What does it mean to grandparent on purpose? For Richard and Linda Eyre, the answer has been decades in the making. The bestselling authors of Teaching Your Children Values have evolved with their family, from nine children to 34 grandchildren, and along the way have developed a philosophy of proactive grandparenting that mirrors what good leadership looks like at any stage of life. In this 1st of 2 conversations about Richard Eyre’s new book, The Grandparenting Blueprint:How to Teach Your Grandchildren Life’s Most Important Lessons, we discuss:
Linda brings warmth, insights and creativity to the grandmothering side of the equation, such as music, art, storytelling, and the precious one-on-one moments that reveal what grandchildren are really thinking. Richard brings his Harvard MBA mindset (and toolkit) to the legacy-building and structured side of grandparenting, including how to give financial help without creating entitlement.
This episode is a masterclass on how to cultivate meaningful relationships with intention. It’s a powerful reminder that grandparenting, like retirement itself, is far too important to leave to chance.
Linda and Richard Eyre join us from Utah.
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For More on Linda & Richard Eyre
The Grandparenting Blueprint:How to Teach Your Grandchildren Life’s Most Important Lessons (Amazon)
Also available from the publisher at the author’s price (40% off)
https://familius.com/book/the-grandparenting-blueprint/
Use the coupon code EYREFRIEND at checkout
Grandmothering: The Secrets to Making a Difference While Having the Time of Your Life – by Linda Eyre
Online Grandparenting 101 Course
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Richard and Linda Eyre are among the most popular speakers in the world on parenting and families. Their clients and audiences range from The Young President’s Organization (YPO) and major corporations and associations to a wide array of school, civic, church and community groups. They find it remarkable and gratifying that in every one of the 50+ countries where they have presented, parents have similar hopes, dreams and worries about their children regardless of economic, religious, geographic, and cultural differences.
The Eyres are authors of more than 50 books, most of which deal with work/family balance and parenting, and one of which, Teaching Your Children Values, became the only parenting book in more than fifty years to reach #1 on the New York Times bestseller list. In addition to their ongoing work with parents, their latest books are about grandparenting and “Life in Full” for Baby Boomers.
Richard and Linda have been frequent guests on national network shows including Oprah, The Today Show, Prime Time Live, 60 Minutes, and Good Morning America; and they once did regular segments on the CBS Early Show. Their parenting website, ValuesParenting.com, provides ideas, guidance and creative programs for families throughout the world.
But their most important production is their nine children (“one of every kind”) who, through the years, have helped formulate their ideas for books and speeches. The second generation Eyres and their spouses are an impressive bunch, all with university degrees from the likes of Wellesley, Harvard, Columbia, M.I.T., Stanford, and BYU and all having interrupted their university education to spend up to two years living abroad, studying, doing missionary work and providing humanitarian service. They are also doing their part to expand the importance of family through their own speaking, books, blogs, and websites, and they have presented Richard and Linda with 34 grandchildren.
Beyond their speaking engagements, the Eyre’s favorite travel projects are humanitarian expeditions to places like Ethiopia, Kenya, Bolivia, India, Romania and Mexico, and the family’s Eyrealm Foundation focuses on assisting and strengthening third world families.
Richard is a Harvard MBA, president of his own management consulting company (which worked with national political candidates and locally ran campaigns to build Symphony Hall, restore the Capitol Theater, expand the Salt Palace, extend the Central Utah Project and save the Hogle Zoo) and a nationally ranked senior tennis player. He was a mission president for his church in London and a former director of the White House Conference on Parents and Children as well as a candidate for Utah Governor. Linda is a teacher, musician, and co-founder of International JoySchools.com, an in-home, do-it-yourself co-op and program for teaching preschoolers the joys of life. Both Richard and Linda have served on numerous arts, university, and non-profit boards and do a radio show/podcast at BYUradio called Eyres on the Road that is now in its 14th annual season.
