The Toast Was Planted Years Ago

Our kids gave toasts at Thanksgiving this year. Nobody asked them to.

They’re four and a half and six. At the first table, my son stood up and told everyone he was thankful and that he loves his family. Then my daughter stood up and said she loves her family, and that she misses her Grammy.

At the second table, with my in-laws, they both stood up again. Nobody asked them to that time either.

I wrote a short post about it that week, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since. I don’t think that moment happened that weekend. I think it was planted years ago, and we just happened to be in the room when it came up.

Nobody plants a garden in October

We’ve lived two and a half hours from my parents for the kids’ whole lives. My daughter was born into the pandemic, and after that came years when illness on one end of the highway and every daycare cold on the other made visits rare.

So we kept them close from far away. Phone calls. Video calls. Pictures around the house. Stories about Grammy and Pop Pop at dinner. Probably could have been more, but we kept at it.

My in-laws are twenty minutes away and with us at least once a week. Aunts and uncles whenever we can manage it. In our house it’s always been about family, and the kids have heard it so many times that it’s just how things are.

None of that was ever about producing a toast. In a garden you plant in the spring, on days when nothing about it feels important. It grows all summer while you’re busy with everything else. And by October you’re cutting it back and getting it ready for next year. You’re not expecting anything new to come up.

Ours bloomed in October anyway. On a weekend when our house had been a sick ward for two weeks, and there was an empty seat at one of the tables. That’s exactly when it showed up.

At work, it’s the same garden

I’ve spent a lot of years in operations, and plenty of it meant hard decisions, some of them unpopular. I’ve asked people to do things they weren’t ready for, things that made them uncomfortable, and in some cases things they downright shouldn’t have had to be asked to do. That’s what happens in that kind of environment.

What I could control was what I planted around those asks. Taking care of the person. Listening to them. Coaching them, bringing them along, reminding them why they were doing it, and trying to fill their tank before I asked them to empty it again.

That’s repetition, not a program. You do it on ordinary days, over and over, and for a long time it doesn’t look like it’s doing anything. Then the hard change lands, and you find out what you planted.

The opposite grows just as reliably. I’ve watched leaders run everything on direction and conflict. Make the call without seeing what it would do to people at work and at home, then make it again the next week. Make promises they couldn’t keep. And when it went sideways, not be able to bring themselves to say so out loud and go looking for another way.

Usually nobody means any harm by it. They’re under pressure and can’t see past this week. But it’s poison in the garden all the same, and poison still grows something. It just never grows anything good.

Somebody planted something in me, too

When I was thirty-five, I had never skated. Never played hockey. Always wanted to.

My boss at the time coached me through a lot — the easy stuff, the uncomfortable stuff, the really complex stuff, and the odd conversation that was very much boss to employee. Somewhere along the way we became friends. I learned about his family. His son played hockey, he coached, and you could see how much of himself he put into it.

One evening he stayed late after one of our one-on-ones and said, “Come on, we’re going.” We got in his car, drove down the road to a hockey store, and he helped me buy my first equipment. He showed me the things you’d show your own kid. We picked out a stick. We talked about a lot of things that had nothing to do with work.

I’ve told the short version of this before. What I left out is what I only understood later. That man had a hard job every single day — I know, because I ended up walking in his shoes — and the thing that gave him fuel through all of it was the game, and his family in it. He didn’t just have that. He handed me a piece of it.

It looked like a small thing. A trip to a store after work. It was one of the best pieces of leadership anyone ever showed me, and it was years ahead of the way we talk about any of this now.

I may not have that exact stick anymore, but what it represents is still there every time I step on and off the ice.

What’s planted in you

I call it the Incongruous Fire: the thing you build outside the work that puts back what the work takes out. It looks out of place next to everything a person is carrying. That’s the point.

Every time I’ve worked with someone who had something they loved outside work, the same things were true. It kept them going. When you asked them about it, you could watch them step away from whatever was happening for a minute, and the joy would show up in their face. And it gave me somewhere to start when someone needed to refocus, or just needed a minute away.

Most people already have one. They just don’t think of it as something that’s holding them up, which is exactly why it’s the first thing they give up when the work gets hard.

That’s the part I think we have to unlearn. We were taught that success comes from inside the career — the next course, the next promotion, the next title. Some of it does. But the energy and the focus to keep going when it’s hard come from somewhere else.

What you plant on a Tuesday

You don’t always know the moment it will bloom. You only know what you planted, and most of it went in on ordinary days.

That goes for the phone call to a grandparent, the way you handle the hard ask on a Tuesday, and the thing you do on a Saturday that has nothing to do with any of it. Every one of them is growing something, good or bad.

And knowing which takes some honest looking. You need some self-awareness for that. And where you can’t manage it, you need to at least be self-aware that you’re not being self-aware.

My kids didn’t know that toast was years in the making. They just knew it was time to bloom.