“The first to complain is tomorrow’s cook.” I gave my mom a sign with that saying when I was in middle school. It sat in the same spot in the kitchen, next to the stove, until the day she moved. I suspect it will show up there again for any holiday dinners.
Mom wasn’t a bad cook and she made several meals I still love, but she had five children. It was rare that she could cook something to please all of us at the same time. I have only two children and it is impossible!
She has told me repeatedly that nothing made cooking feel more like drudgery than to slave over the stove only to get grumbling and complaints from several children.
My husband is the cook in our family, and he feels the same way. Why should he spend energy on a home cooked meal just to have children complain and refuse to eat?
Complaints undermine our desire to try.
Some people need more verbal encouragement and some need less, but everyone struggles when the atmosphere is constantly negative. When team leaders dedicate hours to ensuring team members have what they need for success but all they hear are complaints, even the best leaders will eventually become discouraged.
Or a teacher might spend extra hours tutoring a student who is struggling, only for the student to grumble about the workload. If parents add to the complaints by blaming the teacher for the student’s failure, the teacher may eventually give up.
It’s the same for everyone – homemakers, office workers, contractors, artists – if they hear nothing but grumbling without gratitude, eventually their internal drive to succeed will disappear. Why keep trying if it is impossible?
So what can we do about it?
Here is where most inspirational speakers would gear up into their “don’t quit” speech.
Certainly, we do need to mature enough to find intrinsic motivations instead of depending on the accolades of others. So the “never, never quit” stuff does have its place.
But that’s not what I’m thinking about today.
Today I’m thinking about how I contribute to the atmosphere in my home and on my various teams. I’m pondering what attitude I model in times of difficulty and stress.
Am I grumbling and bringing others on the team, or worse, the team leader, down? While typically I am a positive person, at times this year my complaints should have been kept quiet and replaced with a perspective of gratefulness. My voice should be used to encourage my team and strengthen my leaders, not undermine their own motivation.
And it’s the same at home. Sometimes, I am the voice of reason and hope and gratefulness. And sometimes I voice discontentment and my children echo it back at me. My voice at home sets the tone even faster than in work or church teams. If I am grumbling then everyone around me soon will be, too.
And since “out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks,” grumbling words are just expressions of discontentment and ungratefulness from within the heart. If I voice discontentment, I am not just teaching my children to complain. I am teaching them to be unhappy.
So as I listened to my daughter today complain about everything from shoes, to friends, to food, I was prompted to reflect on my contribution to that grumbling heart.
And I hope that I can embrace contentment and gratefulness in all areas, and not just in the easy times, and then model the right kind of attitude before my children.
I want “thankfulness” to be not just a family goal written our fridge, but an actual practice in our home.