Jen and I were in our first year as parents when we found Ginger Plowman's Don't Make Me Count to Three. Tate was our first. We were already in the deep end — already running on instinct, already making it up — when we picked up the book.
We both dove in. Read it, marked it up, talked about it constantly. And the more we talked, the more we realized the book wasn't really about parenting. It was about authority. It was about consistency. It was about whether the home we were just starting to build was going to say the same thing tomorrow that it said yesterday.
So we made a decision early — early enough that it shaped almost everything that came after.
We were going to parent the same way. Same standards. Same answers to the same questions. Same yes. Same no. One voice.
That sounds simple. It is not.
What we were actually agreeing to
The premise of Don't Make Me Count to Three is straightforward: when you tell a child to do something and then count to three before there's a consequence, you've taught the child that what you said the first time wasn't what you meant. The first instruction was a rehearsal. The real instruction comes at "three." Maybe at "two-and-a-half" if you sound serious. The child doesn't have to obey the first time, because the first time isn't really a request — it's a warning that there might be a request coming if they keep going.
The book's argument is that this small, daily move — counting to three — is one of the ways well-meaning parents quietly teach their kids that their word doesn't mean what it says. And once that's baked in, every other instruction loses weight too.
But what hit us harder than the counting argument was the underlying principle: a child can only respond to one set of standards. If Mom and Dad each have their own standards, the kid doesn't experience two sets of rules — the kid experiences chaos. He learns to read which parent is in front of him and adjust. He learns to triangulate. He learns to find the daylight between us.
We didn't want to raise kids who were good at reading us. We wanted to raise kids who knew where the line was, because the line never moved.
That meant Jen and I had to actually agree on where the line was. Out loud. Specifically. Repeatedly.
Why it was hard
We came into marriage from different homes. Different parenting examples. Different defaults about what a five-year-old should be expected to do, what an eight-year-old should be allowed to say, what counts as disrespect, what counts as a teaching moment versus a discipline moment. Most of those defaults were invisible to us — we just felt them as instincts. Of course you don't let a kid do that. But the "of course" was wired in differently for each of us.
Early on, the disagreements weren't even at the level of strategy. They were at the level of reaction. One of us would respond to a moment and the other would think — that's not how I would have handled that — and we had to learn to take that thought, walk it into another room, and have an actual conversation about it instead of either contradicting the other in front of the kid or just letting it go and stewing.
We had a lot of those conversations. We still have them. After more than two decades and five kids, we are still having those conversations. The difference now is that we expect them. We've stopped being surprised when our instincts diverge on something. We've stopped treating a disagreement as a sign that one of us is failing. The disagreement is just where the work happens.
What "the same page" actually requires
I want to be honest about what this has cost.
It has cost a lot of arguments. Arguments that didn't feel like they were about the kid, but were. Arguments where one of us thought the other was being too strict, or not strict enough, or inconsistent with what we said yesterday. Arguments where we had to go back and admit we'd been undermining each other without meaning to.
It has cost the easy out of letting one of us be the "fun parent" and the other be the "rule parent." That's a tempting deal. The fun parent gets to be liked. The rule parent gets to be respected. Both parents get to feel like the kid still has one of them in the corner. But that deal works against the kid. It splits the home into a soft side and a hard side, and the kid quietly learns that the rules depend on geography. We refused to make that trade.
It has cost the impulse to vent about each other to the kids. That's another tempting move. Your dad is being unreasonable. Your mom doesn't actually mean that. Tiny throwaway lines that feel like venting but actually train the kid to see one of us as the obstacle and the other as the ally. We've worked hard not to do that. When I disagree with how Jen handled something, the kid doesn't hear about it. We talk about it later, in private, and whoever was wrong walks back into the room and corrects.
What it has bought is a home where the kids don't experience two parents. They experience one front. They can't pit us against each other because there's no daylight. They know that what one of us said is what the other one is going to say. The line doesn't move depending on which parent is on duty.
That has been worth every argument.
The same fight, different room
Here's the thing nobody told me when I was learning to lead.
Running a company is the same fight.
