One Degree Changes for Lasting Family Relationships

Overwhelmed and disappointed with the state of affairs in your home? We've all been there. You long for change, but it’s exhausting to think of altering the atmosphere in your home, and you don’t even know where to start.

Change is hard, and we, as humans of all ages, are often incredibly resistant to it. Possibly it seems as though your home is full of exhausting arguments between children every minute of every hour of every day. Family relationships are strained. Maybe you are worried that you don’t even recognize or connect to your children anymore, and life is so busy that you don’t know how to change that fact. Perhaps busyness has escalated to an unprecedented level in your home, and you are near burnout from the unending to do lists. Possibly the demands of parenting and work have estranged you from your spouse, and things are less than pleasant between you two. Possibly your middle school child is suddenly failing a class and for the life of you, you cannot figure how you ended up here. Can I get an “All of the Above” option, you may wonder?! We’ve been there too. You long for connection and grounding for your family; you want more for your people, but you don’t know how to get there. You are not alone, and we want more for you too!

James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, is all about small beginnings and one percent changes. In his book, he tells the story of Dave Brailsford, the performance director for the British cycling team, and his efforts to bring the program from sub-par to super. His entire strategy was formed around the idea that, “… if you broke down everything you could think of that goes into riding a bike, and then improve it by 1 percent, you will get a significant increase when you put them all together.” By utilizing this philosophy, Clear tells of how Brailsford guided the team, who had won only one singular gold medal in over one hundred years, to winning sixty percent of all the medals available to cyclists in the 2008 Olympic games just five years after he took the helm. It’s a fascinating story, and it’s definitely worth a read. The strategy? Improving by one singular percent at a time.

When your family is in a state of chaos, from any variety of circumstances, chances are you might think a one percent improvement isn’t really all that impressive. In fact, when thinking of a circle as three hundred sixty degrees, a one-degree shift sounds almost completely pointless and an irrelevant waste of time. But what if this week there was a one-degree shift in your home that felt manageable to everyone? What if that shift was maintained over the course of the next several weeks, and each additional week some other sort of one degree shift was maintained, to the point that while you were twenty-five degrees off course from your preferred destination at one time, now – a few short months later, your family is a sizeable amount closer to being on track.

These types of course corrections in our homes are meaningful. There is no underestimating what a one-percent change is able to accomplish! But where to start? The honest truth that we’ve learned over here at Families Doing Life Differently is to just begin today. Making change isn’t really about the beginning point because we can’t change that no matter how desperately we desire to, or else none of us would be in an undesirable place to begin with. So the question quite literally becomes which aspect of our home do I begin to tackle first? The reality is that only you can answer that. What is the greatest source of frustration in your home? What aspect of daily life is causing an incredible amount of frustration for you or your family?

At Families Doing Life Differently, we have a free tool that we want to get into your hands that we believe will help you to identify some optimal areas for growth in your home. We believe this tool will help your family to target some areas where you can apply the one percent or one-degree corrections idea to begin to create lasting change. When families are headed full steam ahead on an insane pathway that leads them far from where they hoped they would be, it is very rarely intentional choices that have landed them there. But it happens. It happens to all of us. The life-changing moment occurs, however, when we learn to recognize ourselves and our families as off course, learn to identify the better, more worthwhile destination, and begin to make sustainable micro course corrections that will combine over time to achieve sustainable and significant change. The tool we would like to put in your hands today is one that hopefully will provide meaningful family connection alongside a healthy real life status check as well. It will give you a handle on your starting point. The point at which you’ll be able to look back on someday as the beautiful day it all began to change.

What one-percent change can you make in your home that will help set your family on a brand-new course towards that meaningful and long-lasting relationships? Click the button below for our free Life Lately guide to help you identify some valuable first steps. Don’t wait! Today is the first day of the future for your family – let’s affect some change, beginning now!

Free Guide, Please!

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“Improving by 1 percent isn’t particularly notable—sometimes it isn’t even noticeable—but it can be far more meaningful, especially in the long run. The difference a tiny improvement can make over time is astounding. Here’s how the math works out: if you can get 1 percent better each day for one year, you’ll end up thirty-seven times better by the time you’re done. Conversely, if you get 1 percent worse each day for one year, you’ll decline nearly down to zero. What starts as a small win or a minor setback accumulates

into something much more.” Atomic Habits, James Clear

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May 26th, 2025 | Katrina Eaton