Morning and Evening Bookends: Building Strong Family Rituals for Connection and Growth - LIFE Network: RAW Podcast #4

Welcome to a special raw episode, what does raw mean? Well, within the life network,

at joinlifenetwork.com, I pop on every once in a while and just release solo-sode

conversations with me, myself, and I. Today is one of those raw episodes. This is going to be

at joinlifenetwork.com. If you want to check it out.

I've come a long way from the smearing extra virgin olive oil on my face as a moisturizer

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and feel more confident. You've probably heard of your vagus nerve and you've probably heard of

vagus nerve stimulation. There's a few ways to stimulate your vagus nerve. You can get a giant

needle shoved past your carotid bilaterally on either side of your neck. That's called a

stellate gangly nerve block. That sounds fun. You can also get surgery to get a vagal nerve

stimulator implanted into your neck, which also sounds like a blast, where you can use gentle

non-invasive vagus nerve stimulation by simply holding a device called the true vagga up on either

side of your neck and that helps your body shift out of fight or flight sympathetic nervous

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and use code greenfield30 to save 30 buckaroos on any true vagga device. Welcome to the

room. Let's start that over. We're here to talk about awkward edgy controversial content.

Nothing is off limit. You're going to learn a lot. Welcome to the raw podcast.

Hey, hey, let's see. I am recording. I'm just walking out my front door here of my home

and just on a new little new microphone for today's raw podcast.

Episode four if I'm not mistaken. Hopefully my fancy new recorder gives you even better quality

audio while I meander around the greenfield compound here in Spokane and talk with you.

These raw episodes have been fantastic. You guys have been given great feedback,

guys and girls, and you know something that I've been asked repeatedly that I haven't really

talked I guess in detail about, but it's been on my mind a lot lately because it's such a huge

part of my life, by the way, so say hello to our rooster. It's not 4 a.m. It's what, like 4 30 p.m.

The rooster's still going off. Never stops. But something that I get asked about a lot

are this whole idea of our family book ends. I like to call them the book ends. How we book end

our family habits and our family day. Now this is important whether you have a family, you plan

on having a family, you know families who you might want to share this with because we actually

do have really solid, meaningful family connections every day. And a lot of people,

you know they want to jinx myself here, but they meet my sons and they say that my sons seem

like well-balanced teenage boys. You know they're not in the drugs and porn and gluten with girls

and alcohol and, you know, disappearing out in the town. They're, you know, they're hard working

industrious, productive, upright, ethical, young men. And I think that a big, big part of that,

whether you're raising a girl or a boy, comes down to some key habits. Now on my main

Ben Greenfield Life Podcast, I've interviewed folks like Rich Christianson of the Legato Family

Foundation who our family worked with and I detail that work also in my book, Boundless Parenting

to develop the Greenfield Family Constitution, the Greenfield Family Values, the Greenfield Family

Mission Statement, the Greenfield Crest, the Greenfield logo, which is probably displayed on the

flags that hang outside our front door and on the family pickleball paddles and the family

throw pillows and the family t-shirts and hoodies and hats and even the family pepper grinder and

and cup coasters. I think that all of these elements, when it comes to family legacy, are so

important to pass on generational meaning, generational wealth. If you look at the Greenfield Family

Playbook, it has everything from, you know, the contact details for all the people who run our,

you know, our insurance, our financial management, all the way down to, you know, me and my wife

and my son's memorial service plans are our end of life wishes, our family colors, our family spirit

animals, you know, what we do on Thanksgiving, what we do on Christmas, what we do on Easter,

what we do on a day-to-day basis. It's all spelled out in there, but I specifically want to hone in

for you today on the day-to-day, specifically the so-called book ends of the day. Probably one of

the most meaningful things for me as a father, as a husband, as a human being. This is something that

really gets me out of bed in the morning and despite me loving my job, you know, as a podcaster

and speaker and author and what have you, my, my job's wonderful. I love it. I love to be able to

help people and educate just like I'm doing right now, but it's really that beginning of the day

and the end of the day with the family, that's one of the most cherished and special parts of my day.

