A family mission statement is a combined, unified expression from all family members of what your family is all about—what it is you really want to do and be—and the principles you choose to govern your family life. It’s based on the idea that all things are created twice. First comes the idea, or the mental creation; then comes the reality, or the physical creation. It’s drafting the blueprint before constructing the building, writing the script before performing the play, creating the flight plan before taking off in the airplane. It’s like the carpenter’s rule: “Measure twice, cut once.”
Can you imagine the consequences of the opposite—of beginning with no end in mind?
Suppose you were to go to a construction site and ask the workers there, “What are you building?”
“We have no idea,” one of them replies.
“Well, what does your blueprint show?” you ask.
The foreman replies, “We have no blueprint. We feel that if we build with great skill and craftsmanship, in the end we will have a beautiful building. We must get back to work now so we can complete our task. Perhaps then we will be able to determine just what it is we have built.”
Or, going back to the airplane metaphor, suppose someone were to ask you as a pilot, “Where will you be flying to today?”
Would this be your reply? “I really don’t know. We have no flight plan. We’ll just load the passengers and take the plane up. There are a lot of air currents up there. They blow in different directions on different days. We’ll just catch the current that’s blowing the hardest and go wherever it takes us. When we get there, we will know where we were headed.”
In my profession, if I’m working with a particular organization or client—particularly with the top executive cabinet—I often ask all the members to write a one-sentence answer to this question: “What is the essential mission or purpose of this organization, and what is its main strategy in accomplishing that purpose?” I then have them read these papers out loud to the others, and they are usually shocked at the differences. They cannot believe that everyone sees it so differently, particularly on an issue of such governing importance. And this sometimes happens even when the company mission statement is on the wall in that very room.
You might consider trying the same thing in your family. Tonight, just go and ask each member of your family individually, “What is the purpose of our family? What is this family about?” Ask your spouse, “What is the purpose of our marriage? What is its essential reason for being? What are its high priority goals?” You may be surprised by the answers you receive.
The point is that it’s vital to have the entire culture aligned—to head toward a mutually agreed upon destination. It’s critical to have everyone in the cockpit knowing that all are heading to the same place, rather than having the pilot thinking they’re going to New York and the flight engineer thinking they’re going to Chicago.
As it says in Proverbs, “Without vision the people perish.” The opposite of Habit 2 in the family is to have no mental creation, no envisioning of the future—to just let life happen, to be swept along with the flow of society’s values and trends without having any sense of vision or purpose. It’s simply living out the scripts that have been given to you. In fact, it’s really not living at all; it’s being lived.
Because all things are created twice, if you don’t take charge of the first creation, someone or something else will. Creating a family mission statement is taking charge of the first creation. It’s deciding what kind of family you really want to be and identifying the principles that will help you get there. And that decision will give context to every other decision you make. It will become your destination. It will act like a huge, powerful magnet that draws you toward it and helps you stay on track.
Creating Our Own Family Mission Statement
I hope you’ll excuse the long personal reference that follows, but we learned the power of all this not in the reading, observing, teaching, or writing but in the doing. Please understand that this is a very intimate sharing of our personal and family life. It reflects our own deep values and beliefs. But know that we recognize and honor the principle of respect for all, including those who believe differently.
If you were to ask Sandra and me, “What has been the most transforming event in your own family history?”, we would answer without hesitation that it was the creation of our family mission statement. Our first mission statement was created in a sacred marriage ceremony some forty-one years ago. Our second mission statement was developed in stages over a period of fifteen years and several children. Through the years these mission statements have created the common sense of destination and manner of travel that has represented the social will, the culture, in the family. And either directly or indirectly, consciously or unconsciously, almost everything else in our family has grown out of it.
On the day we were married, immediately after the ceremony, Sandra and I went to a park called Memory Grove. We sat together and talked about what that ceremony meant and how we were going to try to live our lives by it. We talked about the two families we had come from. We discussed what we wanted to continue to do in our own newly formed family and what things we wanted to do differently.
We also reaffirmed that our marriage was much more than a contractual relationship; it was a covenant relationship. And our commitment to each other was total, complete, and for always. We also recognized that our covenant was not only with each other; it was also with God. And we determined that we would be able to love each other more if we loved Him first.
So we made the decision to put principles ahead of each other and ahead of our family. And we feel that one decision, more than any other single factor, has given us the strength to apologize, to forgive, to be kind, and to keep coming back to the flight path time and time again. We’ve discovered that the more we are able to center our lives on these principles, the more wisdom and strength we can access—especially in situations where it would be very easy to be centered and even controlled by other things, such as work, money, possessions, or even family itself. Without that decision, we are convinced, we would have been far more dependent on each other’s moods or on our popularity with our children for our sense of security, rather than on our own inner integrity.
Putting principles first has given a sense of appropriate priority to everything else. It’s been like a set of glasses through which we view all of life. It’s given us a sense of “stewardship”—a sense that we are both responsible and accountable for the way in which we handle all things, including family. And it’s helped us realize that family itself is a principle—universal, timeless, and self-evident.
That day as Sandra and I sat in Memory Grove, we also began to talk about the children we would have. We took seriously the words of Daniel Webster:
If we work on marble, it will perish. If we work upon brass, time will efface it. If we rear temples, they will crumble into dust, but if we work upon immortal minds, and instill into them just principles, we are then engraving upon that tablet that which no time will efface, but will brighten and brighten to all eternity.
We began to identify some of the principles we wanted to use in raising our children. Then and over the next few years as children began to come, we often asked ourselves, “What kind of strength and abilities will our children need to have in order to be successful when they’re grown?” And out of these discussions came ten abilities we thought were vitally important—ten things we felt these children would need to be able to do when they became independent and started families of their own. These included the ability to work, to learn, to communicate, to solve problems, to repent, to forgive, to serve, to worship, to survive in the wilderness, and to play and have fun.
Part of our vision was to gather together at the dinner table at the end of the day and regroup, share experiences, laugh, bond, philosophize, and discuss values. We wanted our children to enjoy and deeply appreciate each other, to do things together, and to love being with each other.
As the children grew, this vision gave direction to many family discussions and activities. It caused us to plan each of our summers, our vacations, and our leisure time in a way that would help us realize our dream. For example, one of the ten things on our list was the ability to survive in adverse conditions, so to help the children develop this skill, we enrolled our family in survival programs. We were trained and led into the wilderness for several days with nothing but our wits to sustain us. We learned to survive through our ingenuity and through the knowledge we had gained about what we could and could not eat and drink. We learned techniques that would allow us to survive in freezing conditions, extremely hot conditions, and conditions where there was no water.