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The Board Meetings strategy doesn’t successfully connect you with your kids by accident. Like every successful process, it’s driven by a series of proven principles—fundamentals that are true, regardless of family or situation.
This isn’t new—you apply principles in your life every day, often without realizing it. If you're committed to health, for example, you eat well and exercise because those are proven principles for health and fitness. Follow them, and you get great outcomes.
Similarly, the Board Meetings strategy is based on a few well-proven fundamentals that ensure, as long as you follow the three steps, that you’ll get the same great outcome every time—in this case, a better and more lasting connection between you and your children.
There’s a reason that we allow calendars to run our professional lives. Without them, important things get missed, forgotten, or bumped to that neverland of “someday.” And we all know when someday comes.
Effective professionals know that the calendar is their secret weapon because that which we schedule gets done. It’s that simple. It may seem silly to schedule a meeting with your child, but I challenge you to reconsider that. Could you imagine not scheduling appointments with the top clients in your business? Or not writing down and blocking off a scheduled meeting with your boss?
Absolutely not. Now, it's time to give our children the same respect.
Once a Board Meeting is scheduled with your son or daughter, then a big part of the job is already done. You’ll be shocked to discover how effective this simple principle is in overcoming obstacles to quality time together.
There should never be a 90-day period when a Board Meeting isn't scheduled. At the end of each meeting, we recommend reviewing the following three months of your calendar and finding a four-hour block for the next. This ensures you build momentum from one Board Meeting to another.
If you don't schedule Board Meetings, they won't happen. Period. In fact, talking about a Board Meeting and then not doing it is even worse for relationships.