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Retirement Podcast Conversations You May Love
Grandparents’ Day – Kerry Byrne & Ted Page
The Mindful Grandparent – Dr. Shirley Showalter
The Art of Relationships with Adult Children – Francine Toder, PhD
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About The Retirement Wisdom Podcast
There are many podcasts on retirement, often hosted by financial advisors with their own financial motives, that cover the money side of the street. This podcast is different. You’ll get smarter about the investment decisions you’ll make about the most important asset you’ll have in retirement: your time.
I help people who are retiring, but aren’t quite done yet, discover what’s next and build their custom version of their next life. A meaningful retirement doesn’t just happen by accident.
Schedule a call today to discuss how the Designing Your Life process created by Bill Burnett & Dave Evans can help you make your life in retirement a great one — on your own terms.
Joe Casey is an executive coach who helps people design their next life after their primary career and create their version of The Multipurpose Retirement.™ He created his own next chapter after a 26-year career at Merrill Lynch, where he was Senior Vice President and Head of HR for Global Markets & Investment Banking.
Joe has earned Master’s degrees from the University of Southern California in Gerontology (at age 60), the University of Pennsylvania, and Middlesex University (UK), a BA in Psychology from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and his coaching certification from Columbia University.
In addition to his work with clients, Joe hosts The Retirement Wisdom Podcast, ranked in the top 1% globally in popularity by Listen Notes, with over 2 million downloads. Business Insider recognized Joe as one of 23 innovative coaches who are making a difference. He’s the author of Win the Retirement Game: How to Outsmart the 9 Forces Trying to Steal Your Joy.
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On The Grandparent’s Blueprint
“Linda does it by group. So she’ll have her preschool group and then she’ll have her elementary age group and they all get their turn at the Grammy camp. And I’m sitting there, Joe, like, what am I? I mean, what am I doing? This fabulous Grammy is doing all these things with all these kids and I’m just sort of an observer. And that’s really what led to this new book about these grandfather’s secrets. I thought, well, I want to leave a legacy. There’s certain life lessons I think I’ve learned as a management consultant and all the other things I’ve done in my life. And I want to somehow condense those concepts into something simple enough that children can understand them. That’s my legacy.”
“We just recently met with three of our granddaughters. They’re all in university. And so we went down there to meet with them and for breakfast. And it was so fun. We call them the babes because we have these little separate groups and these are the babes. And it was so fun to be with them. But in one breakfast, we learned more about their life than we could have imagined. And what were the three things you asked? We just said, Look, we just said, while we’re having breakfast, we just want to hear your story. We want to hear your recent story. And they just got going on telling us things. And I thought, if we’d been too specific with our questions, we would have missed part of what they said. We love to tell stories to grad kids, but what’s really great is having them tell you their story. We’ve found that if we, it sounds funny, but if we pull out a pad or a pen and take a few notes on what they’re saying, they realize we really are paying attention. We really want to know. And they tell their story and they know it’s safe with us.we we know more about them than we would have if we just spent a big family reunion and everybody because we had some one-on-one and not only that we had one-on-ones with little kids.”
“But the failure is the lecturing and the other failure I want to mention and I’ve made this more than Linda. Linda is way more sensitive. I have failed in the sense that I’ve said to some of my own sons or daughters, I think you need to do a little better with this child on such and such. In other words, giving advice that’s unsolicited on parenting to your own children is almost always a mistake. It is. And we found another interesting thing. At one reunion, we did a survey, we had a survey to our adult kids and ask them, you know, do you feel like we’re too involved and not involved enough? Would you like more? Would you like less and all that. And we just saw everybody would just love everything we’ve done. And then we got a couple of responses like, oops, we have not been very sensitive about this. He comes from a different family with a different mindset. And you really have to be so careful. So we learned so much from that. We backed off, we learned how to ask before we did things and not just blunder into it.”
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Watch out for Part Two coming on Thursday on The Secrets section of The Grandparenting Blueprint
