On Serving Families and Their Individual Human Members

If you’ve been reading my missives each week recently, you’ll know that I recently attended my favourite annual event (see Coming Down from Yet Another Rocky Mountain High) and that the very engaging and profound sessions I attended have already sparked one recent post. See On Connection, Belonging and Learning in Families.

Now that I’ve processed everything a bit more, we’re returning to some of the thought-provoking wisdom I gathered from the various plenary sessions.

My thinking will surely continue to evolve as I compose these next paragraphs, which is secretly (or not!) why I force myself into this weekly ritual. I hope you stick around to see how I land it all.

One of the topics I so often return to here is how difficult it is to describe the work that my colleagues and I do, and so whenever I hear elders in our space share some of their thoughts on this, I jump into note-taking mode.

It bears mentioning that there are some definitions of “elder” that minimize the part about chronological age, and those are the ones I prefer.

For the second year in a row, one plenary session during Rendez Vous ’26 was a Fellows Panel, where three of our PPI Fellows were interviewed to share some of their wisdom, followed by a bit of audience Q & A.

Stacy Allred mentioned that her work involves “walking alongside families” and minutes later Matt Wesley shared that he “tries to stay one small step ahead of his families”.

Later, Wesley noted that a big part of this work is simply “being available” to rising generation family members, which I hadn’t necessarily heard anyone put that way, but which resonated with my work.

None of what I shared above is rocket science, but for those engaged in this work it’s important for us to have ways to describe our services in relatable ways.

I appreciated the simplicity of the wisdom they shared and felt better about the fact that I haven’t been missing that much in my own ways of talking about this family work.

Somewhere along the way, either during that panel or another session, I jotted down

and this is where we’ll now pivot.

Again, nothing revolutionary there, but when one works with families, which is complex work, we can sometimes get lost in the idea of finding the right next step “for the family”.

When we concentrate on serving the group, we can sometimes lose sight of the individual members along the way.

This work is centered around human capital, as opposed to the financial capital. We can’t ignore the money, but we need to focus on it less, because quite frankly, there’s already too many other specialists who are working on that part of the family’s wealth.

Working with the whole family requires facilitation, i.e. helping all the family members have productive conversations that they otherwise will not get around to having, despite knowing that they should.

A huge part of that is simply getting the family into a rhythm and a cadence of meeting together and then holding the space for them so they can speak and hear each other safely.

But facilitating the family space is not sufficient.

That’s where coaching comes into play, to work with each individual human on their own individual journey.

This gets back to the “being available” to the rising gen family members, but it is potentially much more than that.

As the father of a son and daughter in their mid-20’s, I know firsthand how difficult it is to resist trying to give them guidance on life that they are not asking for, even though they could surely benefit from it.

This is precisely the time where they are discovering things on their own, and that is as it should be.

They want to be the authors of their own lives, not the life that Mommy and Daddy envisioned for them.

At the same time, though, we’re there for the whole family, and the family has hired us to do what we can to keep them all together.

We serve families and their individual human members, and we want what’s best for all of them, as well as for each of them.