The Greenfield Family Rituals for Connection and Growth – (& How To “Bookend” Your Days For Better Relationships) — LIFE Network: RAW Podcast #4

Ben Greenfield [00:00:00]: 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.

Ben Greenfield [00:00:27]: Welcome to the— let's start that over. We're here to talk about awkward, edgy, controversial content. Nothing is off limits, and you're going to learn a lot.

Ben Greenfield [00:00:37]: Welcome to the Raw Podcast.

Ben Greenfield [00:00:41]: Hey, hey, let's see. Oh, I am recording. Just walking out my front door here of my home and using a new little New, new microphone for today's Raw Podcast, episode 4, if I'm not mistaken. So hopefully my, my fancy new recorder gives you even better quality audio while I meander around the Greenfield compound here in Spokane and, and talk with you. You know, these, 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 that's been on my mind a lot lately because it's such a huge part of my life. By the way, say hello to our rooster.

Ben Greenfield [00:01:38]: It's not 4 a.m., it's what, like 4:30 p.m., and the rooster's still going off. Never stops. But something that I get asked about a lot are this whole idea of our family bookends. I like to call them the bookends. How we bookend 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— I don't 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 looting with girls and alcohol and, you know, disappearing out in the town.

Ben Greenfield [00:02:47]: They're, you know, they're hardworking, industrious, productive, uh, 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 Christiansen of the Legado 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 The Greenfield logo, which is proudly 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, 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 bookends of the day.

Ben Greenfield [00:04:43]: 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 as a podcaster and speaker and author and what have you, my job is 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 the 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.

Ben Greenfield [00:05:26]: It doesn't just happen, the 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 AM— and yes, sometimes it's 6:55, sometimes it's 7:05, we're just going to go with 7 AM 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 interview one couple, Patrick and Laurie Gentempo, who first turned me on to this idea about probably 8 years ago. So, I've been doing this with my sons and my wife since my sons were about 8.

Ben Greenfield [00:06:31]: 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 stayed home for the first hour of school. The family played music, danced, burnt incense, made breakfast together, and just hung out together as a family for that first hour of the day. Now, my kids are homeschooled. I don't need to pull them out of school for, for the routine that I'm about to describe to you. And it's not, 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 7:00 AM meeting, we all gather.

Ben Greenfield [00:07:15]: 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 you doing? How'd you 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, "Hey, I have tennis practice at 11:00 and I am going to go pick up alfalfa for the goat, home around 2:00." And my sons say, "Hey, Dad, we have jiu-jitsu at 11:00 today. We have tennis at 2:00 and we have a big meeting for our card game company for whatever." And so, we're all kind of like matching up our schedule talking about the day. And, yes, we all We also use Google Calendar. So every family member does put what their activities for the day are on Google Calendar. So you can at a glance if you really wanted to go in and see what 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 with everybody's day.

Ben Greenfield [00:08:19]: It's important for two reasons. It helps you all just meet together as a family even if you're like ships passing in 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 AM. So, our workout today that we do together is going to be at 8:30 AM. 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 son's going to be working out at 3:00. So, as a part of the huddle, we get on 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. I'm kind of in charge of the physical fitness programming in our house.

Ben Greenfield [00:09:09]: No duh, I'm probably the person 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 begin to plan one night's dinner the night before. Who's making a salad? Who's, you know, trying out a 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. Shoutouts to my cookbook, Boundless Kitchen and Boundless Cookbook. Most of our family recipes are in those cookbooks. But basically, we really get on the same page about dinner because it's such another formative part of the second bookend of our day.

Ben Greenfield [00:10:08]: So, everybody knows in the morning, what it is that they're expected to have ready for family dinner at 7 PM, 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.

Ben Greenfield [00:10:39]: 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 leading 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 Christian author named Jordan Rayner. It's called Word Before Work. It's about how to take pride in the work 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.

Ben Greenfield [00:11:26]: I love to read aloud for years and years. I don't do it as so much now that my sons are 16, but 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 2 to 3 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, it's a little bit of a, you know, brief discussion after the reading. Nothing's too long because let's face it, you know, every, you know, we don't have a 6-hour morning routine.

Ben Greenfield [00:12:13]: But, you know, just that quick discussion after the reading. And the reading is usually 5 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. 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, 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 hit the pillow and we're falling asleep and our lover's embrace, we pray together. And our whole family prays together in the morning.