And I think that just like with a workout or meditation or prayer or journaling or a cold

bath or anything else, you have to schedule this type of stuff in. It doesn't just happen,

type of stuff that I'm about to talk to you about. So here's how it breaks down.

I know, I have it on my calendar, that every morning at 7 a.m., and yes, sometimes it's 6.55,

sometimes it's 7.05, we're just going to go with 7a.m. because that's about approximately when

it happens and that's when it's on my schedule. I am in charge of gathering my entire family

in the living room. Occasionally, if it's nice outside, it's the back porch or the patio or the

backyard. But my job as the leader of the home is to gather the entire family and kind of like the

quarterback of the football team get everybody together for the daily huddle. Now in my book,

Boundless Parenting, I interviewed one couple Patrick and Laurie Gentempo who first turned me

onto this idea about probably eight years ago. So I've been doing this with my sons and my

wife since my sons were about eight. But they literally spoke with their school superintendent and

requested that their children be able to skip the first hour of school. And the children said

stayed home for the first hour of school. The family played music, dance, burnt incense, made

breakfast together, and just hung out together as a family for that first hour of the day.

Now my kids are home school. I don't need to pull them out of school for the routine

about to describe to you and suck. It's not really a full hour just hanging out and dancing

together as a family, even though dancing is sometimes involved. But basically for that 7am

meeting, we all gather. We sit down on, again, living room, floor, backyard, patio, you name it.

And the very first thing I do is I check in on everybody. Hey, how are you doing? How just

sleep? How are you feeling? How are you feeling about the day? What are you excited about today?

What's happening today? And then people begin to share, hey, I've got my wife will say,

yeah, I have tennis practice at 11 and I'm going to go pick up Elfalford for the goat,

home around two and my sons will say, hey, dad, we have you know, Jiu Jitsu at 11 today, we have tennis

at two and we have a big meeting for our, you know, our car game company for whatever. And so

we're all kind of like matching up our schedule, talking about the day. And yes, we all also

use Google Calendar. So every family member does put what their activities for the day are

on Google Calendar. So you can add a glance if you really wanted to go in and see where everybody's

up to in general. But it's nice to just sit at the beginning of the day and talk about, you know,

what's going on through everybody's day. It's important for two reasons. It helps you all just

meet together as a family, even if you're like shifts passing the night, the rest of the day.

It's great to be able to gather like that at the beginning of the day. And secondarily,

it helps to understand that, oh, hey, you know, my sons and I don't have any major appointments

or meetings until 9.30 a.m. So our workout today that we do together is going to be at 8.30 a.m.

or we all like are super busy this morning. And there's no way we're going to be able to do

our workout together because I'm going to be working out at 8.30 and my sons are going to be

working out at 3. So as a part of the huddle, we get them the same page about what the workout

of the day is going to be because my sons and I all do the same workout plan together from kind

of in charge of the physical fitness programming in our house. No done. I'm probably the person

most most equipped to do that for our house because I'm a personal trainer, just a glorified

personal trainer. So anyways, we we match up schedules, talk a little bit about what's going on

that day. And as a part of that discussion, there's even a discussion about the family dinner,

which I'll get to later on, but it's literally, hey, you know, what got pulled out of the freezer

last night because we'll usually, you know, begin to plan one night's dinner the night before.

Uh, who's making a salad? Who's, you know, trying out new recipe from a cookbook we got? Who's

doing the meat? Who's, you know, making the potato salad or the bread or the carrot fries or

what have you? Uh, shout out to my cookbook, Boundless Kitchen and Boundless Cookbook. Most of

our family recipes are in those cookbooks. But basically, we really get in the same page

about dinner because it's such another formative part of the second book end of our day.

So everybody knows in the morning what it is that they're expected to have ready for family

dinner at 7 p.m. 12 hours later when family dinner gathering occurs. And sometimes there's

other little discussions, hey, whatever, you know, dad didn't sleep too well last night,

I'm going to take a nap this afternoon, heads up or, you know, mom's not feeling well. Let's

pitch in and help her today, you know, just little things like that. So then we move into a devotional.

We always, for years and years, had some kind of a reading that we do together as a family.

