I found myself as a panelist at an event co-organized by the World Health Organization last year on mental health where I shared extensively on family systems and the need for self discovery before we venture into marriage, because unknown to us, there are so many folks with mental health challenges heading corporate organizations, gracing red carpets and even being given awards. Kunle Soriyan calls it superior lunacy, but nobody notices because they still act like normal people and still move around. At the end of the event, a man with grey hair called me out and in his words: ‘Even though this was meant to be a youth event, you just shared a paradigm shifting family model that no one ever taught me. I wish I learnt this many years ago, but I will do my best to pass this message to my children’.
I often counsel women not to succumb to societal pressure or the biological clock syndrome simply because you want to be Mrs. ???? Until you find a selfless leader who can pilot the ship of the family you desire, there is no point getting into marriage. Don’t settle for a man who has a history of looting (cheating) or irresponsibility and hope he changes when he marries. In my country, it is a standard practice for my people to hire an incompetent leader and hope their prayers and emotional outburst would make him competent, whereas sanity says avoid incompetence.
Having completed our family ideology, which also includes the vision and values that would help us achieve the vision, the next thing every family must now do is to begin to model the ideology. This is usually tough for families because of the bad habits they had been used to all their lives, but I often counsel that mistakes are allowed and someone must become the law enforcement agent in the family (I am the policeman in my family at the moment) who ensures that what we agreed to live by is upheld. While this is going on, the families must now begin to sit together every week to craft out a family constitution because every nation has got laws to live by and your family is not excluded.
Are you a desirable role model?
The cry all over the world is the thirst for role models and that is a crucial block in building family systems because having a family ideology or family vision and values that we fail to live out is falsehood. I have visited several organizations whose corporate culture is totally far from what they have written on paper as their core values. Yet I have also seen a schizophrenic generation in other international organizations who live out the corporate culture while at work and revert back to lawless culture once they close from work.
I once visited a friend in one of the leading international oil and gas companies in Nigeria and was so impressed by the corporate culture and how everyone lived it out that I had to confess to him that what I saw there was enough to change Nigeria if the number of employees model the same life in the society, but what you find out is a generation that lives right when their source of livelihood is at stake while they slump back to mediocrity once nothing is at stake, forgetting that something is always at stake. I think your perception of yourself and your home to a large extent would determine the quality of life that you live out at all times.
For example, adultery becomes difficult when your understanding is clear enough to see how your pleasure without conscience can upset the dynamics of your settled family. The moment it is clear that you are actually trading your sanity for scandal; your dignity for shame; and your spotless track record for a future of regrets, you would not dare it because even though your irresponsibility may be personal, it may not be private as it goes to affect your wife through heartbreak, your kids through divorce, the other woman who may never trust men again and who may go out to destroy more men and a nation where trust becomes a rare commodity: you would learn to checkmate your pleasure for a greater good of the society.
Every irresponsible behavior on our part may affect the entire nation as we are witnessing in the present Ebola syndrome. Are you modeling the right life?
To be continued.