part process for repair has accountability right in the middle.
For a child, the first step would be, let me explain what happened. This is not to rationalize it, to diminish your role or your ownership, but like, here’s what happened. These things happened. I’m not quite sure why, but I reacted really strongly to that. And I didn’t show up as the leader you expected in that moment, right? Some version of that. Take ownership. I’m not proud of it. How I responded is not about you. That’s about me.
We can still talk later about maybe there was a performance issue in there. But like, if I brought inappropriate emotions, I need to repair that to build trust and connection. I’m just gonna take ownership. I didn’t show up as a leader, I expected myself. I didn’t show up as a leader I want to be. I apologize for that.
And in the future, I plan, that’s the third step, especially with a kid, you would kind of explain how you hope to perform differently. Say, “You know what? I hope that next time I’ll be stronger, I’ll be a better leader. I’m certainly going to try. And hopefully, this awareness will make it better.”
Now, what’s great about repair, and this is something I didn’t know but I learned from listening to her and reading, and I’ve also gotten it from a few other sources. If you heard my episode with Dr. Robyne Hanley-Dafoe, she also talks about this. It’s never too late for repair. It’s never too late for us to go back and repair. Hey, you remember that time when we blew the deadline and we didn’t hit our sales goal and this happened? This is what happened. I’m really sorry for my part and I take ownership of it. And I hope you’ve seen the difference since.
Like you can always go back and repair. And that, guess what? You’re preventing maybe those triggers from showing up. Like we can create triggers in the people that report to us just like we can in our kids, just like our parents did for us and some of our former bosses did for us. But that is kind of the point here. If something is happening that creates a big emotional moment in the workplace or in the home, we need to go back and repair it.
And we talk about counterbalancing a little bit, and I kind of associate these two ideas. The longer we wait to repair, maybe the harder it will be, but we can still try. But the sooner we do it, a lot of times, the better it will be. Immediately go back, follow the three steps you want or just take ownership. “Hey, I don’t like how I showed up yesterday. I’m not proud of it, but that’s on me. It’s not on you, and I plan to do better.”
Now, when we repair, we strengthen relationships. We can also build a culture where people value these conversations, that they don’t label people as weak or whatever, because I know, sometimes, when you come back and take ownership of stuff, it can be seen as like, “Oh, I need to be strong and stoic, and I never do wrong.” BS on that. We don’t need to be vulnerable about stuff that we don’t actually have figured out. But if we’ve got it figured out and we say, “Hey, I kind of screwed up that time. Here’s what I learned from it,” that’s how leaders show up. We actually have processed it. We know the lesson. Even if we’re not going to be perfect in the future, we’ve taken the lesson from the moment and that’s the lesson. That’s what they’re looking to us for, is what is the lesson from this moment that we can both have because they have these moments too.
So, give you two more tools because triggers are tough. I’ve written about this in the TwentyPercenter. It’s called Hanlon’s Razor. And it’s been around for a long time, but it’s a razor, it’s just a way of thinking. Never assume ill intent when ignorance could also be the explanation. And Hanlon’s Razor just says that when something happens that triggers us, if we first say, “What if that wasn’t by intent?” The example I like to use is when someone cuts us off and we’re like, “That guy cut me off.” And like, you go to the road rage thing and people are angry. We see it all the time in videos and stuff. Thankfully, I don’t get wired that way, but I know that it happens for a lot of people because traffic is stressful.
The truth is 99% of the time, they did not cut you off. They just didn’t check their blind spot. Was it dangerous? Yes. Did it scare you? Yes. Do they deserve your road rage? No. They were just ignorant of the situation. And nine times out of 10, the people who are triggering us, they were just ignorant that they stepped right onto that booby trap. So Hanlon’s Razor, never assume intent, right? We’re going way into motive here without any curiosity when ignorance would also be the explanation.
Now, Dr. Becky has a version of that and she calls it, what is my most generous interpretation of this? And I like that too. Like we look up, someone is not being apparently nice to us, or I don’t really like the decision they made, and it feels like it’s aimed personally at me and my team. Well, what’s the most generous interpretation? What happens is we pan the camera back a little bit, and we try to look for a bigger picture. Maybe there’s a piece of the puzzle we’re missing. Curiosity, remember that earlier lesson. And then, the story gets bigger. And maybe some of the triggering elements go away.
So, the power of repair, if you get to those situations where all of those tools fail you, go back, take ownership, be better the next time. I promise, even if you have to take a little dose of humble pie, the repair process maintains the trust and connection that are so important to leadership.