Sometimes it changes like reading up to Christmas. It's an advent reading right now while I'm talking

to you. It is a book about work by a productivity expert and a Christian author named Jordan Rainer.

It's called Word Before Work. It's about how to take pride and the works that you do and

devote it to God and help other people and just a really good perspective on productivity and work

from a theological standpoint. So we do that reading. Usually I do the reading. I love to read

aloud, you know, for years and years. I don't do it as so much now that my sons are 16, but,

you know, read the family stories every night before bed. But I do the reading, the devotional

reading. I'm traveling one of my sons or my wife does it with the family at home. And so I do the

reading. And then when I finish the reading, I will usually talk to my family for about two to

three minutes about kind of the major takeaway. Or I'll ask them a question about something that I

read that I thought was important that I want to hear their perspective on. So there's a little bit

of a, you know, brief discussion after the reading. Nothing's too long. So let's face it, you know,

you know, we don't have a six hour morning routine, but, you know, just that quick discussion

after the reading. And the reading is usually five to 10 minutes maximum. So, you know, within about

15 minutes, we have matched up schedules, we've planned out the day, we've done a devotional

uplifting spiritual reading together. And then we all pray. She was, she was, she was, she was,

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I lead the prayer. And it's just a wonderful thing to do together as a family to engage in

something spiritual and sacred together. You know, and the very last thing I do in bed before

I fall asleep is my wife and I pray together. You know, after we do our pillow talking and our

heads at the pillow and we're falling asleep and our lovers embrace, we pray together. And our whole

family pray together in the morning. My prayers are very simple. For those of you who don't know how

to pray or want to structure for prayer, it's very, very simple. I follow the apps acronym ACTS

Adoration, meaning first I will say something like, you know, Dear God, you know, you're so

awesome, you know, wonderful. Thank you for for allowing us to just come before you and for

creating the universe and you just basically act like you're walking into a king's throne room.

And then confession, you know, please forgive us for this or that or, you know, something

that we fell short on or, you know, forgive me for being selfish or, you know, for, forgive,

you know, me for not trusting you and getting anxious yesterday and work. And typically after

the C part, the confession, I'll stop for about 20 or 30 seconds to let other members of the family

and as well as myself just silently, you know, confess whatever it is that we want to lay out on

our hearts before God that we would like to be forgiven for because that's one of the, of course,

the most beautiful parts of, in my opinion, my religion, Christianity is that, you know,

you're not expecting to be perfect, but you can't ask for forgiveness for what you've done.

And, and come away completely clean and with the weight off your back and I have to carry shame

and guilt and that's, that's, you know, in my opinion, just the most beautiful part about Christianity.

Well, tears me up talking about it here.

And then I get to tea, which is Thanksgiving. Thank you for our home. Thank you for, you know,

the fun time we had last night with such and such at a restaurant. Thank you for, you know, the,

the wonderful, you know, tennis game that we got to play as a family yesterday afternoon. Thank you

for providing us with this beautiful sunshine and thank you for the rooster and, you know,

thank you for our dogs looking at our faces right now as we're sitting on the living room for.

So it's thank you, thank you, thank you. You know, so it's basically our family gratitude practice,

essentially. And then finally, the S is supplication, right? People who I've committed to pray for,

or our family has committed to pray for, things that have come to our heart that we need to ask God

for, right? Like we're in the process of moving to Idaho. So we'll, you know, pray about God,

blessing our move and helping to, you know, make it go smoothly or praying that God would, you know,

provide direction and wisdom for some business issue that I might be tackling or praying for my

sons as they build their business or praying for my wife as she ministers to the local community.

But it's just asking God for, for, you know, whatever's on our hearts that we want to lay out and,

and ask for. So that's the S. So ACTS, adoration, confession, thanksgiving, and supplication.

And I always pause at the very end. I pause for about 30 seconds, just in complete silence.

And usually in those 30 seconds, other things come to mind that I want to thank God for some of my

heart. I think it's always important to have that silence at the very end, you know, before you say,

you know, in Jesus' name, amen, just because some other things usually come to mind. And it just

perfect for you here are that this whole prayer is usually about five minutes longer. So, right?

