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Let me wish you all a rocking 2023! I was out for the past weeks building relationships with my family during the holiday break. My year started out a bit spiky 🫣. The picture above is one of my favorite we visited; even if I stepped on a sea urching and am still being treated for the spines I got in my foot. 🤕🫣​
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I appreciate each and every one of you for your support this past 2022.

Let's do this!

I recently revisited the Project Management Triangle, also known as Triple Constraint, Iron Triangle, or Project Triangle.

Did your mom ever tell you “sweetie, you can’t have it all”?

In fact, we can’t have it all.

Everything has tradeoffs, but the MindSwitch lies in seeing beyond the tradeoff.

Now before we get into that, let's understand what a trade-off is.

A trade-off is a kind of compromise. When we give up something to obtain something else in return, that's a trade-off.

Giving up personal time for a job that requires more of you but pays higher than what you are earning.

Or

Not eating a chocolate bar to lose weight, but losing weight to be healthier.

Or

Spending less personal time to build connections with your kids but having a nurturing relationship with them in the long run.

The Project Management Triangle

To understand tradeoffs let's look at the Project Management Triangle Example. Let's say I want to build a house with the best quality. Good quality requires meticulous work, time, and effort. So good quality will increase my cost, time, and scope of the project.

My tradeoffs for choosing and obtaining high quality will be a higher cost, time, and scope.

But let’s say I want the house to be built the fastest possible. This will reduce labor costs, scope, and time, but I may have to compromise on quality.

We can’t have it all. Right.

But we can decide how we view the situation to see beyond the tradeoffs.

When we reframe the situation our trade-offs disappear.

A few weeks ago my daughter was upset about a school situation she had. She couldn’t seem to get past her frustration. This is where I came in.

There was an opportunity to reframe the situation.

This is what we did:

I asked her to stand up and move to a corner of her room, where I wanted her to describe everything she was able to see standing there.

Then, we moved to a different corner of the room and she started describing what she saw in that second corner. Naturally, many things were the same, we were in the same room. But one thing was different, she wasn’t able to see her dog napping when she was standing in the other corner. Aha!

Like in all situations, there is always a new perspective to take, and new things to visualize.

Let’s take the house example, when wanting to build a house focused on quality, the high costs won’t matter if we know we have invested in high quality materials that will last longer.

Everything has trade-offs, we will need to give up certain things to obtain others we want. But it also depends on how we are viewing them.

How do we teach trade-offs to our kids?

1. Have kids reflect on the costs and benefits of their decisions. What they will gain or lose from choosing X or Y.
2. Let them safely fail while practicing with you. It’s ok if they make a mistake, they will gain practice for when they grow older and are on their own.
3. Set the example yourself. Allow them to see when you fail at a choice. Whether it is choosing the wrong flavor of ice cream or choosing the wrong movie. They will be observing how you manage trade-offs and how you deal with making mistakes.

We will never get it perfectly. When saying “yes” to something, we naturally say “no” to something else. We want our kids to learn to make wise decisions, so when they fail, they know how to fail forward!

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Thank you for reading.
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Until next week,

Alexandra

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Special thanks to my wonderful writing group friends for helping me frame this MindSwitch. Thank you Kelly Davis and Karena De Souza!

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