Okay, this brings us to lesson six. And because you’ve already heard the other lessons, you might see how some of them kind of show up and compound. So, lesson number six is resilience over happiness. And we wrote a whole chapter in The ONE Thing towards the end around happiness. So many of us say, “We just want our kids to be happy,” “We just want our people to be happy.” And the truth is, happiness isn’t what we’re really after.
We chose in the book, The ONE Thing, to kind of argue for happiness is great, but it’s not kind of a state that we can show up in and reliably stay in–fulfillment is. And fulfillment comes from kind of progress towards our goals and getting better at the things that matter to us. Like, the fulfillment is a much more reliable thing to be aimed at.
Dr. Becky has kind of a similar event. So many parents show up and it’s like, “I just want my kids to be happy,” right? My kid’s really, really unhappy. They’re screaming, they’re mad or whatever. And we try to pacify them. We try to make them happy. And she argues that what we really wanna do, and this is the next lesson, it’s played a long game, is we’re aiming, ultimately, for them to be resilient.
Part of our job, know your job, as a parent, is to raise kids that can handle struggle, that can handle the tough things, that they don’t always need us. They’re not codependent on us for survival anymore. That’s the whole point of raising a child. It happens in the wild, it happens with us. The whole point is to make them and equip them for the world without us, even if we hope to be by their side as long as humanly possible. So, resilience, not happiness, is the goal.
Why does that matter? Because if we only focus on happiness, then we don’t allow our kids and our people to do the hard things. Now, how do we build long-term resilience? We do it, right? Short-term discomfort is what leads to long-term resilience. Hear that again. Short-term discomfort is what leads to long-term resilience. Kind of doing those hard things on a regular basis, maybe raising the standard that we talked about earlier to make things a little bit harder to find and test for people’s potential. How do we do that on a regular basis and be okay with it?
Now, I remember one of the scripts in there where she was talking with someone and they were saying like, “How can I get my kid to not watch TV and not be unhappy about it?” And she’s like, a better question would be, “How can I turn off the TV when the time’s up and tolerate my children’s unhappiness?” Because the truth is, your job is to maybe cut off the screen time. And instead of placating them, like it’s going to happen. Life is going to end up short selling them on something like, “Hey, I didn’t get everything I wanted. Well, that’s life, dude.” Might as well teach them early. And we need to be tolerant of their unhappiness, so that they can build resilience on their own. Realize that everything doesn’t go exactly as planned. And that, occasionally, we have tough things to do.
I learned this personally with our youngest child. I was impatient getting him out the door. They were really struggling at this one point with tying their shoes. And I was just about patient enough to get them to do one very poorly. And then, I would often say, “Well, let me help.” And in my effort to get out the door, get them to school on time and get me to work on time, my wife pointed out to me, every time I tied that kid’s shoes, I was telling that kid I didn’t believe they could do it. And because it was difficult for them, and I was impatient and unwilling to let it be difficult, I was stunting their growth.
And there’s a lot of quotes that you can find out there that every time we short circuit our child or our people’s learning, we’re actually preventing them from their own discovery and fully understanding the thing they’re trying to learn. Like people learn through doing and failing. And if we don’t make space for that, how do they actually learn?
I love learning from other people’s experience, but we also know that when we learn from our own experience, it tends to hit a little bit harder, right? So, how do we create space for a little bit more discomfort as parents and tolerate it because our goal is resilience. And I will tell you, if you’re focused not on just having happy employees, that’s great. But do you have resilient, strong employees? And how do we actually build that toughness into them? Doesn’t mean we’re drill sergeants, right? But we can systematically look for opportunities to test their potential and raise the bar. And that’s how we get them to systematically grow.
One of the things that Gary said to me again and again and again, because he’s a pro at this, my partner and, for many years, boss, he would just say, “Jay, here’s the key. You need to get comfortable being uncomfortable,” right? That’s the key. Get comfortable being uncomfortable because where does the growth happen? Growth always happens outside of our comfort zone.
If we’re living in a safe place where we’re only doing the things that we know we can do well, we’re not growing at all. And that’s not what we want for our kids. That’s not what we want for our people. So, resilience over happiness is just this philosophy that we will allow and build space for our people to struggle, that we will be there to make sure that nothing is permanently harmed, we’re not going to let the business crash and burn just to teach someone a lesson, right? But we can create situations and design situations that may be a little tough but allow people to grow into it.
