Feeling good about yourself can help the family farm succeed by making you better at making decisions, dealing with problems, negotiating and leading.

Twenty-five years ago, I would have told you that topics like self confidence and insecurities were a bunch of fluff. However, I’ve been through a lot and can tell you that it is the soft issues that become hard problems in farming.

What causes 30-plus years of building a family and a farm to fall apart within five minutes? Well, there are several reasons, but one is borderline personality disorder.

The root issue this family had was that they focused on growing a successful business but didn’t focus on what it would take to grow a successful family. There wasn’t a mutual understanding about work-life balance between business partners.

Narcissism is the mental disorder of “you.” People with this disorder are arrogant, self-centered, manipulative and demanding. They are convinced they deserve special treatment. They have difficulty tolerating criticism or defeat. Sometimes, it’s not fun to be around them.

People will argue that economies of scale is the determining factor for which farms will succeed and which will fail. Is this what you believe? 

Grandma was crying at the end of the kitchen table, and hate was too mild of a word to describe the feelings the two sisters-in-law had for one another.

For a lot of farm families, the in-laws quickly become the outlaws due to factors you’d never consider.

After a decade of sorting out the direst farm succession and farm debt cases, I have found that dysfunctional in-law relationships are often a key underlying ingredient to these problems. Really good families are hit by landmines of the in-law kind, and everything explodes. If these families knew what those landmines were before they stepped into them, they would have been able to avoid them.