This morning I applaud your worthy efforts to sustain our valuable resource - the soil. As the direct seeding demands less time in the field, today I want to show you the benefits to the family farm and the farming community.
Families with an awareness of stopping the degradation of our land base also have a commitment to preserving the family tree. Just as you are committed to a sustainable land base for many generations to come, I trust you are also committed to sustaining the foundation that will bring this about - generations to come.
In reference to sustaining the family along with the soil, I bring you three things. First, I want to give you some inspiration. In a world full of demands, bad news, and pain, I hope you will be inspired to have a little more patience, kindness, and understanding with yourself and the family you work and live with. I hope to inspire you to relate to your family in more loving ways, and in the process think about your priorities, your values, and the direction of your life and your business.
Second, I hope to give you some understanding about relationships between loved ones who work together. After counseling family businesses for fifteen years, I hope I can pass on some of what I have learned about how people get along and about how they don't get along, and some ways that you can reach your loved ones. After all, what good is it to be successful in your business if you lose your family in the process?
Thirdly, I want to give you some ideas about how to reach out to your family in more meaningful. Practical ways. I hope that in the midst of my stories and experiences you can find little gold nuggets to inspire you to action. After all, all the self-awareness in the world will not help you until you take some risks and do something different.
In my years of consulting with farm families, I have met many people who know more about their combines and their cows than they know about their spouse. If you stop and think about it, we didn't get a lot of training when growing up about how to relate to each other. I grew up on a small farm in central Alberta and got married in 1978. But then we weren't in love, we were in heat!
I am convinced that a strong commitment to the land comes out of a strong belief in the conservation of the family. My vision is that sustaining relationships in a family leads to sustaining the farm, and sustaining the farm means sustaining rural communities - the backbone of our country. The call today is not necessarily to work harder, but to work smarter. As direct seeding demands less time in the field, there is more time to open your awareness to each other and find ways to open up, pay attention, and be in touch with those who are closest to you.
Here are six keys to conserving the family and the family farm. They are what I call the six willings to build a healthy, sustainable environment in your home and to fins balance in your life.
I start by asking you a question: Now that you are direct seeding, what are you doing with the time you are saving? Are you simply filling it with activity? With more busyness?
All life moves in rhythms, Molecules, tides, plants and animals, planets, heart rates, families, businesses, and each of our daily lives--everything moves in some form of rhythm. Many people today live in one rhythm and at one speed: frantic and fast. I used to find that people in rural communities were more in tune with the natural rhythm of nature. However, even farmers are finding their own version of hurrying and speeding up.
One of the important principles of time and movement in the physical world is the concept of rhythmic entrainment. Entrainment describes the process by which objects in motion synchronize with one another. Scientists have known for centuries that moving bodies tend to entrain. The most familiar is the pendulum clock. If you place two out-of-sync pendulum clocks beside one another, by the next day they will have synchronized and will be keeping time together.
This principle of the physical world has something important to teach us about being human. Like objects in space, we, too, entrain with one another, with our surroundings, and with the pace of or culture. Inevitably, and often outside our awareness, the rhythm of our lives is affected by the rhythm, of those around us and we are also pulled to entrain with the rhythm of the modern world.
Watching for this phenomenon, we noticed that we continually entrain, however briefly, with other people. When a baby smiles at you, I dare you not to smile back. Is someone is in an angry mood, we instinctively entrain to that person by getting defensive.
Even more important is our innate tendency to entrain with the rhythm of the world. In my observation, the rhythm of the modern world is primarily built on the rhythm, of technology. Technology brings us powerful tools and incredible capabilities but also sets a brutally fast pace. The rhythm of the world moves faster, and inevitably further from the rhythm, of the natural world, with every technological innovation.
We are all aware of the rapid pace of technology: The instantaneous nature of communication, the velocity of travel, the processing rate of computers, the number of jolts per minute on television, the speed of a diesel engine, all these speed up our perception of time and our reality. Most of us would not choose to live in a world without the tools of communication, travel, information analysis, or the tools that make our lives Easier on the farm. I do believe, however, that we need to notice what happens in us, and in our relationships, when we become overly entrained with the rhythm of technology.