Ben Greenfield [00:12:59]: My prayers are very simple. For those of you who don't know how to pray or want a structure for prayer, it's very, very simple. I follow the ACTS acronym. A-C-T-S. Adoration, meaning first I will say something like, you know, dear God, you know, you're, you're so awesome, you know, wonderful. Thank you 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, forgive, you know, me for not trusting you and getting anxious yesterday in work.

Ben Greenfield [00:13:46]: 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, 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, my religion, Christianity, is that, you know, you're not expected to be perfect. But you can ask for forgiveness for what you've done and, and come away completely clean and with the weight off your back and not have to carry shame and guilt. And that's, that's, you know, in my opinion, just the most beautiful part about Christianity. Almost tears me up talking about it here. And then I get to T, which is Thanksgiving. Thank you for a home. Thank you for, you know, the fun time we had last night with such and such at a restaurant.

Ben Greenfield [00:14:41]: Thank you for the wonderful 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 thank you for our dogs licking our faces right now as we're sitting on the living room floor. So it's thank you, thank you, thank you. 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, 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.

Ben Greenfield [00:15:40]: But, it's just asking God for, you know, whatever is on our hearts that we want to lay out 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. It's on 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.

Ben Greenfield [00:16:16]: And just for perspective for you here, this whole prayer is usually about 5 minutes long or 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. And then we get on with our day. We get on with our day. Occasionally, the family huddle changes. I will sometimes, if I sense that the mood is down or I want to throw a curveball, 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.

Ben Greenfield [00:17:19]: 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 a random dance party or we'll do something different. But 9 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, that's the first part of the day.

Ben Greenfield [00:17:49]: And again, like, how am I going to detail all of our family habits start to finish? I have an entire— Boundless Parenting is 700 pages long, you guys. And so, it details a lot more as far as family habits of not just our family but 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, after that family huddle, you know, we're all going about our day. I have a home office. You know, I'm often podcasting, consulting. I don't get out much.

Ben Greenfield [00:18:24]: I'm usually just around the house all day. You know, my sons are going this way and that to 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 their 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 PM, everybody just knows 7 PM is when the end of the day occurs, when our end of the day family gathering occurs. Now, depending on how the day has gone, often prior to that 7 PM family dinner meeting, we do go off and do something.

Ben Greenfield [00:19:15]: Like, you know, if I'm done with work by 6 PM, we'll go off and play family tennis or family pickleball. Or maybe at 6:30, we'll play family bocce ball or cornhole in the backyard. Or 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 PM. At 7 PM for the family dinner meeting, here's what happens. Number 1, um, I always am going through a book with my sons. My wife doesn't like to read. She's mostly dyslexic.

Ben Greenfield [00:19:54]: 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 PM, and again, sometimes it's 6:55, sometimes it's 7:15, but, you know, it's 7 PM-ish, 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 to Right now, it's a Harvard Business School financial management for entrepreneurs. So, we're talking like literally tonight at dinner, 2 hours from now, we'll be talking about the different ways that you evaluate a business for a sale or an investment. So, that is our time though for me to share wisdom with them, for us to be able to engage in dialogue about the books that we're reading together. Our cadence is about 1 to 2 books per month. So, every year since my sons were about 7, I have taken them through a cadence of at least 12 books a year, sometimes more. And it's great because all of these great books that I read and that I want to share with them, I'm able to do so in a really systematized format throughout the entire year.

Ben Greenfield [00:21:18]: And it doesn't matter. Your kids can be public-schooled, private-schooled, homeschooled, You can do this practice and it's great because even though I'm typically reading anywhere from 2 to 5 books a week, some in preparation for a podcast, some for personal interest, some for spiritual growth, etc., 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'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. 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 psalm or a spiritual song. You know, it can be everything from, you know, Amazing Grace to The Blessing to some— sometimes it's an old Johnny Cash or whatever, but we always play a song before dinner.

Ben Greenfield [00:22:30]: And it's a great way to just come together and singing is so great. It's wonderful for the kids. We harmonize. We, you know, some people sometimes people will clap and I'll play a little drum on the back of the guitar. 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, right? Adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication. You know, the primary thing is, you know, is a blessing of the meal and bless this food to our bodies and give us a wonderful evening together. And then what happens is Everybody busts out whatever dish that they've prepared for dinner that evening.

Ben Greenfield [00:23:12]: So, you know, I'm pulling the meat out of the oven and my wife's grabbing the potato salad out of the fridge that she made 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. Then, 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 we have to talk to our guests even though our guests often join us in what I'm about to describe to you, we play a a big, glorious family game.

