410 | Why Dads Are Called to Bring Order, Solving Family Friction Points, and Setting Impossible Goals – Part 1 (Chris Cirullo)

Rhythms & Habits
Written By Jeff Zaugg

Episode Description

Chaos doesn't have to be the norm in your home. In Part 1 of this conversation, Army Ranger turned fatherhood coach Chris Cirullo unpacks the biblical call for fathers to bring order—and shares the practical systems he's built to lead his five sons with both fun and discipline. You'll also hear why setting impossible goals might be the key to real growth.

  • Chris Cirullo is a former Army Ranger with four combat tours in Afghanistan, a former collegiate football player, fitness coach, and tech startup leader. He now coaches men through Mission Fit and serves on the team at Forming Men. Chris and his wife Justine homeschool their five sons in Eugene, Oregon, and are expecting their sixth child.

    • God designed fathers to bring order and strategy to their homes—it's part of our calling, not just a nice-to-have.

    • Training kids in specific behaviors with immediate rewards (like M&Ms) can save decades of frustration.

    • Weekly family meetings with your wife help you identify and solve one key friction point at a time.

    • Setting "impossible" goals narrows your options and forces clarity on what actually needs to change.

    • What gets measured improves—but what gets measured and reported improves exponentially.

  • Jeff Zaugg: Chris, I've been looking forward to this conversation. Before we even communicated back and forth, I was like, at some point, I've got to get Chris on for an episode of DadAwesome. So thanks for joining me.

    Chris Cirullo: Yeah, it's a pleasure to be here. I'm super excited.

    Jeff Zaugg: Usually I don't do bio. That's not kind of the way we roll of like, well, this person's done this and this and this. But I think I'm going to take an exception today because the nature of your journey helps apply to what God has shown you to help men, to help dads.

    So if I have this right—thank you for serving our country in the area of Army Rangers, four tours in Afghanistan. Before that, some collegiate level football. And then you jumped into coaching in the fitness area, a fitness coach, and then the startup world of software startups serving churches. And now you help through this project of Mission Fit dads, helping dads be their whole hearts and bring strength. And then you're also serving on the team with Forming Men, which is where we met. So that's the wide flyover—dad of five sons, and you're in Oregon. Did I mess anything up in the quick flyover?

    Chris Cirullo: No, that was a great flyover. You got it spot on.

    Jeff Zaugg: Now how would your older sons, your oldest two boys—what are some of the words if they were introducing dad? They probably wouldn't say what I just said. What are some of the things they'd say about dad?

    Chris Cirullo: Man. Well, I know that they would say probably some version of fun and strict and disciplined. It's usually one of the two that they get the most of me during the day. As you have a household of five boys, and we homeschool, there's a tremendous amount of order that needs to be brought into the home for that to function properly.

    So I try to be really intentional about how we are doing that so that my wife can actually get done what she feels the Lord asking her to do with our boys. But man, I love to have fun. We do a ton of wrestling, we go shoot bows. We love life. So yeah, those would probably be the two things.

    Jeff Zaugg: Well, the order side—that's a struggle right now for my home. And I think a lot of dads listening would say, man, chaos is more common than order. Give us, just bring your coaching heart a little bit to a few areas of bringing order to chaos that you'd say, hey, maybe focus here.

    Chris Cirullo: Can I start with a little bit of background theologically too? Because what's really interesting when you look at Genesis 1 and 2, we get this really interesting picture of what God's unadulterated perspective is. When he could have done anything that he wanted to—infinite wisdom, creativity, knowledge, capacity—he chose to create man. He said it's not good for him to be alone. He gave him a wife and then he commanded them, blessed them, said be fruitful, multiply, fill, subdue, and rule.

