Hello and welcome back to the Simplicity Diaries with me, Kem Jong Paine. I've been re-reading a book that I haven't touched in years this week. I was just cleaning things up and you know how when you do that, a book just jumps off the shelf and you think, wow, I haven't seen it in a long time.
And it was this book about the seven habits of highly effective people, written some time ago by Stephen Covey. And I remember reading that and it having a tremendous impact on the way I parent. But what jumped out at me particularly in the book was this whole aspect of sphere of influence, sphere of concern.
And it really reminded me of the difference between what we're concerned about and how little power we have over that. But it still remains a concern and what we have influence over and therefore power to change. And in a lecture I actually saw by Stephen Covey, he actually drew up on the board this big circle.
And he said, that's the sphere of concern. We've got so many concerns. And as parents, boy, we specialize in it, right? We've got so many worries, so many concerns.
And then he drew a smaller circle, really much smaller. I mean, if you imagine the sphere of concern being the size of a beach ball, the sphere of influence being the size of a tennis ball. And he said, that's where we have influence.
And a highly effective person will know the difference between the two, will really know and act out of sphere of influence and be informed by sphere of concern. So I really took that to heart. And I remember I went through a patch when the kids were little of finding it difficult to fall asleep because of all the things that were going on and the concerns I had.
And they were in grade school and things were going on. And the way in which I personally learned to deal with this is to say, okay, those are my concerns. There they are.
Now, how do I, is there any foothold of influence I have within that concern? You know, what is the influence I have? And usually, most of the time, there's some kind of influence that I can take, that one can take within the larger concern. And rare times, but they pop up, is sometimes there's frankly nothing. There's really nothing that can be done about it.
And in which case, one just consigns that to the periphery, this bigger circle of the sphere of concern, because there's nothing you can do about it. That's rarer because I found very often, if I spent my time, I was a bit bugged by something, I couldn't sleep. And if I spent my time, rather than being sleepless, just working backwards as to where is my foothold, it was just minutes before I was then asleep.
And I'm not saying this is an insomnia cure, because I don't think I had that. But it was just, you know how things as a parent, things just churn around inside you. And to separate out what is concerning and worrying as to what you have influence and a good degree of control over is absolutely golden.
Because then you become an effective parent. Then you're acting within what you actually can influence and often can control. And then your kids know it.
And this is the thing, is that your kids then hear the ring of authenticity in your voice, the fact that you can control this, you can have influence over this. Because our kids do like a cost-benefit analysis, do you know what I mean? When they hear us give an instruction, say something, make a statement, they sort of listen to it and think, yeah, is that for real or not? Does my dad really mean that or not? Should I really do what he's asking or not? When we operate within our sphere of influence rather than our sphere of worries and concerns, what happens is that our kids not only hear it, we feel more steady and solid within us. Look, I'll give one quick example.
In my early adulthood, when I was 19 and through for two or three years, I worked in a group home for what was then called violent and recidivistic youth. It's not a horrible name, right? But it was an edgy place, and I lived and worked right there. My room was right in the corridor with these kids who came to care for very deeply, but boy, they had some stuff that they had to work out.
I'd meet with a very, very defiant attitude if I wasn't very careful, and I learned quickly to differentiate what I could control and what I wish I could control. What was my influence? What was my concern or worry? And so rather than get into arguments with them, for example, this place was in a little bit of a rural setting. It was way on the outskirts of town.
I could control the car. I mean, I could say to them, you stop talking like that right now, and they would just keep right on sometimes. But if I said to them, look, this is just so disrespectful.
This is so uncooperative. I can't extend to you cooperation unless you extend to me cooperation, and we're just simply not going to get in the car to go into town this afternoon. We're just not.
The cooperation needs to improve. I want to cooperate with you, but I need to see you cooperating with me. Otherwise, we're not getting in that car, and it's a long, long several-mile walk.
That was within my sphere of influence. I was acting within that as a foothold, but what I was really talking about was cooperation, you see, which was my concern. And so that's what I mean about operating within your influence, because those kids, no matter how aggressive they were, couldn't say to me, yeah, you will take me into town.
You will. It's like, no. No, you can't make anyone do that.
This is my sphere of influence. Another example is I was working with a school a little while ago in a school district that was bringing in iPads for kindergartners, and they had already brought it down into first and second grade, and now they were bringing it down into the kindergarten. They were doing it out of their best of intentions because they wanted it to seem cutting-edge and groovy and so on, but there were a ton of parents.
Well, there was one parent, because where it started, there was one parent who just was aghast at that happening, and she'd watched it happen in the first and second grade, but because her child wasn't in that first and second grade, she didn't really take action, but she was very concerned about it, and now it was coming into the kindergarten. Got a call, and I said, well, what's within your sphere of influence? What's within your concern? Now, her concerns were long. She'd researched this, and she'd looked up the Fool's Gold report from the Alliance for Childhood.
Great report, by the way. Fool's Gold from the Alliance for Childhood. And she'd found a lot of data and a lot of well-written stuff, and she just couldn't believe the school were doing this.
So I said, well, what's within your sphere of influence? And she said, well, nothing. I don't know what I can do, because she was overcome with her sphere of concern. It was just really overcoming her.
We paused, and we talked about just a phone call, and we talked about what was in her sphere of influence, and what it was was that she could take all the data that she'd gathered, make it concise, because no one's going to read a dossier on this. And I suggested that she condense that down, and we worked it out down to one page, just bullet points, one page, and that then she could consider beginning to reach out to her affinity group. Like, who are the mothers and the fathers within the school that you feel connected to would get this? Start reaching out to them, which she did.
That group quickly grew, and it grew, and it grew, to the point where they had the sphere of influence that was now quite considerable. They then approached the school administration with this. And, by the way, they let the school administration know that they were like-minded parents.
Parents were discussing the use of technology in kindergarten. They didn't blindside the administration. That wouldn't have been a great approach.
Anyway, they got a pretty large group of parents who were somewhat concerned, very concerned. They put out a questionnaire. This woman got together with a small group.
This was easily done through the software you can get now to put out questionnaires. They did it through the parent organization of the school, had access to the parent organization database, built a very, very convincing case, and the purchase of the iPads was halted for a full year while more study was done into that. And guess who was asked to be on a key part of a four-member team for the study group? That was this woman.
This was very, very effective in translating her sphere of concern into her sphere of influence. And I was just so pleased that she was able to do that and felt so much healthier and effective. And when I spoke to her several months later, it was just a little down the track, it was a remarkable sort of shift in her voice.
The anxiety, the worry, the feeling of, I guess, helplessness. I'm extrapolating here, but it didn't sound good when I first spoke with her. When we made contact again, she sounded strong, centered, calm, but kind of powerful, that she had done this and she had felt that her view had been well represented and that she felt seen within the community.
It was a wonderful thing. So I want to end with a serenity prayer that all of us know, but it so encapsulates this sphere of influence, sphere of concern, the serenity prayer. God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
Doesn't that speak right to the core of what we've been addressing in this Simplicity Diary today? Okay, I sure hope that's helpful. It's been helpful to me, that's for sure, and helpful to countless other people too. So that's it for today.
Okay, bye-bye now.