A leadership team that isn't on the same page is a household with two parents who contradict each other. The team meets, agrees on a direction, walks out, and then each leader quietly tells their part of the organization a slightly different version of what was decided. The sales leader emphasizes one piece. The ops leader emphasizes a different piece. Finance has its own read. None of them are actively rebelling. They're each speaking from their own instincts and their own priorities, and the result downstream is exactly what you get when Mom and Dad don't agree: confusion. The people on the floor learn to read which leader is in front of them and adjust. They learn to triangulate. They learn to find the daylight.
When I joined CHE in 2023 and became an owner the next year, I stepped into a twenty-five-year-old company with the same dynamics every legacy operation has — inherited instincts, divisions with different defaults, leaders who'd each developed their own answers to questions that should have had one answer. None of it was malicious. Most of it was invisible to the people doing it. But the cost of all those small daylight gaps was visible everywhere downstream.
So we did at the company what Jen and I did in the home. We started fighting to be on the same page. Out loud. Specifically. Repeatedly.
That's looked like a lot of long meetings. It's looked like leaders walking into another room to hash out a disagreement instead of contradicting each other in front of the team or just letting it go. It's looked like correcting a previous decision in front of everyone instead of pretending we didn't make it. It's looked like senior leaders refusing to vent about each other to their subordinates, even when the temptation is high.
It's looked, in other words, exactly like marriage.
Truth is truth
Most people I know compartmentalize. They have a work self and a home self. They have a work playbook and a home playbook. They assume the principles in one room don't apply in the other.
I think that's the lie at the bottom of a lot of bad outcomes — at home and at work.
The truth is that authority is the same thing everywhere. Consistency is the same thing everywhere. Saying what you mean, meaning what you say, refusing to manipulate, refusing to let "your side" of a disagreement leak out sideways — those are the same disciplines whether the people in front of you are your kids or your direct reports. The principles don't change just because the room does.
This is the part that makes a lot of operators uncomfortable. Because if it's true, then the way you lead at home is going to look a lot like the way you lead at work. And if there's a gap — if you're patient with your team and short with your wife, or careful with your customers and casual with your kids — then one of those is the real you, and the other one is the performance.
ITABWODI applied to that gap is brutal. Is there a better way to be the same person in both rooms? And the answer is yes, but only if you stop pretending the rooms are different.
What it costs to live this way
I'm not going to tell you it's easy. We're still in the middle of it. Jen and I are still having the conversations. The leadership teams I sit on are still hashing out disagreements that should have been settled three years ago and somehow weren't. The integration I'm describing isn't a finish line. It's a daily commitment to refuse the easier path.
The easier path in marriage is to let one parent be the soft one and the other be the hard one and call that "balance." The easier path at work is to let each leader run their own version of the company and call that "empowerment." Both are accommodations to a real cost — the cost of the argument that gets you back on the same page. Both work fine in the short run. Both compound badly over years.
The harder path — the integrated one — is to fight through every disagreement until you're actually saying the same thing again. To take the cost of the argument every time, instead of paying the slow tax of confusion forever.
When I look at our kids now — Tate, Ollie, Aribella, Finlay, and Parlyn — what I see in them isn't a perfect parenting outcome. Nobody gets that. What I see is that they didn't grow up reading us. They didn't have to triangulate. They didn't have to figure out which parent to ask. They knew. Whatever the answer was going to be, they knew it would be the same answer from either of us, so they could spend their attention somewhere else. They could spend their attention on actually growing.
That's what one voice gives you. Whether the people in front of you are your kids or your team, that's the gift.
The question
So the question I keep coming back to — and I'm asking it of myself before I'd ever ask it of anyone else — is:
Is there a better way to live than separated?
Most of us were taught to compartmentalize. We were taught that work is one thing and home is another. We were taught that you can be a different person in each. We were taught that integrity is about not lying — not about being the same person across rooms.
I don't believe any of that anymore. I think life is integrated whether we like it or not. The principles that make a home work are the same principles that make a company work. The disciplines that make a marriage hold are the same disciplines that make a leadership team hold. There is no separate-but-equal version of you for different audiences. There's just you. And the only real question is whether the you that shows up at home and the you that shows up at work can stand to be in the same room.
A lot of fights to be on the same page. A lot of arguments that didn't feel like they were about the thing they were about. A lot of going back and admitting we'd been undermining each other without meaning to.
That's the whole life. That's the whole work.
It turns out they're the same life and the same work.