What An Awful Life!

Dear Friend,

Sometimes even a writer struggles when he sits down in front of that screen.

In my case, the problem isn’t a lack of stuff to talk about.  In fact, I am a bit overwhelmed by everything that I need to teach you.

If you are like I used to be, you can’t wait to get started living the life you were meant to live.  And that’s what I am driven to teach you.

But today, it seems that a bit of humor is in store, ’cause that’s what’s coming out. When I started to type this morning, the following little diddy presented itself, and I thought that I’d share it.

It pretty much sums up my experience in Creative Family Lifestyle Design.

Enjoy!

A Man Named Hugh

There once was a man named Hugh who lived in a shoe.  He had so many kids he didn’t know what to do!

So he decided to chuck his old shoe and set out on a crazy adventure with his wife and kids.

The neighbors thought he was crazy.  They always did – he lived in a shoe after all!

His relatives thought he was ruining his kid’s lives.  “After all, they might miss the Prom,” they said.  “What if one day one of them wakes up and decides to become a dancer, but then realizes that she never quite understood the Pythagorean Theorem?” they said.

“Oh goodness, that would be a tragedy!” he said.

But Hugh and his family decided to continue on their unique path of freedom anyway.  What else could they do?  They knew in their hearts that it was the path that they were meant to follow.  A path of adventure, discovery and exploration.

And they all lived happily ever after.

The End.

And, The Beginning!

I hope that put a little smile on your face!  Have a great day!

All the best,

Hugh

Embrace Uncertainty and You Create Adventure

Dear Friend,

Uncertainty is the key to adventure.

One of the first steps to starting down the road to a creative family lifestyle is to prepare yourself for uncertainty.

If you are the kind of person who needs a lot of predictability in your life in order to sleep well, then this path may not be for you.

First, deciding to change your lifestyle pushes you out of your comfort zone and replaces that sense of dull peace with a sense of excited fear.  But it’s a “good” fear.  And you can convert that little fear into positive energy as you follow up your decision with tangible action.

This is the process of converting uncertainty and fear, defensive emotions, into excitement and adventure, offensive emotions.  This is also the process of seizing control of your life.

When you live in fear, you feel powerless.  When you live in excitement, you are empowered.

So the process of embracing uncertainty, though it sounds discomforting and potentially dangerous, actually makes you feel more powerful, and ultimately, more at peace with your life.

It’s counter-intuitive, but there it is.

Can you embrace uncertainty?  Can your partner?  How about your kids?

Your Kids

From my experience, you won’t need to worry about your kids.  Unless they struggle with a condition such as Aspergers Syndrome*, they will see change as adventure.

In fact, the way that a typical child accepts change is directly related to how their parents deal with it.

When something new or unexpected happens, the very first thing a child will do is look over at you.  What is your reaction?

Remember, like it or not, you are your childrens’ rock.  You take it in stride, and they will too.  You panic, and so will they.  If you handle this part well, your biggest problem will probably be keeping up with your kids, because kids are often fearless adventurers.

Your Partner

Is your partner ready for uncertainty?  Are they a roll-with-the-punches type, or do they prefer a more settled, concrete existence?

Our world needs both kinds of people.  But if you intend to go forward with the process of Creative Family Lifestyle Design, you will likely be turning your existing family “lifestyle” on its head.  And this makes some folks very uncomfortable.

If this is all your idea, then you will understand the process more.  But to your spouse, this may just look like some hair-brained scheme of yours, and they may see themselves as just putting up with it until you move on to something else.

But you aren’t going to move on, are you?  Once you get the Creative Family Lifestyle Design bug, it never lets you go.  So what do you do?

You need to get your partner on-board.

I’m not saying that you have to sell him or her completely on your ideas.  But you do need to provide them with enough information, in as simplified a form as possible, so that they understand exactly what you are trying to accomplish.

Your partner needs to feel empowered by this process, too. Otherwise, you will just spin your wheels.

Trust me.

You

So, are you ready to take this on?  Are you ready to feel powerful and in control of your life?

Stick with me, and we’ll do this together.

Thanks and all the best,

Hugh

* Affiliate Link

He's Gonna Take a Lotta Work...

Dear Friend,

My children are always looking for a better way to make a little money.

A while back my oldest child had noticed how all the men on TV seem to have hairless bodies, like children.  But his dad had some body hair.  He asked me about it.

In my fatherly tone I explained how adults, particularly men, tended to grow body hair. But some men choose to remove that hair because they think it makes them look better.  He agreed that it looked better to him, too.

We also talked about fashions through history.

For example,  I explained to him that in ancient Rome, body waxing (a rather painful technique for removing body hair still in use today) was popular.  Julius Caesar was said to be quite fastidious about removing every last hair on his body that was, in his view, out of place.