Ben Greenfield [00:24:03]: We have a family game closet that's full of over 100 games. At least once a month, I take my sons out to Barnes Noble, or we go surf over to Amazon, and we just get a new game. Obviously, you know, as I think I've said before on other podcasts, my sons have actually decided that the business they want to go into is card and board game production. And designed, and they have a company called Fried Pickle Games. They're bringing their first game called Fart of 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 that are so wonderful for laughter, for rhetoric, for logic, for game flow theory, for, you know, for reasoning, 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.

Ben Greenfield [00:24:57]: 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 were your accomplishments today and, you know, anybody have news to share, etc. But there's always gameplay involved as a major part of dinner. As a matter of fact, I joke that you could eat off most of our games because they're just so covered with like food particles and chunks of meat and all the things 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, Little Birdie or Exploding Kittens. And sometimes we've got a little more time to spare, so we're playing Scrabble or, you know, the Ticket to Ride train game or Canasta 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 and I can't recommend it highly enough. I know some families play games after dinner.

Ben Greenfield [00:26:05]: We're kind of like a later night. Obviously, if we're starting our family gather at 7, you know, by the time we sit down to actually eat dinner, it's 7:15, sometimes as late as 7:30. And then by the time we finish dinner, it's like 8:30. So we're not going to, you know, we're old buddy daddies. 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, occasionally we'll go out in the yard and play some cornhole or bocce ball or something like that. But usually once dinner has ended and game time has ended, we're like doing dishes and starting to clean up the house and button up things and begin to get ready for bed.

Ben Greenfield [00:26:42]: So anyways, much to the chagrin of many longevity enthusiasts who finish their last meal by 5:00 PM. I will admit your sleep quality, your 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 3 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 closer to like an hour to an hour and a half before bed rather than the, than the token gold standard 3 hours before bed. So anyways, we, we finish up game and dinner and then after that, you guys, it's, it's, it's, it's pretty straightforward. You know, we, we clean up the kitchen, we do the dishes, and then everybody's beginning to, to get ready for bed. We always, every single night, we all gather in my son's room ever since they were born.

Ben Greenfield [00:27:43]: Sometimes, it's story time. Sometimes, it's song time. These days, and this is the practice of ours for the past 6 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 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 reciting Bible verses to myself to fall asleep or get myself back to sleep if I wake up at night. There's something about it that's just super soothing to the soul. But, it's also nice because honestly memorization is great for the human brain. And, my sons, they're not intimidated when they see some 2-page old school, like, you know, Hebrew text translated to English, you know, New King James Version, you know, giant Psalm.

Ben Greenfield [00:28:42]: And they know, oh, hey, in a month I'm going to have this totally committed to memory. So our family has literally memorized hundreds and hundreds of verses of Scripture. Like right now we're just, just on the tail end of memorizing Psalm 19. So we do that every night in the boys' bedroom. We do our memory verse together. And then, once we finished up that, you know, 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 time routine.

Ben Greenfield [00:29:20]: So, what can you do? You know, obviously, a lot of information here. What can you do right now? Let's say you have a family. Let's say you don't have a family. You've got, you know, a spouse, husband or wife, because 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 gone at camp or whatever, my wife and I have the same routine. Okay? My wife and I, have our husband-wife-family huddle, 7 a.m. in the living room. My wife and I meet 7 p.m.

Ben Greenfield [00:29:58]: 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 described to you. So anyways, what can you do? Think about a morning routine. Think about some type of bringing together of a community.

Ben Greenfield [00:30:18]: Could be your roommates, could be your family, could be your spouse. But think about calendaring a way 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 dinnertime a more structured magical routine of coming together? Because I've eaten at some people's houses and it's kind of like, "Yeah, let's play up this and play up that." And there's no prayer. Everybody just kind of dives in and finish up. And a few of the kids go off to play video games. And it just seems 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 an evening coming together in the relationship, the community of a family that you currently live in.

Ben Greenfield [00:31:12]: Try it out. It's going to change your life. So, I hope this raw podcast and this specific topic has been helpful for 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 Legado Family Foundation with Rich Christiansen and my podcast with which I'll also link to in the show notes here.

Ben Greenfield [00:31:40]: And this has been another RAW podcast. Thanks for being a part of the Life Network. Until next time, I'm Ben Greenfield.

Ben Greenfield [00:31:51]: Signing out. Hit subscribe, leave a ranking, leave a review if you got a little extra time. It means way more than you might think. Thank you so much.