For the last several years, David and I have sat down around New Years and made plans and dreams for the year ahead. It's been a good way to get on the same page and reflect on where we've been and where we want to head. The past few years, we've gone through Jennie Allen's Dream Guide and while we've liked it a lot, I decided to try something different this year. I went to Pinterest and found some question lists to look at the past year and the upcoming year and cut them up and put them in a basket. During the week between Christmas and New Years, we would go through a few at a time and talk about them. We both made some individual goals, but one of the big things we did was create a Family Mission Statement.
A Family Mission Statement is something I've heard of several times, but not something we'd ever done. As we were looking ahead at 2018, we knew there were some big decisions we were considering and I'd recently heard a Podcast where they talked about a Family Mission Statements and they mentioned that Mission Statements can be helpful in guiding decisions because you can look and see how the decision fits in with your mission statement. So I thought it would be a good exercise for us for several reasons, but the main 2 are these:
1. It would allow us to step back and look at the big picture of what we wanted for our family instead of getting bogged down in the specifics of what we might want to do or change right away.
2. Since we're heading in to our first full year with Cooper, it seemed like a good time to really think about what we want our family to be about. Cooper is growing so quickly and there's so much we want to teach him and show him, so I thought it would be good to try to focus some of the things we talk about into an overarching list of values.
So we read several articles about family mission statements and looked at several examples I found on Pinterest and got to work. I'll link to all of the articles we read at the end of the post, but the most helpful one was this post at Intentional by Grace. In that post there is a method for writing up the statement as well as a Family Evaluation worksheet to go through. So we went through the worksheet and started making our list of family values. Things like loving God, being authentic, being generous, having fun, being okay with making mistakes, using kind words, etc. And then we grouped the ideas into 4 main groups and gave them each a title to come up with the main part of our Mission Statement.
*Follow God*Love Others*Stick Together*Have Fun*
We have a document with these typed up as well as some more fleshed out ideas of what they mean. We also included several scripture references that we used to form these thoughts. We have the full Mission Statement typed out, but these 8 words are the basis of it all and an easy thing for us to teach Cooper when he's young.
It was a great exercise creating this Mission Statement together. I'm sure it'll change and evolve over the years, but it gave us a good vision as we looked ahead at a new year. I also decided it was time for a blog update, so I included them in the header of our new blog!
A few resources we used:
*Stick Together and Have Fun are both family rules in Karen Purvis' The Connected Child. They give an example of a family chant that says Stick Together, No Hurts, Have Fun. We used this phrase a lot when we had the foster kids and when we were trying to come up with good titles for the last two parts of our Mission Statement, these seemed to fit the ideas well, so we used them.
*These articles: Family Mission Statement 7 Steps to Writing a Family Mission Statement Developing a Scripture Based Family Mission Statement
*Franklin Covey's Mission Statement Builder
*And we pretty much just wanted to copy this mission statement word for word, but I found it on etsy as an example of artwork someone can make and had no idea where it came from, so we didn't.
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