How to cancel your teenager

If there is any good leadership principle we should take from today’s culture - it’s that we must cancel people we don’t agree with.

A good place to practice cancel culture is home - mainly because you can practice ‘cancelling’ without the world watching on.

The only problem is you’ll need to wait until your kids start growing their own opinions - typically in the pre-teen or teen years.

If you don’t have teens yet, you’ll need to practice on your partner — but, if you have teens, here’s how to create a healthy cancel culture in your home today.

First you have to cancel their crazy ideas, even though they might think home is a safe place to explore ideas — you need to make sure they feel unsafe to have an opinion early on in life — before they enter the real world and are no longer allowed an opinion.

You should also destroy them when they make a mistake. In today’s culture of tolerance and acceptance, we’ve become increasingly tolerant of everything but a good mistake — and they need to know that.

If your teen does something really stupid — it’s important you make sure they know they’re really stupid.

Whether it’s their crazy ideas or stupid mistakes - the best strategy is to have a good freak-out — but one of the secrets to cancelling people well is to not apologise for your freak-out.

You want to make sure that you say all sorts of things that you shouldn’t — but then you have to double-down and not apologise for it. This ensures they know they have no value to you.

So that’s my simple strategy for cancelling your teenager — be unreasonable and respond to their ideas and mistakes with a good freak-out — but don’t apologise for it.

Once you’ve mastered cancelling those in your own home, you can move onto those in leadership and any tall poppy on social media — and the great news is you can also do that, without leaving home.

This post was a bit silly – to get a point across. I’ll redeem it next week in a post titled: Leaders must fight cancel culture – at all costs, starting at home.

See you next week.