    So we have this missional command as part of the family dynamic. But what's really interesting when it comes to order is if you look at the very first thing that God told Adam to do, it was to actually bring order and strategy. He gave him the job of naming the animals and he didn't say pray and fast and figure out what I want you to name these animals. He said, no, Adam, you go and you name and whatever you name them, they're named. He wanted to partner with Adam to bring about order in the world and he stopped short of producing complete order so that man as a father and a husband could do some of that work.

    Having that in the back of our mind—I know it's a hard day, I'm exhausted, there's a lot on my plate—I have this innate responsibility as a father to bring order. We're not all great at it, but we do have to find ways to make efforts unto that end.

    Jeff Zaugg: Just to pause you there, the way you framed that—this is my calling, my responsibility. I bring, I'm a bringer of order versus a complainer of disorder. It's who I get to be. I'm called to be it. So amazing backdrop. Can you go practical with us for a moment?

    Chris Cirullo: If you think about how business functions, they tend to have a mission or an aim or these metric goals, and then they're reverse engineering what they do in order to bring about that end. As they go throughout their days and their weeks and their hours, they're actually bringing order to this variety of resources so they can bring about this end.

    I think a father needs to start there. What is the vision that I have for my family? And maybe it's gonna take me three years to see one of these things realized, but how do I reverse engineer developing that?

    For us, we think that order first and foremost comes by God's word being obeyed and understood. So every single morning at breakfast, I'm reading the word and then I'm asking them to dissect and tell me what jumps out.

    I'm creating an outlet for them to get energy out in a productive way. At 7 a.m. every morning we wrestle. I have them do a bunch of push-ups and sit-ups and squats and we do a few rounds of that and then each one of them gets one-on-one wrestling time to just really fight it out with dad and get a lot of energy out.

    But then we've created just a lot of systems in our household. We've decided this is what it's going to look like. We're going to train our kids. We're going to show them how to do it. Tell them what's expected, reward them with lots of candy or whatever it is throughout the two or three weeks of really practicing that so that can become something that's relatively set in stone. And then we have something to point to. Like, hey, does this feel like order right now or does this feel like chaos?

    My wife will sometimes take them into a room and there's toys everywhere and it was supposed to be cleaned a certain way. She'll be like, does this room feel chaotic or does it feel peaceful? And they know, they're like, it's kind of chaotic. And she's like, okay, let's be people who bring order and peace.

    Jeff Zaugg: And don't you guys do cleaning sprints? What is that?

    Chris Cirullo: Exactly. My wife Justine does it a few times a day at different transition points. For the small ones she'll tell them, hey, pick up ten things. For the older boys it's like, hey, you got to get 20 things. Or sometimes zones too. Sometimes it's helpful if you put all the boys in one spot—hey, pick up the living room—then some of them kind of shirk and the other ones do more work. So she'll say, hey, your zone is the living room, your zone is the playroom. That way they're separated and they don't end up rubbing into each other and wrestling or doing whatever they're gonna do other than cleaning. Then they just do a quick little four minute, five minute sprint.

    Jeff Zaugg: Do you have a strategy for peaceful exiting the home into the minivan or whatever vehicle you guys have?

    Chris Cirullo: If anyone has kids, they know that getting in the car is like one of the hardest things when they're small. I work from home and probably two years ago, my wife came to me during one of our family meetings and she was like, this is a nightmare. It takes us an hour to get out of the house.

    Jeff Zaugg: And we leave it messy when we leave. So both it takes time and we leave a disaster zone.

    Chris Cirullo: Totally, and then you come home and you're like, oh, I forgot about this, now I gotta clean it. It was just one of those things—we just started testing stuff, and we came up with a plan, and we just started training it. Again, I had a cup of M&Ms, and I'm like, hey, here's what we're gonna do. This is what's expected—shoes, a jacket, get in the car, help your brother get buckled who's too little to buckle himself. You're not wrestling in the car, which was a common thing. And then I'm gonna come out and I'm gonna check to make sure you guys have everything that you need—that you've got a jacket, your shoes and socks are on.