So the entire family huddle that I'm describing to you start to finish is no longer than 20 minutes,

right? So this isn't a huge lift, but it's so meaningful and so impactful for just bringing the

whole family together at the beginning of the day. We finish the prayer and then we all stand up

and we have a big group hug. Sometimes it's individual hugs and embraces, sometimes it's,

you know, all of us literally just like circling up and hugging. Then we get all of our day,

we get all of the day. Occasionally, the family huddle changes. I will sometimes, if I sense that

the mood is down or I want it to occur, I will just put on a song and we will, we'll have a family

dance party for like 10 minutes, you know, playing some big long fun song or a couple of songs or

the happy mix on Spotify or whatever, right? So that might be like a Saturday that we do something

like that or a day when it's like rainy outside or, you know, people, if I just sense the mood is

down, I'll sometimes just call it random dance party. We'll do something different, but nine times

out of 10, it's exactly as I just described. Meet, talk about the day, match up schedules, match up

dinner, do a devotional reading and pray. And that's it. So that's the beginning. That's the first

part of the day. And again, like how am I going to detail all of our family habits start to finish?

I'm an entire boundless parenting is 700 pages long you guys. So it details, you know, a lot more

as far as family habits of not just our family, but you know, 31 other families who I interviewed

for that book. But I want to fast forward now because the purpose of this podcast is to talk about

two things, the beginning of the day and the end of the day. So I've got a family huddle, you know,

we're all going about our day. I have a whole office, you know, I'm often podcasting, consulting,

I don't get out much. I'm usually just around the house all day, you know, my sons are going

this way, that's a jiu-jitsu or tennis or piano or, you know, my wife's off, you know, doing

all of her errands and going about the town and, you know, at home and working in the garden and

taking care of goats and chickens and, you know, everybody just stopped doing this thing. We see

each other throughout the day. And, but we don't have like a big breakfast together. We don't have

a lunch together, but then at 7 p.m., everybody just knows 7 p.m. is when the end of the day occurs,

when our end of the day's family gathering occurs. Now, depending on how the day is gone, often

prior to that 7 p.m., family dinner meeting, we do go off and do something like, you know,

if I'm known as work by 6 p.m., we'll go off and play family tennis or family pickleball,

or maybe at 6.30, we'll play family botchy ball or cornhole in the backyard. Well, my sons and I

will have a quick ping pong tournament in the garage. Sometimes we're all busy, and we literally all

just haven't done anything, but we just meet at 7 p.m. At 7 p.m., for the family dinner meeting,

here's what happens. Number one, I always am going through a book with my sons. My wife doesn't

like to read. She's mostly dyslexic. She kind of sits in the background and listens in, but my

sons and I devote the first 10 minutes when we meet around 7 p.m., and again, sometimes it's

6.55, sometimes it's 7.15, but at 7 p.m., we go over the chapter or the section of the book

that we're reading together, and it varies widely. I mean, it's everything from some deep

theological book to a productivity and time management book to a health and physical

sciences book. Right now, it's a Harvard Business School financial management for entrepreneurs,

you know, so we're talking like literally tonight at dinner, you know, two hours from now,

we'll be talking about the different ways that you evaluate a business for a sale or an investment.

Right, so that is our time, though, for me to share wisdom with them for us to be able to engage

in dialogue about the book that we're reading together. Our cadence is about one to two books per

month, so every year, since my sons were about seven, I have taken them to a cadence of at least 12

books a year, sometimes more, and it's great because, you know, all of these great books that I

read that I want to share with them, I'm able to do so in a really systematized format throughout

the entire year, and it doesn't matter, you just can be public school, private school, home school,

if you can do this practice and it's great, because even though, you know, I'm typically reading

anywhere from two to five books a week, you know, some in preparation for a podcast, some

for personal interests, some for spiritual growth, et cetera, there's always at least one big

hell yes. This is a book I want to read with my sons book that we're reading, and then again,

what gets calendared is what gets what's going to get done. We always have that calendar time

right before dinner, to talk about the chapter or the section that's been assigned from that book.

