Realize that in a larger sense we are teaching one thing or another all the time because we are constantly radiating what we are.

Always remember that, as with modeling and mentoring, you cannot not teach. Your own character and example, the relationship you have with your children, and the priorities that are served by your organization (or lack of it) in the home make you your children's first and most influential teacher. Their learning or their ignorance of life's most vital lessons is largely in your hands.

How the Leadership Roles Relate to the Four Needs and Gifts

In the following Principle-Centered Family Leadership model, you will see the four roles-modeling, mentoring, organizing, and teaching. In the left column, notice how the four basic universal needs-to live (physical/economic), to love (social), to learn (mental), and to leave a legacy (spiritual)-relate to those four roles. Remember, too, the fifth need in the family-to laugh and have fun. Notice in the right column how the four unique human gifts also relate to the four roles.

Modeling is essentially the spiritual. It draws primarily upon conscience for its energy and direction. Mentoring is essentially social and draws primarily upon self-awareness as manifested in respecting others, understanding others, empathizing and synergizing with others. Organizing is essentially the physical and taps into the independent as well as the social will to organize time and life-to set up a family mission statement, weekly family times, and one-on-ones. Teaching is primarily mental. The mind is the steering wheel of life as we are guided into a future that we create first in our minds through the power of our imagination.

In fact, the gifts are cumulative at every level so that mentoring involves conscience and self-awareness. Organizing involves conscience, self-awareness, and willpower. And teaching involves conscience, self-awareness, willpower, and imagination.

You Are a Leader in Your Family

As you look at these four leadership roles and how they relate to the four basic human needs and the four human gifts, you can see how fulfilling them well will enable you to create change in the family.

You model: Family members see your example and learn to trust you.

You mentor: Family members feel your unconditional love and begin to value themselves.

You organize: Family members experience order in their lives and grow to trust the structure that meets their basic needs.

You teach: Family members hear and do. They experience the results and learn to trust principles and themselves.

As you do these things, you exercise leadership and influence in your family. If you do them in a sound, principle-centered way, by modeling, you create trustworthiness. By mentoring you create trust. By organizing you create alignment and order. By teaching you create empowerment.

The important thing to realize is that no matter where you are on the destination chart, you are doing all four of these things anyway. You may be modeling the struggle for survival, goal setting, or contribution. You may be mentoring by putting people down, "rewarding" success with conditional love, or loving unconditionally. The organization in your family may be a system of repeated disorganization, or you may have calendars, job charts, rules, or even a family mission statement. Informally or formally, you may be teaching anything from disrespect for the law to honesty, integrity, and service.

The point is that, like it or not, you are a leader in your family, and one way or another you are already fulfilling each of these roles. The question is how you are fulfilling them. Can you fulfill them in a way that will help you create the kind of family you want to create?

Are You Managing or Leading? Doing What's "Urgent" or What's "Important"?

For many years now I have asked audiences this question: "If you were to do one thing you know would make a tremendous difference for good in your personal life, what would that one thing be?" I then ask them the same question with regard to their professional or work life. People come up with answers very easily. Deep inside they already know what they need to do.

Then I ask them to examine their answers and determine whether what they wrote down is urgent or important or both. "Urgent" comes from the outside, from environmental pressures and crises. "Important" comes from the inside, from their own deep value system.

Almost without exception the things people write down that would make a tremendous positive difference in their lives are important but not urgent. As we talk about it, people come to realize that the reason they don't do these things is that they're not urgent. They're not pressing. And, unfortunately, most people are addicted to the urgent. In fact, if they're not being driven by the urgent, they feel guilty. They feel as if something is wrong.

But truly effective people in all walks of life focus on the important rather than the merely urgent. Research shows that worldwide, the most successful executives focus on importance, and less effective executives focus on urgency. Sometimes the urgent is also important, but much of the time it is not.

Clearly, a focus on what is truly important is far more effective than a focus on what is merely urgent. It's true in all walks of life-including the family. Of course, parents are going to have to deal with crises and with putting out fires that are both important and urgent. But when they proactively choose to spend more time on things that are truly important but not necessarily urgent, it reduces the crises and "fires."

Just think about some of the important things that have been suggested in this book: building an Emotional Bank Account; creating personal, marriage, and family mission statements; having weekly family times; having one-on-one dates with family members; creating family traditions; working together, learning together, and worshiping together. These things are not urgent. They don't press on us in the same way as urgent matters such as rushing to the hospital to be with a child who has overdosed on drugs, responding to an emotionally hurting spouse who has just asked for a divorce, or trying to deal with a child who wants to drop out of school.

