Hey friend,

I ended my last email talking about our kids.
I told you I don’t want to remove every hard thing from their lives.
I want them to learn how to struggle.
How to recover.
How to persevere.
How to ask for help.
How to help someone else.
How to develop character.
How to hope.
And how to know who’s walking beside them when life gets hard.
Because whether we realize it or not…
our kids are watching us.
They’re learning something from the way we live.
But I’ve been thinking about the other side of that statement too.
And I think it might be even more important.
While they’re watching us…
are we really seeing them?
I’ve told you pieces of my childhood throughout these emails.
But there’s a part of my story I haven’t really explained yet.
I LOVE sports.
I love competing.
I love training.
I love being part of a team.
I love working alongside people who share a desire to get better.
And after decades of sports being part of my life, I’m incredibly grateful for everything they’ve taught me.
But sports didn’t originally become important to me simply because I loved playing the game.
There was something underneath it.
I was bullied.

Quite a bit, actually.
Especially through elementary and middle school.
And when you’re a kid, you don’t necessarily have the language to explain what all of that is doing inside of you.
I certainly didn’t.
I just knew what it felt like to not fit in.
To wonder where I belonged.
To pay attention to who was safe and who wasn’t.
And somewhere along the way, I discovered something.
Sports could level the playing field.
If I could become faster…
stronger…
better…
more skilled…
then maybe the kids who bullied me would leave me alone.
Sometimes sports gave me an opportunity to stand up for myself.
Sometimes they gave me a place where I could fit in.
And recognition felt good.
Really good.
Because when people started recognizing me for what I could do athletically, it helped cover some of the pain of the years when I didn’t feel like I belonged.
So I trained.
And trained.
And trained.
I became relentless about getting better.
Eventually, I genuinely fell in love with the game.
I loved my teammates.
I loved competing.
I loved leading.
I loved pursuing something difficult alongside other people who wanted it too.
Sports gave me some incredible gifts that I still carry today.
But looking back as an adult, I can see something that I couldn’t see as a kid:
Part of what looked like ambition on the outside was a kid desperately trying to belong on the inside.
People could see how hard I was working to become a better athlete.
But underneath some of that drive…
I was trying to become accepted.
That’s a very different story.

Part of me wishes an adult could have seen that.
Not so they could have taken sports away.
Not so they could have removed every difficult person from my life.
Not so they could have fixed everything for me.
I think I just wish someone could have looked beneath the performance and understood:
There’s something happening inside this kid.
He’s not just driven.
He’s trying to find his place.
He’s trying to figure out where he belongs.
He’s trying to figure out who is safe.
He’s trying to become someone other people will accept.
Maybe I would have understood myself differently.
Maybe I would have learned earlier that my worth wasn’t determined by how fast I ran, how well I played, whether we won, or whether somebody else approved of me.
I don’t know.
But here’s the interesting part.
There’s another part of me that’s grateful for what I had to learn through it.
Not grateful that I was bullied.
I’m not.
But grateful that something meaningful could still develop through something painful.
Remember what we talked about in my last email?
Hard things don’t automatically become good things.
But hard things don’t have to be wasted either.
Because when you’re a kid trying to figure out whether somebody is safe, you learn to pay attention.
I learned to REALLY pay attention to people.
What are they saying?
What aren’t they saying?
What does their face tell me?
What’s happening underneath the words?
Can I trust this person?
Is being strong around this person safe?
For a long time, I thought everybody did that.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that’s not necessarily true.
Somewhere along the way, something I developed partly out of necessity became something I now consider a gift.
I learned how to see people.
Not perfectly.
I absolutely get things wrong.
But I notice things.
I feel things.
I ask questions.

I can often tell when the story somebody is telling me on the surface isn’t quite the whole story they’re living underneath.
And now think about the last several emails I’ve written to you.
Maybe you can see why I care so much about asking:
“What’s happening underneath what we’re seeing?”
That question didn’t start for me in a textbook.
In some ways…
I’ve been asking it since I was a kid.
And now I’m a dad.
Four kids.
Four VERY different kids.
And parenting has made that question infinitely more important.
Because I don’t want to see only what my kids do.
The grade.
The behavior.
The athletic performance.
The meltdown.
The achievement.
The attitude.
The thing they did that made me proud.
Or the thing they did that made me want to pull my hair out. 🙂
I want to see THEM.
What’s underneath?
What are they excited about?
What scares them?
Where do they feel like they belong?
Where don’t they?
What lights them up?
What shuts them down?
What are they trying to communicate that they don’t have words for yet?
What do they believe about themselves?
What do they think they have to do to be accepted?
And maybe one of the most important questions I can ask:
Do they know they are loved?
Not just…
“Have I told them I love them?”
That’s different.
Do THEY know?
Do they experience it?
Do they feel it in a way that actually means love to them?
That’s something marriage has taught me too.
We don’t all experience love in exactly the same way.
I can have all the loving intent in the world.
But part of loving somebody well is learning them.
How do they receive love?
What makes them feel seen?
What makes them feel valued?
What makes them feel safe enough to be fully themselves?
That matters with my wife.
It matters with each of my kids.
It matters with friends.
It matters with the people I have the privilege of caring for.

