This week on The Most Important Thing, we start with a new family favorite game (Sardines 🐟) and end up somewhere much deeper: authority — what it means to claim it as adults and how to submit to it without losing ourselves.

In this episode, we explore:

• Claiming authority (“adulting”)
  • Moving out of “please the group” mode into values-aligned choices for our family
  • Boundaries 2.0: revisiting decisions we made in survival mode
  • Trusting our intuition and setting boundaries without emotional leakage
  • The messy reality of changing roles and expectations with people who’ve helped us in earlier seasons
• Submitting to legitimate authority (staying teachable)
  • Staying humble, curious, and open to wisdom beyond ourselves
  • Greg’s story about why it’s hard to trust guidance from people he knows deeply
  • Letting books, mentors, and lived experience shape us — without outsourcing our judgment
  • Connecting to something larger than ourselves so we’re neither too arrogant nor too small
• Gretchen Rubin’s Four Tendencies and how we relate to expectations
  • Danielle as an Upholder (meets inner + outer expectations) and Greg as a Rebel (resists both)
  • How those styles shape the way we set boundaries, take advice, and hold authority in our home
  • Take the Four Tendencies Quiz: https://gretchenrubin.com/quiz/the-four-tendencies-quiz/
• A mantra for this season: “Choose guilt over resentment.”
  • Why saying no may come with guilt — but saying yes when we shouldn’t often breeds long-term resentment
  • How we’re trying to model this for our kids in how we protect our time, energy, and family culture