The ability and willingness to improve and develop across personal, professional, and relational dimensions, including energy management, health, fitness, focus, creative expression, passion pursuit, mental resilience, and emotional intelligence. If you'd like to read the long-form version of this article you can download it HERE. And there's a worksheet to go with it HERE.
In the summer of 1955, my football coach, Lou Howard, invited me to his house one evening. I remember driving my mother's car over to his place, but what I remember most vividly is the ride home. I felt like I had left my body—as if I were floating above myself, watching a young man who had just learned he would be on the Varsity Football team. It was a huge honor that I could hardly comprehend.
Coach Howard had talked at length about the family system at Amityville High School. That evening became my introduction to the concept of team as family—players looking out for one another, supporting each other through victories and defeats, bound together by something deeper than just shared practices and games.
Today, nearly seventy years later, I feel like the tables have turned. It's time to talk about family as team.
COVID-19 and other unknown factors have placed unprecedented demands on family life that scream out for a new approach. Families need to adopt the foundation of successful teams—the principles that urge players to communicate openly, to cooperate willingly, to listen with genuine care, and to love the time spent together. Just as Coach Howard's team became a family, today's families must learn to function as teams.
This framework works because you're developing a way of life that makes improvement inevitable and ongoing. That growth demands the courage to see yourself clearly—something every good teammate must possess. The magic happens through integration, not isolation. Each element—Awareness, Acceptance, Actions, Accountability, Adaptation, and Alignment—gains power when combined with the others. Like players on Coach Howard's team, these six elements work together as a complete system for transformation, each one strengthening the whole.
The Six Principles of Personal Growth
Personal growth isn't about perfection—it's about developing the capacity to get better. This capacity emerges through six interconnected principles that work together to transform not just individual performance, but the entire quality of how we engage with our lives and challenges.
These principles—Awareness, Acceptance, Actions, Accountability, Adaptation, and Alignment—create a comprehensive framework for sustainable growth that honors both your authentic self and your highest aspirations.
Awareness:
The Foundation of All Improvement
Awareness is the foundation of all improvement because it requires you to see yourself and your situation clearly and objectively, without the distortion of self-criticism or denial. This means observing your patterns, behaviors, and reactions with curiosity rather than judgment, recognizing both your strengths and areas for growth.
The Story of Tim. Tim was a talented runner who ran well but not fast. Despite his natural ability and strong work ethic, he couldn't break through to elite times. The solution involved mastering breathing techniques that allowed him to get in the flow and maintain consistent rhythm throughout races, rather than letting his mind wander when fatigue set in.
The comprehensive approach addressed not just race-day performance but the accumulated stress and pressure creating tension in his body and scattered focus in his mind, ultimately preventing him from accessing his true speed potential when it mattered most.
Awareness in Family Life: Families can develop collective awareness through regular check-ins where each member shares what they're noticing about themselves and family dynamics. Parents model awareness by being honest about their stress levels and triggers. When family members learn to recognize patterns—when Dad gets quiet, when Mom cleans frantically, when teenagers slam doors—they can respond with understanding rather than reactivity.
Acceptance:
Embracing Reality as Your Starting Point
Acceptance means embracing your current situation as the starting point for growth, not as a permanent state. This includes letting go of resistance to what is and releasing shame about past mistakes or perceived limitations. True acceptance means acknowledging where you are without resignation—seeing reality clearly while maintaining belief in your capacity to change.
The Story of Malia Malia was a professional surfer with a fearless, innovative style until a severe back injury left her unable to surf with the same freedom and creativity. Her movements became tentative and mechanical. At the risk of losing her sponsors and career, she worked to get her fire back through intensive breathing work that allowed her to systematically release the negative emotions from her trauma—fear, frustration, grief, and anxiety.
Through this deliberate emotional release process, she transformed trapped emotional energy into renewed confidence and accessed the fearless creativity that had originally made her a champion surfer.
Acceptance in Family Life: Families practicing acceptance learn to start where they are rather than where they wish they were. This means acknowledging a teenager's anxiety instead of just demanding better grades, or accepting that spouses process conflict differently. Acceptance doesn't mean resignation—it means stopping the exhausting battle against reality that drains family energy, allowing everyone to contribute their best without constantly trying to be someone they're not.
Actions:
Deliberate Steps Toward Growth
Actions are the deliberate steps taken to create positive change and growth. This encompasses setting clear, achievable goals and breaking down large changes into manageable steps that build momentum. Effective action requires developing mental strength to learn from setbacks rather than being derailed by them, viewing obstacles as information rather than evidence of failure.
