Old Fashioned Lifestyle

Because we are in transition (living in a trailer house while we build a new house), many of our personal possessions have been packed away for more than a year.  Today, however, I came across an old 3 ring binder in which we kept notes from family meetings.  In this notebook are a few pages reflecting the work we were doing on creating a family mission statement.    We did not quite get to the point of a final product – but we laid the foundation.

The starting point came from suggestions taken from Steven Covey’s “7 Habits of Highly Effective Famillies”.   From this book – we asked ourselves the following questions:

1.  What is the purpose of our family?
2. What kind of family do we want to be?
3. What kind of things do we want to do?
4. What kind of feeling do we want in our home?
5. What kind of relationships do we want with one another?
6. How do we want to treat one another?  Speak to one another?
7. What things are truely important to us as a family?
8. What are our family’s highest prioriy goals?
9. What are the unique talents, gifts, and abilities of members of the family?
10. What are our responsibilities as members of the family?
11. What principles and guidelines do we want our family to follow?
12. What families inspire us and why do we admire them?
13. How can we contribute to society as a family and become more service oriented?

It has been a few years since we answered these questions for ourselves.  I feel that reviewing them again today will be helpful as we re-establish ourselves in our new community.   I think we will “visit” one question a week during our weekly family meetings.

Technorati Tags: Family Life, Family Mission Statement

As a tool for helping us focus on our direction, dream and values we created this vision board at the beginning of 2007.

There are four parts to this board.

1)  Land Ho, Mexico.  San Juan dreams of a life at sea…. he longs to sail around the world.   While the idea of traveling around the world with our kids is so very appealing to me – I feel the need to ease into the whole sail boat thing.  As a compromise, we have decided to take extended trips to various places and charter boats in some places, sail our own boat in some places, etc.  First stop:  Mexico in the beginning of 08.

2)  Our financial goal is to triple our net worth – through the development of self-storage properties and apartment buildings.

3)  My dream has been to start a homestead – a family ranch.  A place to get back to nature and raise our kids and animals…  so a goal for this year is to purchase the land that would work for this.

4)  Foundation.  We have been so blessed – and we feel a need to give back.  Once we free financially (just around the corner) our goal is to use our means, knowledge and effort to start a foundation.  We want to incorporate our ‘giving back’ efforts with our travel plans.    At the time this vision board was done – the plan was to set up a foundation to help foster children prepare for life after aging out of the system by providing financial education, and support.

Technorati Tags: Family Mission Statement, Values