Over the past few years I have had the privilege of speaking to a number of Woman's Institutes. These women are true advocates for agriculture, education, health, and community development. In a world that is so heavily entrained to achievement, production, and getting ahead, Women's Institute is a strong force supporting the deeper human values that our country is based on. They are entrained tot he needs of women, children, and relationships in communities.
I have also found that many farmers are taking every advantage they can to park their truck, put their feet back on the land, and begin to step back into entraining with the important things in life. Connection with the land and with the animals that lice on the land requires awareness of their rhythms, just as connection with others requires sensitivity tot heir rhythm. The most rewarding relationships--whether spouse to spouse or parent to child, or friend to friend--are those in which we comfortably entrain with each other's rhythms. This is difficult in the midst of too much technology, and we need to become aware of and learn to appreciate the rhythms of the people with whom we share our lives.
Some practical ways of becoming more aware of our own rhythm and in turn more aware of those around us is to make some daily quiet time. Take some time to get out of your truck and take a slow walk on your land, see if you can find out what your cows can teach you, experiment becoming entrained to their rhythm rather than forcing them to get into yours. I know farmers who slow down and make the time to entrain to their cattle can document less stress in their cattle and subsequently, less vet bills. Make time to sit and listen to the important people in your life. Find out what they value and what they may need from you. See if you can begin to become entrained to the important things and people in your life.
We are all pretty spoiled in this country, and if you think about it, it's no wonder. We live in the best country in the world. Our generation has been the first one, probably ever, to have ever been protected from facing a world war or a major depression. Like children who have been protected too much, perhaps we take our lives too much for granted, perhaps we forget to be grateful for what we have.
Think for a moment of people in your life that you admire and are grateful for, for what they have given you. How many of you, in the past month have called and told them so? I have a challenge for you. Give them a call tonight. Pick up the phone or go and visit them. Be prepared for some surprised responses.
It is my experience that families that stay grateful, stay together. It is not easy for us to say how we feel. If you want to know how your dad feel about you, ask the neighbours. Chances are he has told them a hundred times how proud he is of you. Many fathers have expressed to me with tears in their eyes how much their children mean to them, how proud they are of them.
Recently, I facilitated a three day retreat on succession planning with a group of Texas cattle ranchers. On the second day they took me to a movie, 8 Seconds, the true story of Lane Frost, the world champion bull rider. Half of the guys in the room new Lane personally, many of them road bulls with him.
It was fascinating to watch the relationship between Lane and his father. The only way his dad knew to relate to him was to criticize. Even when Lane became world champion, dad's response was, Well, we'll see how much of a man you are. How long can you stay on top? After Lane's death, this tough, macho father who never showed any of his real feelings to his son, sat alone in his living room, tears streaming down his face. All he could think was, did I ever tell him I loved him?
Imagine living with this thought for the rest of your life. I challenge you to carry with you an attitude of gratitude, - and let the important people in your life know where you stand.
In this country we don't have a political crisis; we don't have an economic crisis. We have an accountability crisis. Everywhere I go these days, I hear about our rights. We have come a long way, and we still of a long way to go to uphold our Charter Of Rights. Our challenge today is that we do not have an accompanying Charter Of Accountabilities.
My parents were very wise (even though I didn't realize it until years later). As a kid, we sat together and drafted a charter of rights as a family. As you can imagine, us teenagers had little problem developing a list of rights. My parents, in their wisdom, drafted right along side it, an accompanying charter of accountabilities. One example was that we on our list, a "right" to nice clothes. No problem, my dad said, your accountability is "you pay for them!"
Years later, when doing some counseling with a father and his fifteen year daughter, she explained, It is my right to ninety dollar Calvin Klein jeans! The father had a great response, one that has stayed with me ever since:
I recently facilitated a succession plan between parents and their adult children, ages twenty-seven to thirty-five. The meeting started by the children asking the father what they were entitled to. I know it is important to young people working their way into the ownership of a family business to know where they stand. But coming in with this mind-set of entitlement inevitably erodes the sustainable future of the operation and those involved in it.
I feel so passionately about accountability that I, along with two of my colleagues wrote a book about it (entitled Accountability: Getting A Grip On Results, published 1997. Redstone Ventures, Inc., Calgary, Alberta). The book is a practical guide for sitting down with the people that work with you and for you (including contractors) and work out a simple, practical way of getting a grip on results and clarifying what each of you is accountable for.