So after the book reading and discussion, we then move on to song.

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Austin, Texas. There is a fantastic seed oil free, completely clean restaurant. They're called the

well. Well, I have partnered up with the well on March 21st. We are revealing the official launch of

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and the well is now making it. The well is on second street in Austin, Google it. You can find it.

Here's the details. Come meet me right there Saturday March 21st in Austin, downtown Austin.

It's going to be about 9 30 AM to 11 30 AM. I will be giving away signed fresh on the spot boundless

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That's a Saturday. Have fun. See you there. I whip out the guitar or I have one of my sons who are

getting better and better at the guitar, play the guitar and we have a big family song. Usually it's

like a hymn or a song or a spiritual song, you know, it can be everything from the hill. Amazing

grace to the blessing to some, sometimes it's an old Johnny Cash or whatever, but we always play a

song before dinner. It's a great way to just come together and seeing is so great. It's wonderful

for the kids. We harmonize. We, you know, some people sometimes people will clap and all play a

little drum along the back of the guitar. You know, occasionally one of my sons will plunk out

something on the piano, but we play a song and sing a song together. And then we pray again.

And the prayer in the evening is very similar to the prayer in the morning,

where adoration, confession, Thanksgiving, supplication, you know, the primary thing is, you know,

it's a blessing of the meal and blesses food or bodies and give us a wonderful evening together.

And then what happens is everybody busts out whatever dish that they prepared for dinner that

evening. So, you know, I'm pulling the meat out of the oven and my wife's grabbing the potato salad

out of the fridge and she made it earlier that afternoon. And one of my sons is grabbing the salad

that he put together or the, you know, the bread that he sliced and toasted and put some olive oil

and honey and salt on. And so everybody just kind of brings their dishes out. It's almost like

potluck style as a family. And we put all the dishes out and then everybody loads up their plate.

And we move on to really, I think, the highlight of the night. And that's family game.

Almost every single night of the week. Unless we have some serious discussion to have as a family

or we've got guests over and, you know, we have to talk to our guests, even though our guests often

join us and what I'm about to describe to you. We play a big, glorious family game. We have a

family game closet that's full over 100 games. At least once a month, I take my sons out to Barnes

and Noble where we go serve over to Amazon and we just get a new game. Obviously, you know,

as I think I've said before in other podcasts, my sons have actually decided that the business they

want to go into his card and board game production and design. And they have a company called

Fried Pickle Games. They're bringing their first game called Far To War to Kickstarter here

in a few weeks. But a big part of that was inspired by the fact that we just play so many games.

And it's so wonderful for laughter, for rhetoric, for logic, for game flow theory, for, you know,

for for for reasoning, for for argumentation, for conflict resolution. There's so much that you

learn through games. And it's not like we aren't talking with each other. You know, we're still,

a lot of times, you know, in between a hand of cards or in between a round of gameplay. We're

talking about our day and how everybody's day go and, you know, what we're accomplishments today.

And, you know, what anybody has news to share, et cetera. But there's always gameplay involved,

as a major part of dinner. As a matter of fact, that joke that you could eat off most of our games

because they're just so covered with like food particles and, you know, chunks of meat and all

things they get they get dosed with during dinner. But we play games. Sometimes the games are short,

right? If we've started dinner late because it's been a busy day, sometimes we're choosing a

quick game like, I don't know, you know, little birdie or exploding kittens. And sometimes we've got

a little more time to spare. So we're playing Scrabble or, or, or, you know, the ticket to ride

train game or canaster or something that's a little bit longer. But, you know, there's always

some kind of a game that we play. And it's just so wonderful. I can't recommend it highly enough.