But the whole point is that by choosing to spend time on important things, we decrease the number and intensity of true emergencies in our family life. Many, many issues are talked over and worked out well in advance of their becoming a problem. The relationships are there. The structures are there. People can talk things over, work things out. Teaching is taking place. The focus is on fire prevention instead of putting out fires. As Benjamin Franklin summarized it, "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure."

The reality is that most families are overmanaged and underled. But the more quality leadership that is provided in the family, the less management is needed because people will manage themselves. And vice versa: The less leadership is provided, the more management is needed because without a common vision and common value system, you have to control things and people to keep them in line. This requires external management, but it also stirs up rebellion or it breaks people's spirit. Again, as it says in Proverbs, "Where there is no vision, the people perish."

This is where the 7 Habits come in. They empower you to exercise leadership as well as management in the family-to do the "important" as well as the "urgent and important." They help you build relationships. They help you teach your family the natural laws that govern in all of life and, together, institutionalize those laws into a mission statement and some enabling structures.

Without question, family life today is a high-wire trapeze act with no safety net. Only through principle-centered leadership can you provide a net in the form of moral authority in the culture itself, and simultaneously build the mind-set and the skill-set to perform the necessary "acrobatics" required.

The 7 Habits help you fulfill your natural family leadership roles in the principle-based ways that create stability, success, and significance.

The Three Common Mistakes

People often make one of three common mistakes with regard to the Principle-Centered Family Leadership Tree.

Mistake #1: To Think That Any One Role Is Sufficient

The first mistake is to think that each role is sufficient in and of itself. Many people seem to think that modeling alone is sufficient, that if you persist and set a good example long enough, children will eventually follow that example. These people see no real need for mentoring, organizing, and teaching.

Others feel that mentoring or loving is all-sufficient, that if you build a relationship and constantly communicate love, it will cover a multitude of sins in the area of personal example and render organizational structure and teaching unnecessary, even counterproductive. Love is seen as the panacea, the answer to everything.

Some are convinced that proper organizing-which includes planning and setting up structures and systems to make good things happen in relationships and in family life-is sufficient. Their families may be well managed, but they lack leadership. They may be proceeding correctly but in the wrong direction. Or they're full of excellent systems and checklists for everybody but have no heart, no warmth, no feeling. Children will tend to move away from these situations as soon as possible and may not desire to return-except perhaps out of a sense of family duty or a strong spiritual desire to make some changes.

Others feel that the role of parents is basically to teach by way of telling and that explaining more clearly and consistently will eventually work. If it doesn't work, it at least transfers responsibility to the children.

Some feel that setting the example and relating-in other words, modeling and mentoring-are all that is necessary. Others feel that modeling, mentoring, and teaching will suffice, and organizing is not that important because in the long run, it's relationship, relationship, relationship that really counts.

This analysis could go on, but it essentially revolves around the idea that we don't really need all four of these roles, that only one or two is sufficient. But this is a major-and a very common-mistake. Each role is necessary, but absolutely insufficient without the other three. For example, you might be a good person and have a good relationship, but without organization and teaching, there will be no structural and systemic reinforcement when you are not present or when something happens that negatively affects your relationship. Children need not only to see it and feel it but also to experience it and hear it-or they may never understand the important laws of life that govern happiness and success.

Mistake #2: To Ignore the Sequence

The second mistake, which is even more common, is to ignore the sequence: to think that you can explicitly teach without having the relationship; or that you can build a good relationship without being a trustworthy person; or that verbal teaching is sufficient and that the principles and laws of life contained in this verbal teaching do not need to be embodied into the patterns and process, the structures and systems of everyday family life.

But just as the leaves on the tree grow out of the branches, the branches grow out of the limbs, the limbs grow out of the trunk, and the trunk grows out of the roots, so each of these leadership roles grows out of those that precede it. In other words, there is an order here-model, mentor, organize, teach-that represents the true inside-out process. Just as the roots of the tree bring nutrients and life to every other part of the tree, so your own example gives life to your relationships, to your efforts to organize, to your opportunities to teach. Truly, your modeling is the foundation of every other part of the tree. And every other level is a necessary part of those that grow out of it. Effective family leaders recognize this order, and whenever there's a breakdown, use the sequence to help diagnose the source of the problem and take the steps necessary to resolve it.

In Greek philosophy human influence comes from ethos, pathos, logos. Ethos basically means credibility that comes from example. Pathos comes from the relationship, the emotional alignment, the understanding that is taking place between people and the respect they have for one another. And logos deals with logic-the logic of life, the lessons of life.

