“My children gave me some invaluable lessons about demands. Somehow I had gotten it into my head that, as a parent, my job was to make demands. I learned, however, that **I could make all the demands in the world but still couldn’t make my children do anything**. This is a humbling lesson in power for those of us who believe that, because we’re a parent, teacher, or manager, our job is to change other people and make them behave. Here were these youngsters letting me know that I couldn’t make them do anything. **All I could do was make them wish they had—through punishment. Then eventually they taught me that any time I was foolish enough to make them wish they had complied by punishing them, they had ways of making me wish that I hadn’t!**” --- **Tags** -- [[quotes]], [[parenting]], [[leadership]], [[leadership-vs-management]], [[motivation]], **Source** --