I know some families play games after dinner. We're kind of like a later night. Obviously,

if we're starting our family gather at seven, you know, by the time we sit down and actually eat

dinner, it's 7-15, sometimes it's late at 7-30. And then by the time we finish dinner, it's like

8-30. So we're not going to, you know, world buddy does. We go to bed at like 9-30 or 9-45. So we're

not going to go play some big game after dinner. You know, okay, so we'll go out in the yard and

play some corn hole or bocky ball or something like that. But usually, once dinner is ended and

game time is ended, we're like doing dishes and starting to clean up the house and button up things

and begin to get ready for bed. So anyways, much to the chagrin of many one-genre enthusiast who

finished their last meal by 5 p.m. I will admit your sleep quality or sleep onset, your sleep

latency, all that's going to be better if you do have an early dinner time. And if you can finish

eating three hours prior to bedtime, it's always better for sleep. But you know what? I wouldn't

trade slightly better sleep for our wonderful, glorious family dinners and family game nights. And

I'm okay with finishing up dinner close to like an hour to an hour and a half before bed rather

than the token gold standard three hours before bed. So anyways, we finish up game and dinner.

And then after that, you guys, it's pretty straightforward. You know, we clean up the kitchen,

we do the dishes and then everybody's beginning to get ready for bed. We always, every single night,

we all gather in my son's room. You know, ever since they were born. Sometimes it's story time,

sometimes it's song time. These days, and this is the practice of ours for the past six years,

we all memorize one verse from the Bible together. Not only because it's so uplifting and

encouraging to have the words of what I consider to be my handbook for life, it's like memorized in

your brain. You know, even if you don't have a Bible on hand, you can pull out encouraging verses.

I don't want to tell you how many times I'm traveling in some foreign hotel room. And I'm just

residing Bible versus to myself fall asleep or get myself back to wake up at night. There's

something about it that's just super soothing to the soul. But it's it's also nice because

honestly, memorization's great for the human brain. And you know, my, my sons, they're,

they're not intimidated when they see some like two-page old school like, you know,

Hebrew text translated to English, you know, New Kings, James, version, you know, giant

psalm, and they know, oh, hey, in a month, I'm going to have us totally committed to memory.

So our family is literally memorized hundreds and hundreds of verses of scripture. Like right now,

we're just just on the tail end of memorizing us all 19. So we do that every night in the

boys bedroom. We do our memory verse together. And then once we've finished up that, you know,

then it's then it's getting ready for bedtime. And I'm not going to get into bedtime routine

in much detail on this raw podcast, but really the main things that I wanted to go over with you

today was A, that morning time routine and B, that evening right time routine. So what can you do?

You know, obviously a lot of information here. What can you do right now? Let's see you have a

family. Let's see you don't have a family. You've got, you know, a spouse, husband or wife,

because I, I, if I would have known the magic of the tactics I just shared with you as far as

togetherness and relationships and solidarity and growth together earlier, I would have started

this from day one of getting married with my wife. But and by the way, when my sons are going

to camper over, my wife and I have the same routine. Okay, my wife and I have our husband,

wife, family, huddle, seven a.m. in the living room. My wife and I meet seven p.m. for dinner.

My wife and I sing a song together. We pray together. We play games together. Same thing,

even when the kids aren't around. So you don't have to have kids to do this routine that I just

describe you. So anyways, what can you do? Think about a morning routine. Think about some type of

bringing together of a community. Could be roommates. Could be your family. Could be your spouse.

But think about calendaring away to start off the day with some kind of a fostering of relationships

and community and togetherness at the beginning of the day. And then think about how can I make

dinner time a more structured, magical routine of coming together? Because I've eaten at some

people's houses and it's kind of like, you know, yeah, we'll play it up this and play it up that and

there's no prayer. Everybody just kind of dives in and finish up and a few of the kids go off

play video games and you know, just he was very odd to me after experiencing not to overuse this

term, the magic that is our Greenfield family dinner. So think about that. How can you create a

morning coming together and evening coming together in the relationship the community of a family

that you currently live in? Try it out. It's gonna change your life. So I hope this raw podcast and

this specific topic has been held before you. Feel free to share it with anyone you know or

implement it this week. And thank you so much for listening. Wherever you're listening,

there'll be show notes. Check out Boundless Parenting. Also check out the Legato Family Foundation

with Rich Christianson and my podcast with him, which I'll also link to in the show notes here.

And this has been another raw podcast. Thanks for being a part of the Life Network.

Until next time, I'm Ben Greenfield signing out.

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