As with the 7 Habits, the sequence and the synergy are the important things. People do not hear if they do not feel and see. The logic of life will not take root if you don't care or if you lack credibility.

Mistake #3: To Think That Once Is Enough

The third mistake is to think that when you have fulfilled these roles once, you don't have to do them anymore-in other words, to look at fulfilling these roles as an event rather than as an ongoing process.

Model, mentor, organize, and teach are present-tense verbs that must continually take place. They must go on day in and day out. Modeling or example must always be there, including the example of apologizing when we get off course. We must continually make deposits in the Emotional Bank Account because yesterday's meal does not satisfy today's hunger, especially in family relationships where expectations are high. Because circumstances are constantly changing, there is always the role of organizing to accommodate that changing reality so that the principles are institutionalized and adapted to the situation. And explicit teaching must constantly go on because people are continually moving from one level of development to another, and the same principles apply differently at different levels of development. In addition, because of changing circumstances and age and stage realities, new principles apply and come into play that must be taught and reinforced.

In our own family we've discovered that each child represents his or her own unique challenge, unique world, and unique needs. Each represents a whole new level of commitment and energy and vision. We even sensed with our last child-out of nostalgia for the past glorious years of raising a family-a tendency to overindulge. Perhaps this comes from our own need to be needed, even though our mission statement focuses on producing independence and interdependence.

Joshua (son): Being the youngest of nine has its advantages. The older kids are always complaining and moaning to Mom and Dad that I'm spoiled and get away with murder. They say that Mom and Dad aren't half as strict as they used to be, that I don't have to work and slave like they did. They ask, "What do you do anyway besides pick up your room and take out the garbage?"

They tell me that when they were growing up, it was harder to become an Eagle Scout, their schoolteachers were meaner and tougher, and Mom and Dad weren't nearly as well off. They complain that while they have to stay home and put food on the table, I get to go on trips. The boys say they used to lift weights and work out and have muscles, but now they have to be responsible-and that's why they can't beat me in a game of tennis or basketball anymore. They say I'd better buckle down and get straight A's if I want to get into a good college, and I'll never go to graduate school if I read Cliffs Notes instead of doing my own thinking. They tell me that's why I should listen to their advice and not make the same mistakes they did. They also say for sure I'll get to go "pro" in whatever sport I choose because they've all offered to train me. And if I just do what they say, my life will be a lot easier than they had it.

Even as I write this book, I find myself increasingly grateful for the significance of the airplane metaphor and the opportunity to constantly change and improve and to apply what I'm trying to teach. This has been a forceful reminder to me that we need to keep on keeping on, to endure to the end and respect the laws that govern growth, development, and happiness in all of life. Otherwise, we become like the well-intended person who, seeing a butterfly struggling to come out of its cocoon, wildly swinging its wings to break the one small tendon that holds it to the old form, the old structure, out of a spirit of helpfulness takes a penknife and cuts the remaining tendon. As a result, the butterfly's wings never fully develop and the butterfly dies.

So we must never think that our work is done-with our children, our grandchildren, even our great-grandchildren.

Once in the Florida Keys I spoke to a group of extremely wealthy retired couples about the importance of the three-generation family. They acknowledged they had essentially compartmentalized their sense of responsibility to their grown children and their grandchildren. Family involvement was not the central force in their lives; it was an occasional "holidays only" guilt reliever justified by the rationale of helping the kids to become independent from them. But as they opened up and leveled, many acknowledged their sadness in this compartmentalization, even abdication, and resolved to become engaged with their families in a number of new ways. Helping our children become independent is important, of course, but this kind of compartmentalized attitude will never create the intergenerational family support system that is needed today to deal with the onslaught of the culture on the nuclear family.

Families often get caught in one of two extremes. Either they become too enmeshed-that is, too emotionally dependent upon one another (and perhaps socially, financially, or intellectually dependent as well)-or, perhaps through fear of dependence, they become too detached, too independent. This is actually a kind of counter/dependence. Sometimes families cultivate independent lifestyles that have the appearance of interdependence even though deep within, there is profound dependence. Usually, you can distinguish between such dependence and true interdependence by listening to the language; people are either in a blaming and accusing mode, or they focus on the future and opportunities and responsibilities.