Without going into too much detail, here are the underlying key principles of accountability, as discussed in the book:
Key principle #1: To be accountable is to be subject to giving an account, answer or explanation to someone, even if only to yourself.
Key principle #2: To be accountable means you are answerable for outcomes, not just activities.
Key Principle #3: To be accountable for outcomes, you must have room for judgement and decision-making.
Key principle #4: Your accountability is yours, without qualification.
Key principle #5: Every member of the organization is accountable for the organization as a whole.
Key principle #6: Accountability is meaningless without significant consequences.
We all need to feel that we make a difference, that because we are alive the world is somehow a better place. Kids used to feel that they were an asset. They were needed on the farms, and even in the cities. As technology improves, there appears to be a decrease in people's sense of contribution. Kids today feel like a liability. There is an opportunity on the farm to give this sense of meaning, this sense of contribution, yet I see even rural areas infiltrated with technology to the point that contribution is diminishing on the farm. The challenge before us is how to create environments in our home where people believe they make a difference.
Kids inherently want to contribute. Try baking a cake, fixing a tractor, or vacuuming a house with a two-year-old around. They inherently want to help. Yet, watch those adultisms - where we give the message, if you can't do it as well as an adult, then get out of the way! In our busy, hectic lives, we push people away and do it ourselves.
A key principle to remember: If people are not feeling they are contributing, motivation will always be an issue. On the other had, if people do feel they contribute, they bring something to the operation/family that is worthwhile and needed, you don't have to motivate them. Motivation will happen naturally!
During the spring of 1968, when I was 12 years old, my parents said, David, you are not learning enough about responsibility living in the city. We are putting our house up for sale and moving to the country. That summer, we all worked together to renovate a fifty year old log cabin. In the first year, we had no running water, indoor plumbing, nor central heating. This was the winter of 1968, the coldest winter in the recorded history of Alberta. It was below -30C for thirty consecutive days. We had two stoves to heat the cabin. One was a coal and wood oven in the kitchen; the other, a potbelly stove in the living room. Both my parents worked in town: Mom worked twenty miles north, and dad worked twenty miles south. Dad looked after the fires in the morning; I looked after heating the house after school. Actually, there wasn't much choice here. My parents did not get home until 6:00 PM. It was either heat the house or freeze. That's what is called an immediate consequence to behaviour!
My parents had no problem motivating me to go to school. I did not want to come home! Every Saturday, Dad and I worked together cutting wood. It was so much easier to have the wood stacked than to try to chop it at the same time as you are lighting the fires. I was needed, and I knew it. I was making a significant contribution to my family.
Dad and I started competitions to see who could get the living room the hottest and who could chop the most wood in an hour. The interesting thing was that although these were not necessarily enjoyable times, they were the best of times, in terms of developing a closeness with my father and establishing a foundation of responsibility that would last a lifetime.
Think for a moment of all of the things you are attached to in your life: The trucks out in the parking lot, your combine, your house, your income, your land. (I have seen patriarchs so attached to their place they wrote their will so they could still run it from their grave!) Maybe it is more of the subtle things we get attached to, like your point in your life, all of these attachments will be taken from you? Think about that for a moment. You will never see a hearse pulling a U-Haul trailer! What will happen to you when you loose these attachments? Notice I didn't say if, because every attachment you have will eventually come to an end. Are you prepared?
There is nothing wrong with attachments. They are a part of life. It's just that we can't grow as long as we are attached. If we are going to move forward, we must be prepared to let go so that a space for newness can find a place to flourish. Think about it in reference to nature. Death and letting go are apart of the seasons of life. Somehow, as humans, we want to stay in summer our entire life.
I can promise you that those in this room with more years of experience than I have not found growth without a degree of pain that comes from saying good-bye. This is not to imply that all change is good. In the midst of change it is important to ask ourselves, What are we committed to preserve? And yet we must also take an inventory of what we need to say good-bye to and be willing to let go.
One of the things I have had to let go of in my development is the notion that life is always fair. I remember doing some consulting where one of two brothers, now in their forties, was still resentful about the about the fact that his father had purchased a new truck for his brother, but not for him, over twenty years ago! Folks, you might want to take an inventory of that which you currently need to let go of, make a decision, and get on with your life.