    And then I would just reward them. And we did it over and over and over again, same day, 10 times in a day. This is what's expected. And you just train it like a football coach training a new play.

    My mentor told me long ago, he said, minutes of training can sometimes save decades of headaches for a father. And that hits home, because it's like, okay, I can give five minutes to be intentional with this. It doesn't take a lot.

    Jeff Zaugg: Chris, I'm inspired about the practical, simple jar because we've added complex reward systems that then they have to change in these tokens to get something. I wonder if we just need to go back to M&Ms. I'm just going to come up with a king-size bag of M&Ms and say, we're starting over, we're training. I love it.

    You mentioned family meeting. I also want to talk about Sabbath and taking this pause. So either one first—I'd love to hear about both.

    Chris Cirullo: Let me make just one comment for anyone listening in regards to reward systems, because we do also have marble jars and stuff like that, but those are more general. So if we say, hey, Solomon, come here, and he's like, coming, and he runs, and we're like, okay, hey, you get a marble. Thank you for doing what you're supposed to do. It's not every time they obey they're going to get a marble. It's just when we notice those out of the ordinary moments of you've been doing a great job lately.

    But those live separate from intentional training blocks where we're actually saying, hey, we're gonna focus on learning how to get in the car. And that's when the candy becomes really important, because it's the immediate dopamine hit, the immediate reward that they get rather than the marbles adding up over a month or two months and then finally they get to go buy a Lego or whatever. Does that make sense?

    Jeff Zaugg: Right, right, that's helpful.

    Chris Cirullo: Man, family meetings. Let's go there first, because I think that Sabbath sometimes comes out of that. If we go back to the theological framework for fatherhood, to me, every family has a unique mission. I don't believe God would have given us unique personalities and skill sets and different kinds of kids and different spiritual gifts if we were gonna be like robots doing all the same thing.

    If that's true, then discovering why my family exists is another really important thing. I say why my family exists instead of why I exist because I believe based on that Genesis 1:28 framework that the family is the vehicle that is taking God's ways and principles and goodness into all the world. And we just happen to be at the helm with the full weight of the responsibility as fathers.

    If that's true, then how do we create a time each week where we can navigate around that and ensure that the household, our schedules, our finances, everything is ordered around seeing that stuff come to pass? So the family meeting for us is that space. It's 30 to 60 minutes every Friday afternoon.

    Very practically, we are looking at budgets. We're looking at schedules for the next two weeks. Every month we're looking three months out. So we're always looking on a 90-day rolling with schedules. And then we're asking ourselves what went well, what didn't go well, when are we gonna be intimate—those really important marital dynamics.

    Jeff Zaugg: So this is to clarify—this is you and your wife, not the five kids as part of this meeting?

    Chris Cirullo: Right now, yeah. Probably when they turn 12, they'll be invited into the family meeting to be a part of that.

    One of the most important parts of a family meeting for us is the key issues. So every week I ask my wife, what is the number one key issue in our household right now that's causing friction or disorder? She'll usually have a list and she'll be looking at that list and whatever's most annoying for her that week gets pulled to the top. And then we just spend 15 or 20 minutes brainstorming how do we fix this?

    That's how we came up with our laundry systems, that's how we came up with the kids getting into the car system, that's how we developed our marble system—you name it. It's just like, how can I as a father—remember the order and strategy—how can I use that side of my brain, even if I'm not fantastic at it, partner with my wife and come up with a solution for this thing? And if I do that 52 weeks a year, I've solved 52 big friction points in our household, which is such a blessing to my wife.

    Jeff Zaugg: Chris, as much as I want to stay on family meeting, is there another one that's in your mind right now that you're like, oh, here's another one we solved that's probably going to be helpful for a bunch of dads?

    Chris Cirullo: Table training. Meals are a big one for us. Because of the blessing and nature of my job, we eat 21 meals a week around the table as a family. I would say that's not absolute—some weeks maybe it's 18 or 19—but we generally have three meals a day around the table.