Because love isn’t only about what I intend to give.
Part of loving another person is becoming curious enough about them to understand how they receive it.
That’s hard sometimes.
It requires listening.
It requires humility.
It requires putting somebody else’s needs ahead of the way I naturally want to do something.
And I’m still learning.
Especially this next part.
I hope my kids learn how to love by watching me.
I hope they learn how to love because of the way I love them.
I hope they see the way I love their mom.
I hope they learn to love other people through service.
I hope they learn to do things with loving intent.
I hope they learn to recognize what makes another person feel seen and cared for…
and become willing to speak love in a way that person can actually receive.
But there’s something else I hope they learn from me.
And this is one I’m still working on myself:
How to RECEIVE love.
To believe that you are worthy of being loved.
To not feel like you always have to perform for it.
Earn it.
Win it.
Prove something first.
Maybe there’s a reason that lesson hits me particularly hard.
Because somewhere inside the dad writing this email…
there’s still a little boy who once believed that if he could just become good enough at something…
maybe he’d finally belong.
I’ve grown a lot since then.
But I’m still growing.
And maybe letting my kids see that is part of the lesson too.
I don’t need my kids to grow up believing their dad had everything figured out.
They’ll have WAY too much evidence to the contrary. 🙂
What I hope they see is a man willing to keep learning how to love.
Their mom.
Them.
Other people.
And himself.
A man willing to serve.
A man willing to apologize.
A man willing to grow.
A man willing to do hard things.
A man willing to receive help.
A man willing to stand for something he believes matters.
And a man willing to love people even when there is absolutely no guarantee he’ll ever see what comes from it.
Because I’ve started thinking about love a little like ripples in water.
You love your spouse well.
That changes something in your home.
You love your child well.
They carry something from that relationship into school.
They love a friend.
That friend carries something home.
Someone serves somebody.
Somebody feels seen.
Somebody chooses patience.
Somebody forgives.
Somebody encourages.
Somebody shows up when it would have been easier not to.
Ripple.
Then another.
Then another.

Most of them are tiny.
Most will never have our name attached to them.
Most we will never even know happened.
But imagine enough people doing that for long enough.
Those little ripples start meeting other ripples.
Families change.
Relationships change.
Communities change.
And maybe, with enough time and enough people…
ripples can become a wave big enough to change generations.
Will I ever see that happen?
I don’t know.
There are no promises.
I may never get to see where all of those ripples ultimately go.
And maybe that’s one of the most beautiful parts of it.
My kids get to watch whether I believe something is worth doing even when I may never see the outcome.
That’s faith.
To love anyway.
To serve anyway.
To show up anyway.
To plant something you may never personally get to sit under the shade of.
To believe that what we do today can matter to people we’ll never meet.
And to refuse to let the absence of a guaranteed outcome stop us from becoming the kind of people we believe we’re called to be.
I want my kids to see that.
Because I believe our world could use a whole lot more of it.

So yes…
our kids are watching.
They’re watching how we handle stress.
How we treat our bodies.
How we treat their mom or dad.
How we respond when we lose.
How we act when we win.
How we treat someone who can’t do anything for us.
How we apologize.
How we rest.
How we work.
How we ask for help.
How we treat ourselves.
How we treat them.
But while they’re watching us…
let’s make sure we’re seeing them too.
Not simply the behavior.
Not the diagnosis.
Not the grade.
Not the trophy.
Not the struggle.
Not the achievement.
Them.
And maybe if we do that long enough, something begins to change.
Not just in our kids.
In us.
In our homes.
In the people our kids eventually become.
And maybe someday…
in homes that don’t even exist yet.
That’s a movement I think is worth giving my life to.
But if we’re going to call this a movement, we should probably be really clear about something:
What exactly are we moving away from?
And even more importantly…
What are we choosing to move toward?
That’s where I want to go with you next.

Dr. Joe

LIVE BETTER.