Family (fam-uh-lee, fam-lee) noun
Last year the world population passed 8 billion people. To put that in context, if you made a stack of 8 billion pennies it would be 6,960 miles high. If you started at 1 and counted continuously for eight hours a day, every day, it would take you 761 years to count to 8 billion. If you gathered all 8 billion people into one place, they would cover a land area equal to the size of Alaska. 8 billion is a lot of people. Yet out of that massive sea of humanity, each of us can name roughly 10-20 people that we call our family. Our tribe. Our people.
Except for spouses, the members of our family are the only people in our lives that we do not choose to be in relationship with. We don’t choose our parents or grandparents or aunts or uncles or cousins. We’re just born connected to them, for better or worse, through sickness and health, through the good times and the bad. Some of them might be our favorite people in the world, while others might make our skin crawl when they walk in the room.
There are all kinds of families and, like individual people, they all have their own unique personalities and peccadillos. You’ve got your outdoorsy families and your homebody families. Circus families and intellectual families. Conservative families and liberal families. You’ve got families that don’t talk to each other about anything and families where there’s nothing they won’t talk about. I grew up in a family of cowboys where affection was expressed with a punch in the arm and anger was expressed with a harder punch in the arm.
Unless you choose to make yourself a voluntary orphan, you’re going to be spending time with family. Holiday parties, birthdays, family reunions. And even if you love your family from the earth to the moon, spending time with them is going to present challenges. It’s simply the nature of the thing we call family. But when you come to the party prepared, you can survive even the most dysfunctional of family get-togethers.
First, focus on your two places of power: what you do and how you respond. Set your boundaries from the start. You know cousin Julie is going to try to corner you with her Herbalife pitch. Again. But you get to decide how that interaction will go. You can prepare a way to politely decline without making her feel like you’re devaluing her. Or you can decide to have fun with it, listen to the pitch, ask questions, and then let her know, in a good-hearted way, that multilevel marketing just isn’t your thing.
Second, don’t give in to the three places where you lose power: trying to control what people do, how they feel, and what happens. Everyone knows Uncle Larry is going to get five beers in and start talking politics. Mom’s going to start the “grandchildren conversation”. Your sister will announce how proud of you she is for getting out from under her shadow and creating a life of your own. And then she’ll take credit for it. You know what all the hot buttons are going to be and you know they’re going to get pushed. You can’t stop it from happening and you can’t stop Uncle Larry. No one can. But you can go in prepared. Identify the situations that are likely to occur and name ahead of time how you’re going to respond. Name the state you’re going to hold. You’ve already made it perfectly clear to mom that you’re planning to wait at least another year to have kids. So when she starts in about how Nadine, in her book-of-the-month club, already has five grandkids, you can respond from a place of love and compassion and assure mom that she doesn’t have to wait much longer and Nadine can go suck it. (I’m kidding, don’t do that last part.)
The point is, whatever challenges a family gathering might hold, you get to decide how those challenges are going to affect you. Get the nervous system aligned, show up in a love-based state, and have some strategies in your pocket, ready to go. Summer is here. There may be a family vacation looming in your near future. Join us for a Power Series and we’ll get you all tuned up. They’re your family, after all, and like it or not, they’re the only one you’ve got.
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