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I am back in the classroom for my 26th year teaching college, but this year is especially exciting for me because after six years of teaching only online, I am back in the in-person physical classroom, and I am loving it! I cannot believe how much that one change has resonated through my whole life!

I started the semester of my family communication class establishing my 10 underlying or guiding principles about families, and wow! did I enjoy putting this list together! Today, we're going through all ten.

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We don’t get to choose everything that happens in our day, but we do get to choose how we greet it. We get to choose how we see something. We get to frame every situation we encounter. We get to frame our lives. Realizing that, how do you want to frame today?

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Thank you so much for being here!

What does it really mean to be a good person? I am inspired today by Dolly Parton’s legacy of kindness and generosity. Has our culture’s obsession with self-improvement distracted us from the most important kind of growth. Through everyday choices to lead with empathy, compassion, generosity, and integrity, we each have countless opportunities to make the world around us a little better. Maybe becoming our “best” selves isn’t about achieving more at all. Maybe it’s about putting more good into the world.

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Sending a child to college changes more than where they live. It changes the parent-child relationship, and the way we communicate has to change with it. Supporting independence doesn’t require disappearing, just as staying close doesn’t mean monitoring, interrogating, or solving every problem. Strong relationships with college-aged kids are built by learning how they communicate, showing interest in the ordinary details of their lives, giving them room to make their own choices, knowing when they need encouragement versus real support, and making it safe for them to share the hard stuff. Their college experience belongs to them, and it may look nothing like ours. As they learn to need us differently, the goal isn’t to make them prove they still want us in their lives. It’s to keep creating the kind of relationship they want to participate in and to make sure they always know they can come to us.

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How much do you edit yourself to fit others’ expectations of you? Do you let others’ expectations define you? How often do you find yourself editing who you are to be who others want you to be? Or behave how others want you to behave? Or look how others want you to look?

Maybe the part of people pleasing we don't talk about enough is the part that recognizes that we can't control what other people expect from us. We can't control how they evaluate us. We can't control whether somebody misunderstands us. We can't control whether someone thinks we should be doing more. We can't control whether somebody likes our work, our choices, our clothes, our parenting, our personality, our podcast, our priorities – any of it. But we can control whether we automatically accept their assessment as truth.

And maybe that's the part of people pleasing we don't talk about enough.

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I am grateful for this day. I am grateful for this moment.

Most gratitude that we show is situational. It's reactive. That's gratitude because of our circumstances.

Intentional gratitude is something entirely different.

Intentional gratitude isn't asking, "What happened today that I can be grateful for?"

It's asking, "How can I experience today from a place of gratitude?"

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A favorite assignment I give my Family Communication Students is to observe their own family dynamics, applying concepts they've learned. After spending four days with 20 family members in a one beach house, I realized that there are some basic family concepts that could definitely be applied. So let's revisit some of the more applicable family communication concepts: nonvolition, conflict, roles, punctuation, and metaphors. Because we might not be able to fix family issues, but having the language and understanding of them always makes it better.

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