So, you want to homestead but you live with a few folks that aren’t quite as excited as you? How do you get everyone on board?
As a certified Life Coach and Human Behavior Analyst in my former life, I love using the skill of understanding behavior and motivation to get people to accept change and move forward. So, why don’t I use those skills now and show you how to get everyone on board with the idea of taking charge of the things you can grow, use, and make?!
This post will be a brief overview with a few helpful tips to get you started. But later you will be able to access a small booklet that I’ve written. It’s broken up into four easy-to-read and understand parts. Each part will be focused on helping you navigate how best to interact with a personality type identified by the letters D, I, S, and C. Learning how to interact with them and appeal to their motivations will hopefully help them see the benefits to homesteading. I know, it may sound confusing, but you’ll understand as we go along. First though, just some practical advice I’d like to give you.
How To Start
Start small. Understand, different people have different ideas of what homesteading is and it may be vastly different from what you imagine. If you see yourself living on 25 acres of land with horses, cows, chickens, and a 1 acre green house, that may be pretty hard for someone who has never left the city and lived their whole life in an apartment to imagine. So, keep in mind not everyone is going to be ready to drop the life they’ve become used to and move out to the middle of no where to start living off the land. But some may be willing to grow an herb garden in the kitchen. And that’s where you start. Be willing to put aside your big vision and give everyone time to catch up to what you see.
Second, I’d say, make room for others’ imaginations. Often times, if it’s our idea before it becomes anyone elses’, we can get an image in our head of what we want without allowing others’ input. Maybe you imagined living on or near a rushing river so that you can enjoy fishing or a peaceful kayak ride at some point. But what if others want just a small pond – or not to be near water at all? What if their idea was to stay near the city on a quarter acre lot and grow fruit and veggies but not raise huge livestock? Could you live with that and allow them to dream too? When getting others on board, we have to make room for compromise. You may have to give up some minor things to achieve the bigger picture.
Last, be clear on your “why”. Change is hard for some people. And if you want them to come along with you, you must be clear of where you’re going and why. So take some time and as my mom says, “make it make sense”. Think things through before you present your idea. And be clear.
Get Smart!
Last I’d share, before we really get into the meat of what I want to write about, together set goals but be realistic. This kind of ties both points above together. Dream together but be S.M.A.R.T. about it. In other words be:
Specific: Make your goals simple and specific. Define it. Write out “what”, “when”, “where”, “why”, and “how” you want to do this goal (or series of goals). If you make it concrete, you are more likely to remember and do it.
Measurable: Make your goal measurable. It’s not enough just to think of it and write it out. Now, you need to write out bench marks to let yourselves see how far you’ve come. You can’t get from the bottom floor to the top floor without the steps in between. Checklists are things that we use for our goals. Antoine works as a Scrum Master and Project Manager and he has been wise enough to bring those same skills home to us. We use a scrum board online to help us keep track of things we need to do for our journey. And it looks great seeing things checked off and our “Done” pile growing. It makes us want to do more!
Attainable: Make your goals something you can actually achieve. In other words, you want to make goals that you have the potential and ability to do. Sometimes to make something attainable we have to do research and gain knowledge. Once you know it, make it a goal. Of course, you don’t want to make your goals so easy that you aren’t stretched in your faith, but you don’t want to make them so difficult that you get discouraged from even trying. Maybe right now attainable is cooking 5 nights a week at home. Now days with life being so busy, many times we as a society depend on others to feed us – take out, restaurants, fast food. Or learn to make your own laundry detergent. Homesteading is about learning to do things for yourself and finding things you can do on your own is a great start!
Realistic: Is this a goal that can be achieved right now? Sure, many of us have goals of raising pastured beef. But if you are living in a condo, in the middle of the city, in a neighborhood with HOAs that won’t even allow you to have more than two dogs, that goal right now isn’t all that relevant. Make sure the goals that you set together will in some way move you closer to what you need and will serve a purpose that you can use.
Time-sensitive: Goals need deadlines. Without them, procrastination sets in and a goal that should take a week can drag out to a year unnecessarily. “I’ll get to it next weekend” is a dream killer. Don’t plan a project when your time is going to be very limited. Make sure that your goal is set realizing things may come up. Give yourself a little cushion and grace, but not so much that you kill your dream.
So those are the beginning of my tips of getting everyone on board. Please stay tuned. I’ll get that e-book guide that you can download from our site out asap! I really want to get this information out to you. It will go more in-depth on characteristics of personality types and how to work with them. This will help you form ideas of how to get everyone on board using their specific motivations as a catalyst.
But now, I’ll ask….how can you use this information to begin your journey? Be SMART about it!