They Are Not My Slaves

Every weekend is a cleaning weekend at my house. It’s when we get caught up on laundry, vacuuming, and all kinds of other cleaning. Whenever someone asked me what I was doing this weekend I would say, “I’m having my slaves… I mean my kids clean the house.” I used to say this a lot until I read Awaken the Giant Within by Tony Robbins. Tony explains that words are powerful and have meaning. If you describe something as a negative even if you are joking it will have an affect on your attitude and how people see you. My calling my kids slaves just to get a laugh was affecting how I percieved them. Now I always helped them clean but I truly did order them around. Fast forward to today. We had all the cupboard doors removed so that a contractor could paint them. This exposed just how cluttered our cupboards were and how much stuff was in them that we didn’t need. So the whole family spent a couple hours working together to clean out every cupboard, throw out what we didn’t need, wipe down the shelves, and reorganize them. We truly worked as a team. That’s when I realized what my new word would be. From now on I will be saying that “I’m going to clean the house with my team.” I’m going to stop bossing them around with a poor attitude and get them to cooperate with me. Make them feel like an equal when it comes to cleaning the house. I hope that they will be less reluctant because of it.