Hellobee

I’ve been writing about our family’s 4-step plan to restore peace in our house. Last week I dove into Step 1 of our plan and outlined how we created our budget, and this week I am tackling Step 2: writing our family mission statement.

I first read about family mission statements on the Art of Simple blog, which has a great series of articles about creating your family purpose statement that outlines in detail the why, the who, the how, and the what. I also recently read the “Secrets of Happy Families” by Bruce Feiler, which has an entire section on creating your family brand by designing a family mission statement (this tool kit is a nice preview of Feiler’s book). I highly recommend both of these resources if you are thinking of writing a family mission or just want to read more about ways to restore peace in your family.

Simply put, the goal of creating a family mission statement is to identify your family’s priorities and core values and put them down on paper. On a more macro level, the goal is to create a clear vision for your family that allows you to recognize the difference between the important and the urgent and allocate more of your time and resources to the important and non-urgent stuff. Thinking about a mission statement in this way was really eye-opening for me. The days I am the most stressed and anxious are the days where everything feels urgent yet nothing feels important, so my main goal in this exercise was to sit down with Mr. Peas and together create a list of our family’s core values and use that list daily to help us (1) make decisions; (2) know when to say yes and when to say no; and (3) focus more on the important and less on the urgent.

This is a surprisingly difficult exercise – it’s much easier to create an aspirational list of everything you want your family to be or do in a perfect world. It’s much more difficult to really sit down and think about the things that are MOST important to your family (important enough that you can and will prioritize it on a daily basis) and to future-proof that list so it works for your family today and can continue to work for your family in the future.

In Feiler’s book, he quotes Jim Collins, a best-selling author of several business books, who wisely points out that:

“If you’re trying to identify your family’s core values, the most important thing is to identify what your values actually are, not what you think they should be. A core value is something so central you would say, ‘Even if it’s harmful to us, we would still hold on to this value. Even if we had to pay penalties, even if we had to punish our children for violating it, even if we had to deny them something that would bring them pleasure, we would still hold to it.’ That’s what you need to keep in mind as you’re making your family brand: It will work only if it stands for something.”

Other good advice I culled from the Art of Simple blog series and Feiler’s book:

• Keep it short and simple
• Sit down with your spouse (and your kids if they’re old enough to participate) and ask yourselves  a series of questions to identify what’s really important to your family (the Art of Simple blog has a great list). Bonus points for making this process a special occasion!
• Look at your responses and see if there’s a theme. Likewise, see if you and your spouse differ on any answers.
• Highlight a few repeated themes, and find a few descriptive words to encompass them.
• Tweak your answers if needed to be future-proof.
• Start writing your family mission statement. There is no right or wrong way to do this, and you can always revise it later.
• Stick to it. Like a budget, a family mission statement is meaningless if you don’t actually use it. Print it out, display it, and read it aloud often.
• Reevaluate and change if necessary. Core values can change over time just like priorities can, and it’s OK to change your mission statement if/when that happen.

After going through that process, here is what Mr. Peas and I came up with for our family mission statement.

As a family, we want to be a powerful force for good, for ourselves, for each other, for our family and friends, for our communities, and for our world. We will do our best to:

Do and find the good;

Have fun;

Eat together;

Consume good things;

Take care of our health;

Go outside everyday;

Remember that hard equals hard but it doesn’t equal bad; and

Not let comparison steal our joy.