I had the opportunity to speak at my son's school today during their Veterans Day assembly and thought I would share my notes here.

"No plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first contact with the main hostile force."
- Helmuth von Moltke the Elder

It's important to have a plan. Without a plan, you won't know which way to go or which actions to take in order to achieve your objective. It's also important, however, to be able to adapt that plan to meet the changing situation that you're facing.

It took me a long time to be ok with having to change my plans. I felt like any change to my original plan signaled a failure on my part in some way and thereby I was a failure. I had the idea that if things didn't go exactly as I had anticipated, that the whole endeavor was a lost cause.

"A good solution applied with vigor now is better than a perfect solution applied ten minutes later."
- George Patton

I've come to learn that being able to change the plan is a good and necessary skill to possess. In fact, any endeavor worthy of having a plan in the first place is going to be necessarily complex enough that you probably won't be able to consider and account for all the possible conditions and outcomes. Instead of trying to predict every scenario, which is a silly thing to even think of being able to do, just be flexible. Adapt.

Adapting the plan to the reality that you're faced with is not a failure.

It does not mean that you've lost the battle.

It's ok.

Failure occurs when you quit trying to achieve the objective of the plan. When you give up on the reason for having a plan in the first place, that's when you've failed. Having to change the way you approach the objective doesn't mean you aren't going to get there, it just means that the way you have to take a different route. You're never going to be able to foresee every situation and condition. You're never going to have the perfect plan. Make friends with that fact and work with it, not against it.

To pass this week's challenge, you have to take your son to the barber shop.

I don't mean your local franchise stylist or salon. I mean the barber shop. Somewhere where guys with straight razors are shaving necks and cleaning up edges. There's something about a barber shop that can't quite be put into words. You just have to experience it.

Our kids are going to disappoint us. They are going to fail to meet our expectations for them. The vision that we have in our heads for the sort of person they should be is not the sort of person they will be sometimes. They'll do things or not do things and they'll make choices that we don't understand. It will be very frustrating. It is very frustrating.

So what do we do about it? Should we accept that they are who they are and that we should adjust our expectations to meet them where they're at? Should we lower our expectations to the point that our kids don't feel like failures when they fail to achieve the standard we've set?

I'm of the opinion that we should not ever lower our expectations for our kids. We shouldn't lower the standards that we set for the sort of person that we want our kids to become. Yes, they'll fall short and fail from time to time. We'll get angry with them and they'll feel like failures. But that's not always a bad thing and it's certainly not the worst thing.

Kids will strive to meet the standards and will follow the example set by those they trust. If you set that standard low, where the kid is instead of where you want them to be, then you're setting them up for failure and disappointment. Once they achieve that low standard, the chance that they'll continue trying to get better is low. Without the guidance of a parent, a child is essentially abandoned and left to fend for themselves in the pursuit of character.

So how do we deal with the times when our kids fail? How should we respond when they aren't the person that we want them to be? I suggest that rather than lowering our expectations, we increase our grace.

When your kid fails, acknowledge the failure, study it, learn from it, deal with it, and encourage your kid to try again. Don't pretend like it didn't happen. Don't coddle your kid. Do show them the way back to the path that you want them to be on. Encourage them to travel that direction and let them know that you're on the same side.