Only as family members really pay the price by winning the private victory and producing a genuine and balanced independence can they begin to work on the issues of interdependence. With regard to our own intergenerational family, Sandra and I have concluded that the responsibility of being grandparents is secondary to that of being parents. In other words, we have defined our primary job as that of affirming our own children and the job they're doing with their children. That clear value gives us direction in our involvement with our married children and their families. We are convinced that grandparents must never become anesthetized by the "retirement" mind-set into thinking that there is no longer a vital need for family involvement. You never "retire" from the family. There is always a need for providing ongoing support and affirmation, for being at the crossroads, for building a sense of vision of what the intergenerational family is about.

Even when the children are out of the nest, parents need to recognize their children's need for affirmation of their roles as parents and of how well they're doing; they need to recognize their grandchildren's need to have special time with their grandmother and grandfather, both collectively and one-on-one. In this way they serve as another source of reinforcing the teachings given in that home or help compensate for temporary deficiencies in the home.

The opportunities for intergenerational love and support and for creating a legacy only keep growing as your posterity keeps growing. And regardless of your age, you can always be that "someone" who the best research shows is vital to healthy, happy children and grandchildren-someone who is absolutely, positively, unconditionally "crazy" about them.3 A grandparent is uniquely able to do that.

Sandra and I feel a tremendous obligation toward each one of our nine children and their spouses and our (so far) twenty-seven grandchildren. We look forward to continuing a sense of stewardship and responsibility toward more grandchildren and toward the fourth generation, the great-grandchildren. We hope we'll even be around long enough to help raise the great-great-grandchildren.

The first line of defense must always be the family-the nuclear family, the intergenerational family, and the extended family. So we must never think our modeling, mentoring, organizing, and teaching is done.

The Trim Tab Factor

This journey from survival to significance can seem overwhelming at times. It may seem as though there's too much to do. The gap between the real and the ideal may seem huge. And you're only one person. Just how much can one person really do?

I'd like to suggest a single, powerful image for the transition person to keep in mind.

Airplanes and ships have a small surface often called the trim tab. When this trim tab is moved, it moves a larger surface that acts as a rudder and affects the direction of the ship or plane. While it takes a long period of time to turn a big ocean liner 180 degrees, a plane can be turned quite rapidly. But in both cases it takes that small trim tab to make it happen.

One of the most helpful images to have of yourself in your family is that of a trim tab-the small rudder that moves the big rudder and eventually changes the entire direction of the plane.

If you are a parent, you are obviously a trim tab. In you lies the power to choose, to commit. Commitment is the gear that connects vision to action. If commitment is not there, actions will be governed by circumstance instead of vision. So the first and most fundamental requirement out of which everything else emerges is to make a total commitment to yourself and to your family, including a commitment to live the 7 Habits. Interestingly, this total leadership commitment, or TLC, also stands for "tender, loving care."

Though parents play the primary leadership role, we have also seen many others-sons, daughters, aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, and foster parents-represent the trim tab in their families. They have brought about fundamental change and improvement in the family culture. Many have been the real transition figures. They have stopped the transmission of negative tendencies from one generation to another. They have transcended genes, programming, conditioning, and environmental pressures to begin anew.

One man who came from a background of welfare and abuse said this: All through high school I had this desire to go to college. But Mom would say, "You can't do that. You're not smart enough. You're going to have to be like everyone else and go on welfare." It was so discouraging.

But then I'd spend the weekend with my sister, and through her I was able to see that there was more to life than just living on welfare and receiving food stamps. She was able to show me that by the way she lived.

She was married. Her husband had a nice job. She worked part-time when she wanted to-she never had to. They lived in a nice neighborhood. And it was through her that I was able to see the world. I'd go on camping trips with their family. We did a lot of things together. Through her I got the thirst for a good life. I thought, This is what I want to do. This is how I want to be able to live. And I can't do that on welfare.

She's had a profound influence on my life over the years. Because of her I had the courage to move out west, to go to school, to make something more of my life. Even now we travel back and forth to see each other once a year. We do a lot of talking, a lot of confiding in each other, a lot of sharing of dreams, aspirations, and goals in life. Having and being able to renew that relationship has been a really great thing in my life.

Another husband and father who became an agent of change himself reflected on the agent of change in his life: When I was nine years old, my parents divorced. My dad left my mom with seven children from seventeen down to one and a half. He was an alcoholic and was not supportive emotionally or financially to the family. He never paid alimony or child support. The year after my dad left, my brother left for the Navy. So I was there at home with five sisters and a mom. I guess that is why I'm kind of crazy. I can hang wallpaper better than I can work on an engine. At any rate, I didn't have much of a father's influence in my life.