Most of the people in this room today are, in one stage or another of their estate planning/succession process. Let me give you a list of some of the things that founders and successors need to let go of in this process:
I was seventeen and preparing to graduate from high school when my father took me for a walk and gave me an important lesson about life. At some point on our walk, Dad put his arm around me and said many things, some of which I have long since forgotten. His concluding words, however, have stayed with me and have been ingrained deeply in my awareness. He said, Now the conventional things for me, as a father, to do in sending you off on your own would be to wish you success. But I want you to know that success as the world measures it is too easy. In fact, I know you will always be successful at no matter what you put your heart into. So I would like to wish you something that is harder to come by. I am going to wish you meaning in your life. Meaning is not something that will magically come your way or something you will stumble across. Meaning is something you build into your life, starting fairly early and working at it fairly hard. Meaning is about contribution and service to others. It is about character. It is about living out your important values. It is about giving of yourself and living your life in such a way that when you leave the world is a better place for having had you here. Let your life be one that has dignity and meaning for you. If it does, then the yardstick by which the world measures success will hardly be relevant.
In conclusion, I share with you what living a meaningful life means to me now. Picture in your mind two circles that intersect in the middle. In one circle, I want you to write, in your mind, the word urgent. In the other circle, imagine the word important.
Every demand on you come in four categories:
It's either:
1. urgent and not important,
2. important but not urgent,
3. urgent and important, or
4. its neither urgent nor important
My definition of urgency: those demands that press on you. Every time somebody wants something of your time, it is by definition, an urgent demand. For example, a ringing phone, or the combine breaking down. These are urgent demands, some of them are important, some are not. The important things are those demands that you press on. Taking care of an important relationship, or looking after our health, or caring for the land. These are all probably important to you, but they are not urgent.
As a society, we tend not to look after things until they become urgent. We tend to let our important relationships slide, we tend to neglect our fields, our soil, our health, until it reaches a crisis point, until it reaches a point of urgency, and then we wake up! If we don't pay attention to the important things in life, eventually they will become urgent. And id you don't know what is important, everything will be urgent!
A meaningful life, means to heave the courage to run our life but what is important, rather than be driven by the tyranny of the urgent. We will never get rid of the urgency, but peace and serenity come when I know what my values are and I live each day in line with my most important values. This keeps me on a firm foundation rather than trying to live up to everyone's expectations of me, attempting to conform to a standard that the world sets for me. A meaningful life is, for me, being true to myself, clarifying what is most important in my life, and having the courage and internal conviction to follow this internal compass.
Like learning to rely on my instruments when flying in weather with no visibility, I have solid foundation in which to put my trust. My life then becomes an expression of my values, like a work of art, rather than a rudderless ship responding to the tyranny of the urgent.
I challenge you to identify the 5 to 10 most important values in your life. Ask yourself, to what extent do my daily choices reflect these core values? See what changes need to be made, and have the courage to stand tall on the important areas of your life. I promise you that the integrity that comes from this will improve the quality of your lives.
(I have since written a book, a practical, easy-to-read book full of short stories and personal experiences about finding balance and living a meaning life. It is entitled, Simply Living In A Complex World: Balancing Life's Achievements, published by Redstone Ventures, Inc., Calgary, Alberta. 1997.)
I was raised on a small farm in Central Alberta. I share your passion for the land and foe the preservation of our land. The cornerstone of the preservation of our ecosystem is the preservation of our internal ecosystem, the environment within the four walls of our homes. We cannot separate the land from the family.
I hope I have shared something here that will support you to think and act differently in your family. I hope I have given you something that will help you conserve the most important resource you have - the people in your family and business.
And finally, a sentiment that represents my vision, and I trust yours, for farm families and rural communities:
A boy turns to his father and asks, Where is heaven dad?
His father replied, Heaven is a place where people can go and taste pure water, and see in winter, white snow.
Heaven is a place that's good and clean, where you can breathe the air, and the grass is always green.
Heaven is a beautiful park, where there are birds that sing, and you are safe after dark.
Heaven is a place where you won't come to harm.
I lived in heaven once...I lived on a farm."
I wish you all the best in carrying out you most important responsibility - the conservation of the land and of the family!