Now, there was a period for me as a leader, and I remember this, and we had gone through a series of layoffs, we had to reduce staff, one of our key employees had to leave, and I had a choice. Do I bring on a new person right now or do I distribute their workload? And the choice for me was, pan, what if I bring on a brand new person, go through that whole process, and then we have another round of layoffs? You know, it’s last one in, first one out. That happens a lot. And I was like, “I don’t know that I’m willing to invite someone to quit their job where they’re secure to come to this place where I currently am that may not be secure.”
And so I took encouragement because Gary, at one point, I remember him pointing out, he says, “You say your people are killers. You say your people are Navy SEALs. You say your people are strong. Prove it to me.” And a lot of people could point if they’d been together a long time to a tough thing they’d done, but most people just assumed it about their people. And what Gary’s point to a lot of the leaders that were in the room is like, you can design challenges. They don’t have to be absurd. They don’t have to be dangerous, but we can design challenges. You know what happens if you just shorten the deadline this month? Let’s see if we can hit our monthly goal in 15 days. I want to issue a challenge.
Challenges work. That’s why you have things like we have the 66-day challenge. There’s 75 hard. You name it. There’s a challenge for it because people like to rise to the occasion and what we discover is, a lot of times, that we’re capable of more than we thought we were. So, here I’m in this situation. I’m weighing out these two choices. The easy button would be to backfill the position. The hard button would be, well, what happens if I distribute the labor to my existing team? That means they all have to carry more, they’re all gonna have to learn new jobs, it’s gonna be uncomfortable.
And there was a very tough period for me as the leader to watch them struggle learning some of the new jobs. They weren’t happy about it. Some of them rightfully said, “My job has expanded, do I get more pay?” Great, let’s talk about that when we do the review.” I think that’s a very fair question or right now, can’t remember how it was addressed, but we looked up and what I love about that is that I did learn that both people were fully capable. We had three people doing three jobs when two people could do all of them.
And that was a great lesson for me as a leader. And it also, I hope in the future, will allow me to maybe experiment more around those moments where, well, maybe this setback when someone leaves is actually an opportunity for the people who are here. Maybe they want to take on more responsibility. Maybe they want to contribute at a higher level, and that can lead them to a better title and better pay. Like in that sense, it becomes a win for everyone.
I’m sure it doesn’t always work out, but that’s this idea. Are we willing to take these moments and cultivate a little resilience for both our people and ourselves to live through these moments of discomfort because that leads to strength. That’s one of the big lessons. That’s what Dr. Becky wants us to do as parents, right? Let them struggle a little bit because the gift of struggles, they get stronger. We need to do the same thing for our people.
Okay, this last one is gonna be maybe the shortest, and it’s kind of a bookend. We tend to remember the bookends, right? You know, two things can be true and play the long game. But I’ve noticed in listening to conversations with Dr. Becky Kennedy and reading the book, this is one of those things, like two things can be true, that even though she didn’t state it as one of her pillars, I feel like it’s a core part of the philosophy.
When given the choice between a short-term outcome and a long-term one, she will always play for the long game. And that’s kind of this idea of instead of like in the last lesson six, resilience over happiness, the short game would be, I just want my kid to be happy today. I want them to be quiet and play. And that way, I can relax on Saturday and be better for Monday. That’s the short game. The long game is, nope, maybe I’m going to upset child, but say, “Hey, part of being in this family is we do chores together. You need to come help me weed the garden.” And we’re gonna do that together. And it may not be pleasant, but I’m playing a long game here, right? I’m going for resilience.
Again and again and again, this theme shows up. And I think as leaders, we should look that way too. This is a legacy question. For you as a leader, whether you’re brand new at it, you’re an aspiring leader, or you’ve been doing it for a while, what do you think your legacy of a leader will be or could be? Do you even think about that? So, the line that kind of triggered this for me, ultimately, that maybe drop it in instead of six lessons, seven, there was a line where I remember her saying in one of the interviews, if you don’t want to hear your child say these words to their partner one day, don’t say it to them today.
And the power of the words that we speak to people will often create behaviors and words in their future. What we’re role modeling today, they are seeing as the example, and consciously or unconsciously they may follow it. And if you’ve been in business as long as I have, and a lot of you probably have, you’ve seen, kind of, the family tree of different leaders in different organizations, right? There are those people who came from kind of, hey, I believe in a genius with a thousand helpers, right? That we elevate the top people, everybody else feels a little bit diminished and unimportant, and what you end up with is one really talented person surrounded by a bunch of people that have been told exactly what to do for so long. They’ve largely turned off their brains at work.
