Like our family, companies are a blend of people working together around a common goal. Our Speech, “It Doesn’t Matter Where You Come From, It Matters Where You Are Going,” helps companies recognize and leverage the strengths of their individual contributors via our personal story of living in a family of 21.
What to Expect
In this speech, we’ll discuss the life lessons that we’ve learned from being part of a family that included 19 children. With so many people under one roof, and children made up of multiple adopted sibling groups, there were definitely some interesting situations. The result of our experience is an entertaining keynote talk that motivates all levels of management with life lessons that are surprisingly relatable to a variety of people.
But of course, this speech is about more than just telling stories. There are specific, valuable lessons to be learned. Here are some of the key takeaways from “It Doesn’t Matter Where You Come From, It Matters Where You Are Going.”
Diversity
You might be wondering how a father and daughter team can know much about diversity, but you would be surprised. As both members of a blended family with 8 different sibling groups, we’ve had our share of needing to understand diversity. Our family is far from conventional. The children in it came from diverse backgrounds, varied in ages, and had vastly different life experiences. As a family, we had to learn to support each other’s individuality while simultaneously working toward a shared goal.
Teamwork
With such a large, diverse group living in one household, there was always the need to find reasonable solutions for getting along. It isn’t easy for many companies, and it definitely wasn’t easy for our family with 19 adopted children! Learning how to form an effective team of sorts was an absolute must for us, and we detail how we did it in this speech. Our life experience is not only entertaining but also immensely beneficial for any member of your leadership team. After all, if we can handle forming a successful team, so can you.
Goal Setting and Attainment
Goal setting was also a regular part of our family experience. With so many children to educate at one time, our family needed to take a very practical and direct approach, and we’ve had plenty of practice to perfect our methods. From the perspective of both parent and child, setting and achieving goals was tightly woven into our day-to-day life.
But success isn’t just about setting goals, it’s also about carrying them out, especially when so many different people are working together as one family. For it to work, we had to ensure that everyone’s individual talents were being used efficiently – only then could we achieve some of our joint goals. Our stories of how we got everyone on board are sure to help motivate your team to become stronger leaders and, as a result, strengthen your entire company.
Adversity
If it sounds like we had everything figured out, we didn’t. Part of living in a family is learning how to deal with adversity when it does arise – and boy does it. We’ll discuss how we overcame adversity as a family even when it felt like we were a bunch of mini families. Our stories will likely leave you giggly one moment and weepy the next with everything we have gone through. But in the end, it will help you find the tools you need to get through your own examples of adversity and build teams that help your company thrive.