My child quickly realized that a body hair removal service for all of the hairy old men out there might be a profitable venture.  He could make some money out of this!

He immediately chose as his new business’ name, “Sasquatch Waxing”.

He figured that if he claimed he could handle the job with the likes of Bigfoot, most ordinary hairy guys would be a snap.  He started to envision big money.

What do you think?  Does he have a chance?

All the best,

Hugh 🙂

Trying Something "Different"

Dear Friend,

Give your family lifestyle dreams a try out.

If you followed the advice in my last post, you have been doing a lot of thinking lately about what sort of family lifestyle you could be following.

Now it’s time to get your feet wet.

Up to this point, everything that you have done has been in your head.

You have imagined your creative family lifestyle involving your family in all sorts of adventures together.  You have visualized a more proud, more alive you living a new life of real meaning.

When you imagined your new family lifestyle, what, exactly, did you imagine that you were doing?

Were you traveling, like us?  Were you working with others?  Doing charity work?  Taking a family course in martial arts?  Living on a farm in the mountains?

Whatever you imagined, now it’s time for a little taste of your new life.

Look around for opportunities to test out your fantasies.   Maybe it is a trip with your family?  Or a family Saturday at a soup kitchen?  Or renting some rooms at a working guest farm somewhere?

Whatever it is, you need to test your expectations against reality.

Just because you imagine these activities to be exciting or fulfilling doesn’t mean they actually will be.  I will tell you from personal experience that your imagination is probably right on.  But you have to prove this to your reasoning side.

This is also a chance to introduce the rest of your family to your dream.

Whatever you do, don’t just announce, “Hey guys, I hope you like this because it’s what you are going to be doing full time from now on.”  You will need to be much more subtle in how you introduce a new direction for your family.  And that introduction happens much later.  For now, just tell them that this is really important to you, and it will be really cool to do together as a family.

You will now discover where the major resistance in your family will come from.

If you have one or more teens, they may see this as mandatory family time and resent the time away from their burgeoning social life.

Unfortunately, there is no certain way to handle teens. They are on the brink of forming their own dreams and lifestyle, so they naturally resist be imposed upon by yours.

You might just tell them that you’d like to live a dream, if just for a few days or weeks, and, if nothing else, it just might inspire them to discover their own dreams or learn something about themselves that they never realized.  If you can afford it, you might let them bring along a pal.

In this experience you will also discover just how far apart your family has drifted.  And what the current level of comfort is for spending time together.  Some people are going to be afraid to discover this fact.  It is easier to pretend that all is well and everyone is close and loving, than to possibly discover that your family members really don’t care for each other’s company much right now.

Well, this is reality.  If you want your dreams to stay in the realm of your fantasies, then you are already done.  If you want to make them real, then finding out where your family stands together (and apart) must be experienced.

Understand also that your first journey together may be a bit awkward, and even stressful.

I promise you that it get’s better.  You are all figuring out your comfort zones.  You are getting used to being close again.  So don’t give up on this process too soon.

Anyway, if any of you are or were at this stage in your family lifestyle journey, I’d love to hear from you – good and bad.  Please post a reply to this post about your experiences.

Hang in there.  Turning your life around is like turning a big ship.  It is slow.  It takes time.  But it will turn.

All the best,

Hugh

Have An Open Mind?

Dear Friend,

To pursue creative family lifestyle design, you must have an open mind.

Hello from the foot of Stone Mountain at Stone Mountain Park, Georgia!

Today, while enjoying the sights and sounds of this beautiful location with our children, my wife and I talked a bit about her experience of transitioning from our old, traditional lifestyle to our new, open-ended creative family lifestyle of adventure.

For her, this was not an easy process.  It took her well outside of her normal comfort zone.  She told me that only when she had decided to adopt an open mind did the possibilities of our new lifestyle become apparent to her.

In fact, she said that adopting an open mind was the most important thing she did during this process.  Without an open mind, she believes that she could not have wrapped her head around this new creative family lifestyle.  And once she had loosened up, and our family had begun our new creative family lifestyle journey, having an open mind resulted in her seeing so much more than she had ever imagined she would.

Without an open mind, she said, she would’ve been trying to understand the world with her eyes closed.

You may be like my wife.  You want to make a change.  You want to pull your family together.  You want to rediscover a connection with your partner and create a new and unbreakable bond with your kids.  But what will all of this require?

Well, first and foremost, if you want to get your family’s lifestyle out of its rut, you must have a reasonably open mind about the way you might live your life everyday.

If you cannot adopt this open mind, then you are already dead in the water.

What do I mean by an “open mind”?  How about way open.

