by Michael Holland As you eat breakfast, make mental notes on some aspect of each of your kids’ activities from the previous day or evening. Visualize the situation and make a mental movie of the impact of the activity or behavior had on them and/or others. During your afternoon commute home, take [...]
By Michael Holland We plan and guide and push and pull our kids towards paths that we envision will help them be successful in life. What's been so interesting for us over the last couple of years is how different the paths our kids have taken have been from our vision. I find myself in [...]
By Michael Holland "Even when I breathe I disgust my daughter." A man quoted this to me this week as he described his current season of life with 2 teenage daughters. What is it about teenage girls that requires them to vent every ounce of frustration and drama at their parents? These teenage [...]
by Michael Holland Each year I’m committed to reading completely through the Bible. This year I’m reading the Chronological Bible, which aligns events according to when they occurred. At the moment, I am in the Leviticus era, and no matter how many times I read through this book, I struggle with the tremendously detailed rules [...]
by Michael Holland I, like many of you out there, leveraged more than one all-nighter while in college in order to cram for a big project or test. Procrastination, underestimation of the work involved, and overconfidence in my capability to work well under pressure all were at work in rationalizing the all-nighters. The success that [...]
by Michael Holland I believe one of the hardest behaviors I've had to learn as a dad is to hold back on solving a situation for one of my kids so that they can make their own decision. It can be crushing to watch the events unfold, visualizing potential train wrecks as I struggle against [...]
by Michael Holland At a church on any given Sunday, you can see the teenage kids taking their seats and playing the part. They have been dragged unwillingly to church, so they put themselves into that dead space between being actively engaged and full-out rebellion. They participate as little as possible, leverage technology as much [...]
by Michael Holland The words flowed easily for me: “. . . in my first marriage….” They referenced something that was a part of my life: I was married before right out of college. I consciously made that decision and it is part of my history, impacting who I am today. But the reaction from [...]
by Michael Holland In business, I have the opportunity to help executives gain feedback on how others perceive their leadership behaviors and impact via a 360-degree feedback survey. The survey gathers feedback from the executive’s direct reports, his peers, and his boss, forming a full circle of perceptions. The multiple vantage points provide a great [...]
by Michael Holland When our youngest son was 8 years old, he was climbing up into a tree fort at a neighbor’s house. The access was through one of those nifty trap doors in the floor, and as Jesse neared the top of the ladder, he reached up to the edge of the opening to [...]