    If we see our household as a vehicle for hospitality and one of the things we love most is having people in our home and having deep spiritual conversations and discipling people around the table, then I need my kids, quite frankly, not to be banshees at the table.

    So one of the training blocks with the M&Ms was just like, here's what's expected. Here's how you behave when you're done, here's how you ask to be excused, you don't get up from the table—all the little things. It's not perfect, my kids are still nine down to one, but generally speaking, they now know what's expected, and I have a reference point to say, hey, you know better, what are you supposed to be doing at this time? And they're like, oh yeah, and they'll sit down and ask to be excused.

    Jeff Zaugg: One light bulb went off—Chris, with the 21 meals with your family in a week, even the idea of the challenge of let's try in a week to eat 21 meals together... I feel like our family just feels so thankful for call it 12 to 15 meals a week. But the idea of there's more that I could be pressing into for quality, meaningful times that I'm gonna wish I had back if I go forward. You have deeply impacted me by just saying 21, because I work from home as well. I have that flexibility to take—I'll give a stranger 45 minutes over the lunch hour that's asking about fatherhood. I'm like, yeah, I'll do a Zoom call with you. But I could give that to my family. I could make that a higher priority. Whatever I'm paying you for this podcast, it was worth it with just that.

    Chris Cirullo: Well, this brings up an interesting point around goal setting. There's a potentially better future that I can see or that now someone has brought up. People will do one of two things with what they just heard. They'll say impossible for me and just move on. Or they're like, that's a great vision, I'm gonna write it down and I expect to see that in 10 or 15 years, I'd love to be at that point—and then do nothing meaningful with it.

    When you think about goal setting, constraints is a really big thing. Setting impossible goals is one of the most effective ways to actually make meaningful growth.

    If you're like, hey, I wanna get to 21 meals a week with my family around the table, and right now I'm looking at my job and sports and all these things and that is physically impossible—that's okay. But if you set that as your goal and you say within the next three years, we're gonna get to 21 meals as a family around the table every single week, then what it does is it limits the pathways. The amount of options that you have of things that you could change in your life to get there—they narrow and your focus gets really clear on what would need to change.

    Now, maybe in three years you get to 12 meals or 15 because right now you've got four or five. You're still markedly further along than you would have been if it was just some distant vision or idea. The more impossible something sounds, the more likely you are to inch toward it in meaningful ways because you're actually asking yourself the question, what about me, my lifestyle, my family, my current circumstances needs to change in order for something like that to happen? And now windows of opportunity open up.

    Jeff Zaugg: And the whole framework of "I'm stuck"—I'm stuck because of this job, I'm stuck—as soon as we start to whisper or think these lies, like I'm a man, I'm a son of God. I am never stuck, right?

    So let's use these three laws and principles just for fun for a moment to go a little deeper into this. Parkinson's Law, the Pareto Principle, and Pearson's Law. Any takeaways from these three that would flesh further into what you're talking about?

    Chris Cirullo: Yeah, so Parkinson's Law is this idea that work expands to fit the time that's allotted for it. So if I say, hey, I want to see this in 30 years, that's a really long time period. You're probably going to delay. Anyone who went to college probably did this—you had 12 weeks of a term, and you knew that the term paper was coming, and you waited until the last week or two to get the entire thing done when you had 12 weeks to work on it.

    So if you shorten the timeline, then work will fill that space. You can say, hey, I'm going to take something that I wanna see happen and I'm gonna make my timeline way shorter. What happens when you shorten the timeline is you have to start assessing everything and saying, is this thing that I'm doing a meaningful thing moving me towards that particular goal in this now shortened timeline?