Perhaps you aren’t really interested in making fundamental changes to your lifestyle.  Maybe you are comfortable where you are, if a bit bored or uninspired.  Maybe you have invested huge amounts of time and money into your current way of life.  You have a career with financial potential.  You have a home, mortgage, bills, and kids with ultra busy lives.  You have a partner with his or her own activities, career, and priorities.  Is there a way to get your family out of its rut, to bind all more closely together, without shaking up everything that you have built to date?

I don’t know.

But you need to be willing to consider that it is the very way that you are today living your life that is the cause of your family woes. 

I suggest that your current family lifestyle and priorities may be slowly destroying your family.

The way your lifestyle will look after you have completed this process is unknown to all.  But I warn you, if you try to limit what you will and will not consider as possible future paths for you and your family, then your process will fail.

Now is not the time for limitations.  Now is the time to imagine the universe.

Why?

What we are dealing with here is feeling free to challenge your fundamental assumptions about how your adult life can be lived.

You must be open to the possibility that you may one day find yourself following a path that is unique and unexpected.  Even one that others around you do not easily accept, though you will find that they generally cannot articulate why they can’t accept it.  You have to be open to any possibility, no matter how unlikely you now think it might be.

The process of getting your family out of its rut is primarily a mental and emotional process.

The actions that you will take later will be much easier.  The challenge, as my wife so succinctly put it, is to “put your head around” a new point of view, a new way of thinking about your life and your family.

You will have to suspend your inner judge and be open to anything.

Please understand that your judgments today are heavily colored by your current point of view.  And if you follow this program, you will be challenging that point of view.

You will have opinions later, of course.  There will be family paths that appeal to you and others that you cannot stand.  But first, you must be prepared to take a second look at every belief that you have previously held about how you and your family might live your life every day.  Even if you are certain that a particular direction will not work for you, I implore you to drop all of your biases and try to look at all options from an open viewpoint.

It is quite likely that your new creative family lifestyle will be much more unique than you now expect.

You may be quite surprised by how much that you change.  Your ultimate creative family lifestyle may turn out to be a miss-mash of styles, money-making tactics, and living arrangements, that you borrow from others.  Some of these others may not personally appeal to you.  But they still might be able to teach you something.  So don’t self-limit what you check out.

The Internet is by far the best tool to use when you begin your creative family lifestyle exploration process.  When you start to find others whose family lifestyles you find appealing, read their discussion group posts and blogs.

Even better, travel to conventions and gatherings, where all of this theory can become more concrete for you.  There you will see real people who have actually done it – they’ve broken out of their rut and they’ll never go back.  The impact of this on your motivation and confidence cannot be overstated.

So, your first step to family freedom is to dump your inner judge.

Do it, or you might as well stop wasting your time. This is a mandatory threshold step to moving on to the lifestyle of your dreams.

Be prepared to step out of your imagination’s comfort zone.

This is a journey into the unknown. For now, this will only be a theoretical leap. You don’t have to make changes to your lifestyle yet. But you will begin to get a feeling for what your life could be like. And you will discover inner feelings and impulses that you never knew you had or had long forgotten.

You will discover, and rediscover, your most deeply-held dreams.

This is the beginning of your journey to a new life. And a new way of living. With new priorities. And new attitudes. Very possibly in new places and around new people.

Are you ready? I hope so!

So, go ahead and mess around on the Internet.  Get this process started.

Later I will start discussing what you will need to do next.

All the best,

Hugh

Leading Your Brood

Dear Friend,

In my last post I asked whether you were your family’s leader.

Whether your answer was yes or no, this post is focused on you.

Why does leadership matter?

Well, first let’s consider the following questions.

Is your home just a collection of people going separately about their own lives?  Is this what you had always dreamed that it would be like?  Are you and your loved ones bonded together in a way that brings each of you positive energy, strength, and a sense of true belonging?

Chances are, if your home isn’t what you’d like it to be, then you or your partner isn’t doing a very good leadership job.

Most families, I believe, drift aimlessly and lack a strong bond because they are leaderless.  No one has taken responsibility for the family’s direction.  Without leadership, there is no common goal or purpose.

Before a family can truly bond, there needs to be a catalyst – a key personality – around whom everything else rotates.  This person sets the tone for the family, and spearheads the direction of it’s activities.  If there is more than one of these leaders, then there will either be very effective leadership, or these two alpha-types will compete and pull the family apart.

However, most of the time the problem is that there is no leader.

It seems that most adults do not understand that a family is like a team.  A team without leadership, a clear goal, and teamwork, is just a loose collection of individuals.

Close knit families don’t just happen.  You make them happen.

So if you want to have the family of your dreams, then either you or your partner is going to have to step up to the plate and take on the leadership role.

I’ll get into how to get started in this new leadership role in a future post.