And because they’re afraid of doing it wrong, they don’t take any risk and they take no initiative. Right? That’s the genius with a thousand helpers that Covey wrote about versus the seventh level leader. That kind of short-term thinking, right? That’s where I’ll just do it. It’s faster if I do it and I do it better versus doing the long game. Well, maybe I can teach them to do it. Not only do I get my time back, maybe they’ll do it better. And I’ve told again and again and again, when you play the long game, that you can find the person who does that part of what you do, and they’ll do it at a multiple of what you do it. Because that’s actually, maybe that’s the part of your job that, hey, you know, you don’t love it, you don’t hate it, but you’re good at it. But that’s their passion, that’s the thing.
I mean, I like spreadsheets, and some people think that’s weird. But I know people that are so afraid of numbers, the idea that anybody likes to play with them in a spreadsheet is just alien to them, right? We’re all unique people, and we bring our unique likes and dislikes and talents to the table. And the people who tend to get really good at things also tend to like them, or they wouldn’t keep doing it even when it was uncomfortable and they had to grow. That’s just part of the formula.
So, as leaders, can we play the long game? Can we, instead of just doing the easy, convenient thing, try to build not just better employees but better leaders? Teach people how to think instead of telling them what to do, right? Can we build and invest in our training program versus doing more control and correction, more compliance, right? Compliance, compliance, compliance. Like nothing says, I don’t trust you, like a very robust compliance program.
Now, if you work in a nuclear reactor, get used to it, because there is no rationale for not having one but there are lots of places where the stakes are not nearly so high, where that just exists because there is no trust, and they haven’t invested in building it. As a leader, I hope if you’re listening this long in this podcast, one, you wanna be a better parent and maybe I’ve shared some great ideas from Dr. Becky that resonate with you as well, but you wanna be a better leader, right?
So, your legacy, I hope, here would be my challenge for you in that, what if you became the kind of leader that not just led yourself well, but you led yourself and others well, and you led others to become better leaders? What if your legacy of the words that are coming out of your people’s mouth someday are exactly what you hope and wish for would come out of their mouth? That instead of going to judgment, maybe they went to curiosity. When they faced a tough situation, that they could see that two things were true. That maybe they had a great employee that was just having a horrible day, and that they could maybe take a step back and take a different approach with that.
There’s so many ways that this could play out if we’re willing to play the long game. And if we realize that how we are leading people today will impact not just how they feel when they’re led in the future, but how they might lead in the future too.
So, I hope that you’ve enjoyed my seven takeaways from Dr. Becky’s Good Inside and some of her podcasts. I know that I had a lot of fun kind of geeking out on, wow, the parallels between parenting and leadership are a lot more than I ever imagined. But there they are, I believe, and it’s not the first time I heard this. Actually, the woman who raised me to director for the first time, the president at the time, when she was sitting down and she was kind of sharing her philosophy on leadership, all she told was stories about her kids. And like, if they’re fighting at the table, I ask them to go to their rooms and resolve it. And she’s like, don’t let employees come into your office and leave their problems sitting in there. I don’t let my kids do that. Don’t let your people. Like, she kept blending the two.
And that was one of the first places I realized, well, there’s probably a lot of yourself for your children, and a lot of those lessons, because the stakes are so high in parenting, why wouldn’t we apply those lessons to leadership?
Well, that’s it. That’s the end of our two-part episode on leadership lessons from a parenting expert. Lessons one through four were up in episode one, and the last three lessons were in today’s episode. Your challenge for the week, and we’re gonna hearken all the way back to lesson number one, is the idea of two things can be true. My challenge to you as a leader, a leader of yourself, leader of your family, leader in business, whatever that may be, to look for a moment where you can realize that two conflicting ideas are being true at the same time.
Yes, you’re a good leader and you’re having a hard day. Maybe you’ve got a good employee who’s just not performing right now. Can you acknowledge both sides? It’ll help you approach that challenge in a uniquely different way that’ll often serve you better.
Now, next week, we’ve got a very special guest, my friend, Jenny Wood. She’s got one of the hottest business books of 2025. It’s called Wild Courage. Jenny was a top executive at Google. She trained throughout their ecosystem on how to build a great career. And this book, there’s a lot of, kind of, provocative ideas on how to take ideas like being nosy, being bossy, right? Things that we don’t always think of as good and turn them into positive traits as you’re leading your career and leading your team at work. I hope you’ll join us next week. Jenny Wood, author of Wild Courage, will be making lots of ties to The ONE Thing. We’ll see you then.
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