I sometimes get asked about the ROI on the work that I do. Whether I am talking about leadership, emotional intelligence, empathy, communication, trust, developing others, conflict management, or decision-making, it’s all a function of building relationships that build teams that connect with customers that build businesses.

So, let me flip it around a bit and pose the presumed, if underlying, question: what is the ROI on a relationship?

How much is your spouse worth to you? Your kids? Your friends? Your neighbors? What’s the dollar amount you expect to get back from loving them, caring for them, cultivating them? What are they worth? What’s the return on investment for your time, energy, and effort in these people?  

Just asking these questions stirs a kind of queasy feeling. It feels almost perverse because we don’t look at these relationships as transactions, as quantifiable. Most of us do, however, look at them as the investments that create the most value in our lives, the most joy, the things that mean the most to us, that motivate us, give us purpose, connection, and belonging - and yet, they have no consistently defined return on investment.

When you convert the potentially transformational into the transactional, the relational into the purely functional, you’re destroying value in the name of capturing it. At some point, we have to remember we are just humans working with other humans in human-created systems trying to serve other humans. We just call it a business.
​
If you aren’t actively cultivating relationships because you can’t defend the cost, then good luck defending the cost of not cultivating them.
 

One of the reasons I write is for my daughters. I want them to know me at some point, perhaps when I’m gone but hopefully before that, in a way I can only write about and can’t always express otherwise - thoughts from my more intimate moments of personal reflection. I try to capture funny anecdotes about the shit-show times of parenting. I try to capture the sweet moments I don’t want them or me to forget. I talk about my own life and particularly the loss of my Dad to suicide in ways I just want them to understand but can be difficult to verbalize.

Just a few minutes ago, I wrote in a reply text to an old friend who was just checking in that I was "drunk on being Dad" right now. I wrote it, read it, and it seemed like something I should be sharing with my girls. So, here we are.

Lately, I’ve found profound and irrational joy in the young women they are becoming – which includes the flashes of the little girls they used to be, glimpses of emerging teens, and flash-forwards to the women they will be.

And, even as I write this, I realize I should really be speaking to them, telling them directly the things that have me feeling a little woozy.

Girls,

• I love hearing every sour note as you learn violin. It has been an inexplicable joy.
• I love your confidence at your piano recitals. I love that you chose to do that on your own and have kept doing it.
• I love your spirit of adventure.
• I love when you play together.
• I love when you play pretend with dolls and I love when you are too old to play pretend with dolls.
• I love that you’ve tried sports and performance and debate and art and you’ve found the good in each.
• I love that you are learning about yourself as you explore these things.
• I love the incessant dancing around the house.
• I love middle school dance and orchestra and chorus and musicals in ways I could have never possibly imagined.
• I love the new friends you are making and even that you are starting to let go of some.
• I love that you still want to dance with me (or at least act like it).
• I love that you still want to hold my hand (sometimes).
• I love that you still want to curl up on the couch next to me.
• I love that you have confidence I never had at your age.
• I love that you are funny.
• I love that you can laugh at yourself.
• I love that you can work through it when things don’t go as planned at school.
• I love that you are such a good friend to others.
• I love that you look out for each other.
• I love that you love to travel.
• I love that you love to read.
• I love that you make your lists.
• I love (secretly) that your room is so disastrously messy (like mine was).
• I love the boundlessness of your Taylor Swift fandom and your easy, self-assured dismissal of my Tay-Tay provocations.
• I love that you love our dog (Fitz) so fully.
• I love that you love your cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents.
• I love that you are kind to everyone.
• I love that you are thoughtful.
• I love that you are creative.
• I love that you are inquisitive.
• I love that you let me be me.
• I love that you challenge me every day to become the Dad you need and deserve.

​Parenting is hard and it is relentless.

Sometimes, it helps to stop and have a drink of the good stuff.

Cheers!

Just because the clock strikes midnight, and the calendar turns to January 1 doesn’t mean some magical transformation happens in our lives or that we’re suddenly ready or able to make such a transformation happen for ourselves. Pretending the passage of time is somehow also automatically the turning of a page is a setup for disappointment, self-doubt, and lingering unease. Suggesting that this mirage of an annual milestone called New Years is magically the time for starting things anew and changing course in our lives explains why most of the stuff we start in January as a year-long resolution has stopped by February.

I don’t mean to sound negative. I mean to sound honest, to be realistic about growing and changing rather than merely being hopeful or delusional we will grow and change. I suspect, if you are like me and like most humans, 2024 wasn’t all peaches-and-cream, and that didn’t change on January 1, 2025. My friends (4) from their 30’s to their 80’s are all still dead, and I am still mourning. My family member is still fighting cancer and managing a difficult recovery. I’m still raising my children in a world that many days frightens me, and most days frightens me for them.  

What I am reflecting on as I enter this new year is that it’s ok to let the New Year inspire goalsetting. In fact, it’s a good, symbolic moment for it. It’s ok for a New Year to be a time of optimism and planning for something better. But, it’s also a great time to look back at all the stuff that sucked about the previous year, to evaluate the scars we earned, to see what we can control and what we can’t, and to name the stressors and anxieties we are carrying into the next year.

Knowing what past we need to let go of or what present we still need to work through is the only way we know what future we can honestly and freely run toward.

If we are resolved to work on these things first, our New Year’s resolutions will become a lot more resolute.

So, I want to offer a few atypical tips on New Year’s resolutions with the understanding that they will likely be far more meaningful than magical.

1. Talk or write or otherwise reflect on the parts of 2024 that sucked. Name them. Accept them. Then talk or write or otherwise reflect on the parts of 2024 that were wonderful. Name them. Accept them. Neither is right or wrong. Neither can be changed. Neither is controllable at this point. Both just are. And, both are now a part of us as we head into 2025.
2. Evaluate your wounds. Which ones are still active and open? We all hurt sometimes. It proves we love. It proves we care. It proves we are human. How can we allow those wounds to start to heal and become scars? How can we accept, as Buddha might, that our pain is what makes us human but our suffering is our choice? How can we carry pain, but not suffering into the New Year? Let’s make a resolution around that.
3. Own your scars. These are the wounds that have healed in some way, whether by time or deliberate effort. Can we allow them to become a part of who we are, a symbol of our strength and resilience moving forward, and not merely a marker of something that hurt us in the past? Can we own them and thereby claim the power from the life or events or people that caused them? Can we define which ones we caused ourselves and define a better way? Let’s make a resolution around that.
4. Define your next-best self – wounds, scars, and all. Plant a seed in all that newly fertilized 2024 soil. How might we be a better person in 2025? How might we be better at work? How might we be better to ourselves? How might I become the father, spouse, sibling, uncle, cousin, friend, and co-worker that I want to be? I know, for me, it starts with quieting the noise still swirling in my head from 2024. Let’s make a resolution around that.
5. With this foundation of honest, practical resolutions starting where we really are with life, with ourselves, with our relationships, with work, let’s define a goal that excites and stretches us, that defies any negatives and triggers our spirit, that gives us energy, that offers us something to run toward as we work on and through our other resolutions.

May we all be resolved to find peace and love and hope in the New Year knowing that it starts within us.  


Image: https://www.fastweb.com/student-life/articles/a-college-student-s-guide-to-new-year-s-resolutions