Thanks,

Hugh

Out In Front

Dear Friend,

The purpose of The Way of the Passionate Warrior is to create inspired and passionate family leaders.

Yes, this site is about families.  But truly it is about family leadership.

Are you a family leader?

Not much happens in life without some sort of initiative.  And initiative is leadership, even if you are the only one being led.

Today, much of our culture has been conditioned to be led.  We are taught to obey, to just get along.  Initiative creates dissonance.  It stirs the pot, and that creates uncertainty.  And there is a great incentive today for those already in power to try to stay there by squashing initiative.

Yet, in times of great change, it is only initiative that’s going to get us out of here.  It is initiative that steers the ship out of the storm.  And which way do we steer?  That decision requires creativity, decisiveness, and passion to make it stick.  We may just be steering off the edge of the Earth (and those who want to squash our initiative will certainly argue that) but we are more likely to discover a new land, with new opportunities and new dangers.

In fact, we will discover our future.

Are you ready to discover your future?  Or do you prefer wallowing in the uncertainty of today’s perpetual chaos, wondering where the storm might deposit you? Or where others with initiative might dump you?

If you don’t like the direction of your life today, or you feel that your family is drifting apart, perhaps what is missing is you.  You can blame your partner, or the economy, or your extended family, or your job, or a million other things that you have little control over.  Or you can do something about it.

It’s time to seize control of your life and begin to steer a course that you set.

Are you ready to sail?

All the best,

Hugh

Texas!

Dear Friend,

Hello from Marshall, Texas!

The crew has been barreling across the southeastern United States en route to Cleburne, Texas, and our newly refurbished (I hope) Warrior RV motorhome.

Last evening we were like Mary and Joseph, going from inn to inn and finding all full.  I don’t know what’s going on in Louisiana and east Texas, but the economy here looks pretty good.  We finally found a temporary home here in Marshall.

We got the call that the Warrior was ready to go while we were attending The Autodidact Symposium unschooling conference in Columbia, South Carolina.  So, without hesitation, our destination changed to Cleburne.

The Symposium had a big impact on my wife.  And on me, too.

My wife had been curious but uncertain about the unschooling direction that we have been taking in educating our kids.  But the warmth of the reception that she received, and the overwhelming intelligence and peaceful character of the unschooling families that we met there, really put her at ease.

Although I was already comfortable with our current unschooling direction, this was the first time that I had met, face to face, others who were sharing our unique path.

It was great to meet teens who were a “product” of this unschooling path, and to hear of the extraordinary number of PhDs and otherwise highly accomplished individuals who were emerging out of this self-directed method of learning and growing.

My kids had a great time.  My oldest in particular.  He wants to travel North America again.  Except, this time, we will be visiting unschooling conferences each month wherever they are held.  I think that he enjoyed the camaraderie he found with the other kids there.  Remember, going in this unschooling direction was his idea.

The conference itself was organized and managed completely by a 22 year old unschooled young man.  His last year of formal schooling was the sixth grade.  The conference went off without a hitch.  At the end this young man received a standing ovation.

The last speaker at the Symposium was a young lady of 20 years, who spoke to the gathering as if she were 40.  An accomplished artist and scholar, she had been self taught her entire life.  I know that when I was 20 years old, I had never met such a person as she.  I hope that my children turn out half as well.

And that’s what all of this is about, isn’t it?

We can agree to disagree on all of the theories as to what approach is best for raising our children.  But, in the end, it’s the results that matter.  I like the results that I met in the flesh over the last several days.

I believe that, for too long, we as a culture have failed to question the fundamental approach that we take to raising our children.  We believe that we have no choices.  We do what we are expected to do.

I have discovered that we have many choices.  Take your time, teach yourself about what is out there.  And approach everything with a fresh and open mind.

So many of the hard challenges that we face today are the products of our own, unconscious decisions.  If each of us wakes up to those decisions, just imagine all of the good that we can accomplish.  And all of the misery that we can avoid.

Until later,

Hugh

The Autodidact Symposium

Dear Friend,

Hello from beautiful downtown Columbia, South Carolina!

My crew and I are here to attend The Autodidact Symposium, a gathering with an imposing name but a simple purpose – to allow self-directed learners a place to gather and share ideas, experiences, and friendship.

Primarily, our goal is to meet and hear from other families who have chosen this path for their childrens’ upbringing.  My wife, in particular, is interested in speaking to intelligent, experienced people who can (and have) share their wisdom and experience.

I believe that we will have a better feeling for the unique path that we have chosen as a result of our visit here.

We just got word that the Warrior is ready for pick-up!  So we will depart Columbia and head straight for Dallas, Texas, and our rolling home.

I am quite excited to get back into my other “home.”  And the kids are too!

Until later,

Hugh