We created our family mission statement over a period of several weeks.
The first week we called the four children together and said, “Look, if we’re all going in different directions and we’re always fighting with one another, things aren’t going to go very smoothly.” We told them that things would be much easier if we all shared the same value system. So we gave everyone five three-by-five cards and said, “Just write down one word on each card that you would use to describe this family.”
When we sorted through the cards and eliminated the duplications, that left us with twenty-eight different words. So the next week we had everybody define what those words meant so that we could understand what they really had in mind. For example, our eight-year-old daughter had written the word “cool” on one of her cards. She wanted to have a “cool” family. So we encouraged her to explain to us what a “cool” family would be like. Eventually everyone’s definitions were clarified, so there was deep understanding.
The next week we put all the words on a big flip chart and gave everyone ten votes. They could use up to three votes per item if they wished, but they could not spend more than ten votes in total. After the vote, we were left with about ten items that were important to everyone.
The following week we voted again on the ten items, and we got the list down to six. Then we broke up into three groups, and each group wrote one or two phrases about two of the words, defining what they meant. We came back together and read our phrases to the others.
The next week we discussed the phrases. We clarified them. We made sure they said what we wanted to say. We made them grammatically correct. And we turned them into our mission statement:
Our family mission:
To always be kind, respectful, and supportive of each other,
To be honest and open with each other,
To keep a spiritual feeling in the home,
To love each other unconditionally,
To be responsible to live a happy, healthy, and fulfilling life,
To make this house a place we want to come home to.
It was really great because from start to finish we had involvement. The mission statement was their words and their sentences, and they could see that.
We put the statement in a beautiful frame and hung it over the fireplace. We said, “Okay, now anyone who can memorize this statement gets the big candy bar of their choice.”
Every week we have somebody share what one of those words or sentences means to him or her. It only takes two or three minutes, but it makes the mission statement come alive. We’re also setting goals around the mission statement, making it a central part of our lives.
This mission statement process has been tremendously helpful to us. In a normal family you tend to assume certain behaviors. But when you’re blending a family, you’re coming in with two sets of ideas about how to raise children in the first place. Our mission statement has really given us some structure, some common values and a common focus on where we’re going.
Two of the most powerful psychological forces that imprint the brain are writing and visualizing, both of which are involved in this mission statement process. When these activities are consciously done, the content rapidly translates itself into the subconscious mind and to the deeper parts of the heart, helping you to stay on track.
Both processes cause people to crystallize their thinking. And if all the senses are employed in the processes, this crystallization becomes laserlike. It literally imprints the brain or etches into the brain the content and feeling embodied in the writing or the visualizing. And this enables you to translate the mission to the moments of daily living.*
The Power of a Family Mission Statement
Many families talk about how, over time, the mission statement has a profound impact on children—particularly when they feel their input is welcome and genuinely affects the direction the family will take.
And it has a profound impact on parents as well. With proper involvement in the process of creating a mission statement, you’ll find that it will overcome the fear of parenting, of being decisive. You won’t fall into the trap of trying to win a popularity contest with your kids. You also won’t take rebellion or rejection personally simply because you’re emotionally dependent on your children’s acceptance. You won’t get into the state of collusion that many parents do wherein they feel validated by the weaknesses of their children and look about for friendly, sympathetic allies who will agree with them and massage their hearts and make them feel that they’re okay and it’s their “bratty kids” who aren’t.
With a clear sense of shared vision and values, you can be very demanding when it comes to standards. You can have the courage to hold your children accountable and to let them experience the consequences of their actions. Ironically, you will also become more loving and empathic as you respect the individuality of each child and allow your children to be self-regulating, to make their own decisions within the scope of their experience and wisdom.
In addition, a mission statement will create a powerful bonding between parents and children, between husbands and wives, that simply does not exist when there’s no sense of shared vision and values. It’s like the difference between a diamond and a piece of graphite. They are both made of the same material, but a diamond is the hardest of all substances while graphite can be split apart. The difference lies in the depth of bonding in the atoms.
A father shared this experience:
Some time ago I was thinking about my role as a father and envisioning how I wanted to be remembered by my kids. So when we planned our vacation that summer, I decided to apply the principle of vision to the family. We came up with a sort of family mission statement for the event. We called it the “Smith Team.” It described for us the perspective we wanted to take when we went off together on our trip.
We each took a particular role that would help contribute to building the Smith Team. My six-year-old daughter chose the role of family cheerleader. Her goal was to be an influence to dispel any contention in the family, particularly while we were traveling together in the car. She made up several cheers, and whenever there was a problem, she would break into one of them: “Smiths! Smiths! Driving down the street! When we stick together, we can’t be beat!” Whether or not we felt like it, we’d all have to join in, and it was very helpful in dispelling the bad feeling that might have been there.
We also had matching T-shirts. At one point we went into a service station, and the attendant wasn’t paying much attention. But when he looked up and we were all standing there with our matching shirts, he did a double take and said, “Hey, you guys look like a team!” That just kind of cemented it. We looked at one another and felt an incredible high. We got back in the car and took off, windows down, radio cranked up, ice cream melting in the backseat. We were a family!
About three months after we got back from our vacation, our three-year-old son was diagnosed with leukemia. This threw our family into months of challenge. The interesting thing was that whenever we took our son to the hospital for his chemotherapy treatments, he would always ask if he could wear his shirt. Maybe it was his way of connecting with the team and feeling the support and the memories he had around the experiences of being together on that family vacation.
After his sixth treatment he caught a serious infection that put him in intensive care for two weeks. We came very close to losing him, but he pulled through. He wore that T-shirt almost nonstop through those days, and it was covered with stains of vomit, blood, and tears. When he finally did pull through and we brought him home, we all wore our family T-shirts in his honor. We all wanted to connect to that family mission feeling we had created on our vacation.
That vision of the Smith Team helped us through what was the greatest challenge our family had ever faced.
A divorced mother of four shared this experience:
Twenty years ago my husband moved out, and I was left with four children—ages four, six, eight, and ten. For a while I absolutely lost it. I was devastated. For several days I just lay in bed and cried all day. The pain was so deep. And I was so frightened of what lay ahead for us. I didn’t know how I was going to do it. There were times I would just go from one hour to the next and think, “Well, I didn’t cry in this hour. Let’s see if I can not cry the next hour.” And this was very hard on the children because their dad had just moved out of the house and for a while they thought their mom was “gone,” too.