The Story of Coach Stan
Coach Stan's intensity with his girls' volleyball team was off the charts. The girls were afraid of his explosive reactions and relentless demands for perfection. While he was technically excellent, his emotional eruptions caused the girls to shut down and play with fear, losing the instinctive flow that makes great volleyball possible.
The solution involved confronting his deeper fear that the girls' struggles reflected poorly on his worth as a coach. Through Wim Hof-style breath holds and weekly debriefs, Stan learned to channel his passion for excellence into supportive guidance rather than intimidating pressure. The girls began playing with confidence and creativity.
Actions in Family Life: Families function like successful teams when they take deliberate actions toward shared goals while supporting each member's growth. This means creating family mission statements, setting collective goals, and breaking them into manageable steps. Parents must examine their own emotional reactions and take action to create the environment they want—asking questions instead of lecturing, celebrating effort over outcomes.
Accountability:
Honest Assessment and Ownership
Accountability involves regular check-ins to maintain momentum and conduct honest assessment of progress toward meaningful goals. True accountability means taking complete ownership of both successes and setbacks without making excuses, using this information as fuel for continued growth rather than ammunition for self-criticism.
The Story of Sarah
Sarah was a professional tennis player with tremendous talent who couldn't break through from satellite circuit to WTA tour level. Her problem wasn't technique or fitness—it was her complete inability to honestly assess her performance. After losses, she blamed wind, court surface, opponents' luck, equipment—never taking responsibility for her own tactical choices and emotional reactions.
Through a rigorous daily accountability practice—structured post-match debriefs and weekly video review sessions—Sarah developed radical honesty about her patterns. This transformed not just her game but her entire approach to competition, finally allowing her to make the adjustments her talent had always been capable of implementing.
Accountability in Family Life: Family accountability means creating systems where everyone takes ownership of their role in family success and challenges. Parents model this by acknowledging their mistakes: "I was on my phone too much during dinner" or "I got impatient yesterday morning—that's my responsibility to manage." Weekly family meetings where each person shares one success, one area for improvement, and one commitment create a culture where responsibility is seen as strength.
Adaptation:
Intelligent Flexibility
Adaptation is the intelligent flexibility to modify your approach based on real-world results and changing circumstances, rather than rigidly sticking to plans that aren't producing outcomes you need. True adaptation requires staying open to new methods and perspectives, even when they challenge existing beliefs about how things should work.
The Story of Marcus
Marcus was a successful sales manager who built his career on aggressive, high-pressure tactics that worked perfectly in the booming early 2000s. When the market shifted toward relationship-focused approaches, his methods began failing spectacularly. Despite months of declining numbers, he kept pushing harder with the same methods.
After losing three major clients in one week, Marcus developed a systematic adaptation process. He observed successful colleagues, learned relationship-building and consultative questioning, and developed new metrics tracking relationship quality alongside sales numbers. Within six months, he exceeded his previous performance levels with methods that actually worked in the current environment.
Adaptation in Family Life: Families that adapt successfully recognize when current approaches aren't working and have flexibility to try new methods while maintaining core values. This means changing routines, communication styles, or rules when circumstances shift—new jobs, adolescence, financial changes. The key is maintaining open communication about what's working and willingness to experiment without seeing change as failure.
Alignment:
Living in Harmony with Your Deepest Purpose
Alignment means ensuring that your actions, goals, and daily choices are in harmony with your deepest values and authentic purpose. It's about closing the gap between who you truly are and how you're actually living, recognizing when external pressures have pulled you away from what genuinely matters.
The Story of Dr. Jennifer Dr. Jennifer was a successful emergency room physician who found herself increasingly exhausted and cynical despite achieving everything she thought she wanted. She had prestige, financial security, and peer respect, but felt a growing sense of emptiness.
Her healing began with daily alignment practices: five minutes each morning remembering why she first decided to become a doctor—not for prestige, but to ease suffering and bring healing. She paired this with evening reflections and monthly volunteering at a free clinic. This realignment transformed how she approached every patient encounter without requiring dramatic external changes.
Alignment in Family Life: Family alignment means ensuring daily family life reflects deepest values rather than just responding to external pressures. This requires honest conversations about whether actual daily life matches stated values. If family time is a priority but everyone's constantly rushing between activities, alignment means making changes to create space for what truly matters—even saying no to good opportunities that don't serve the family's deeper purpose.
The Capacity to Get Better
These six principles work together to create the capacity to get better across all dimensions of life. Each story demonstrates how these principles transform not just individual performance but the entire quality of how we engage with our lives and challenges.