    Pareto Principle is where that comes in—the 80-20 rule. Typically 20% of the work you're doing is 80% of the meaningful movement. So you've got 80% of the stuff you're doing that you could cut out of your day, cut out of your life, and you could focus on the 20. Now if you expanded that 20 into the entirety of your day, you just exponentially multiplied your outcomes. You can do that all over again and say, which 20% of this has produced the most of what I'm getting out of that? And you just keep doing that.

    Jeff Zaugg: To dial in—you and your wife in your family meeting saying what's the biggest sticking point or problem to solve, you're essentially saying this is clearly in the top 20%, so let's solve it. That's helping to identify it, right?

    Chris Cirullo: Yeah, absolutely. Super meaningful thing that moves the needle towards our family mission being realized.

    Pearson's Law is probably one of the ones that is most often missed. The other two are ones that people are maybe familiar with from business books. But Pearson's Law says that what gets measured improves, but what gets measured and reported improves exponentially.

    Meaning if you don't have meaningful accountability—someone that you have to give an account to for what you said you were going to do—then you're not going to grow at the exponential rate that you could. Measuring is great, like I use goal journals and all sorts of stuff, but if you don't have someone to report it to, you are diminishing your potential for growth in those particular areas.

    Jeff Zaugg: This is so helpful. Immediately I'm thinking about—I took on a push-up challenge and recruited nine buddies into it. So I created the reporting mechanism and I created the crazy goal. I was maxing at like 25 and I said, what if I can get a one rep max to 100 by the end of the year?

    Here's a little confessional. I've gone silent for the last seven days on my text thread because I injured my back a week ago. And I realized the upstream—I was inattentive to some other areas. I was focused only on my push-ups. That was the wrong move. But I created a mechanism for reporting in a clear measurement. So in some ways, I got this right. But what I forgot is there's other things in the top 20% that I wasn't attentive to that have big impact.

    How would you coach me on getting back on track after a back injury? I'm focused on core right now, getting back with my team. You're probably gonna tell me to report in even though I missed the last seven days, right?

    Chris Cirullo: That's a huge factor. Something powerful happens when we just admit where we're at. I think this is why—is it James 5:16?—confess your sins to one another and pray for one another so that you'll be healed.

    This thing of exposing what's happening actually diminishes the power of what's derailing you and then it gives you an opportunity to create a change. Not that this is sin—not doing your push-ups and reporting it—but I think that principle God has woven into the way that things function. There's this openness with other men around what's going on in your life that creates a power to overcome it.

    But I think one of the greatest challenges that people face, especially when it comes to health and fitness stuff, is this idea of going all or nothing. If I can't do the full thing, then why bother? None of us would ever say that out loud, and it may not even be a conscious thought, but it does undergird a lot of our behavior. You see this in January when people start New Year's resolutions. You go three weeks, you're really great, the kids get sick, you kind of fall off, and the whole thing disappears rather than being like, well, I can get one workout this week.

    I think easing back into anything with a meaningful amount—the topic of inertia in physics, it's really hard to get something started. It's much easier to keep it in motion. If a back injury happens, keeping some regular rhythm of movement that you can do with your back just keeps it so that pattern and habit is still in play even if you're not doing the extent of what you want to do. By the time your back is feeling better, it's much easier to just pick up where you left off than it is to start all over again from nothing.

    [End of Part 1 – The conversation continues in Part 2 with The Daily 15, Sabbath practices, and Chris's closing charge for fathers.]

    • "Minutes of training can sometimes save decades of headaches for a father."

    • "I have this innate responsibility as a father to bring order. We're not all great at it, but we do have to find ways to make efforts unto that end."

    • "Setting impossible goals is one of the most effective ways to actually make meaningful growth."

    • "What gets measured improves, but what gets measured and reported improves exponentially."

    • "God wanted to partner with Adam to bring about order in the world, and He stopped short of producing complete order so that man as a father and a husband could do some of that work."

 

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411 | The Daily 15, Brain Science Behind Morning Routines, and Why Sabbath Is Your Family's Secret Weapon – Part 2 (Chris Cirullo)
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