Routines Tame Wild Horses and Children

One of our horses has become wild.  Meanwhile, our kids seem to be calming down. The reason is the same, daily routines. Our big white Mustang was living on the open range just last year. We have been getting her used to human contact by approaching her daily with grain and then rubbing her head and neck. Because it has been so bitterly cold lately, we stopped this daily practice for about a week. Yesterday when we went up to her, she turned her back on us and acted like she was about to kick us. It took hours working with her in the round pen for her even to let us touch her.

Last month I visited a processing plant for a week and attended their daily leadership meeting. Every morning a different team member leads the group through a spreadsheet of key performance indicators. They rate themselves red, yellow, or green based on the past 24 hours of operation. I was so impressed with this idea that I told my wife about it, and we have instituted a similar morning meeting with our kids called “the 7:15”. Every school morning, we review a spreadsheet with questions like how we treated one another, and then we give ourselves a color rating. We also review upcoming plans, like how many days until Christmas and what’s for dinner. The results from our experiment have been very encouraging. Our high-energy kids seem to have settled down. They appreciate the structure the morning meeting provides.

A recent study found that routines can have a great calming effect because they “give our daily life structure and help to eliminate worry about what is going to happen.”  It turns out the key to catching, corralling, and calming children is the same as wild mustangs.  They also both like it when you put your arm around their neck and rub their head.