I don’t know exactly what influence that had in my sisters’ lives, but they’ve married either very dominant or very passive men—no middle-of-the-road, regular-type men—and some of the marriages haven’t worked out.
So as I thought about my mission statement, I felt a real sense of responsibility concerning their children and a great desire to give them a good role model. And every week when I review my mission statement, I think very seriously about what I could be doing for a nephew or a niece.
His wife added:
This has helped him become a real transition person in his family. Not only has he stopped a culture of alcoholism and emotional abuse, but he has also set a really high standard of education and contribution for his nieces and nephews. He will go to them and say, “Okay, you don’t have the grades you need to get into college, so what are you going to do about it?”
We try to have nieces and nephews over often, and they notice what we do in our family. We don’t watch TV at night. School is really important. We have our kids in music and sports. They see us working toward long-range goals, and it has an effect.
Notice how this man’s sense of vision and values enabled him to take a positive, proactive role in his extended family. He has become an agent of change. He’s working from the inside out. And what kind of difference is this going to make in the lives of his nephews and nieces?
There’s no end to the good you can do in your family when you have a clear vision of your destination, your role, and your opportunity. Just think about the opportunity for grandparents, for example. Grandparents can take a vital and active role in unifying their children and grandchildren. My brother John and his wife Jane were both parents and grandparents when they developed their mission statement. They had married children living in different parts of the country as well as some children living at home. They spent eighteen months communicating with them in various ways, and they finally came up with this single phrase that embodies the essence of all they were thinking and feeling: “No empty chairs.”
Those three simple words have profound meaning to them. They are code words. Behind them are many deep discussions and interactions concerning the spirit of unconditional love and commitment that family members have for one another. “We’re going to help each other. We’re not going to let anyone fail. We’re going to pray for each other. We’re going to serve each other. We’re going to forgive each other. We’re not going to hold grudges. We’re not going to be offended.”
Just think of the power of that kind of commitment in the intergenerational family! Think of the impact those words are going to have on aunts, uncles, and cousins as the family continues to grow.
But you don’t have to be a parent or a grandparent to initiate an intergenerational family mission statement. Grown-up siblings can also become agents of change.
One man shared this:
Some time ago my dad called and suggested that our entire family get together and take a vacation. My parents were in Virginia, one sister and her husband were in Ohio, and another sister and brother were in Utah, so we were pretty spread out.
At that time I was deep into the 7 Habits material and thought it would be great if we could write an extended family mission statement. So before the vacation, I wrote to everyone. I explained what a mission statement was and included some material on how to write one. I asked each of them to come with a draft in hand.
One of the things I was really excited about in writing this mission statement was to redefine our relationships with each other. I was convinced that we had assigned labels to everyone that were not valid anymore. “Oh, Johnny—he’s the happy-go-lucky guy. He’s really nice, but you can’t always depend on him. Jenny is the complainer. She’s always going to be whining about this or that. David’s going to whine, but he’ll do whatever it is he’s whining about.” On and on it went with everyone in the family. These labels may have been true when we were twelve or thirteen, but they didn’t fit anymore. And so the first night we were together, we talked about it.
It was an incredible night. We made copies of everyone’s mission statement drafts and distributed them. As each person read his or her draft, we marked our favorite lines. It was really amazing how different the approaches were. My brother had written his as a beautiful poem. My father’s was a paragraph. Mine was three pages. Every one was unique.
Out of the twelve drafts we came up with a family motto and had it printed on T-shirts. We didn’t complete the mission statement at that point, but we did make significant progress.
Probably the most amazing thing about the whole experience was the impact of the process itself. One of the most immediate benefits came later during that vacation when the beautiful, luxurious-looking motel Mom had picked out from a brochure turned out to be a “dive.” Before, this would have sent everyone into a tailspin of silent misery. But the mission statement experience allowed us to communicate openly, and in a matter of thirty minutes we saved the vacation. I’m convinced it was a result of the family togetherness we felt.
Also, as a result of that mission statement work, several families ended up moving back to be close to Mom and Dad. We decided that family was more important than money or location. In fact, we even decided that we would love to run a business together. We realized there are a lot of challenges that come along with that, but we felt it would give us the chance to know one another better. So we packed up our things and moved hundreds of miles to be together.
Before this mission statement experience, it was like “Hey, we’ll see you at Christmas!” But now we realize we want our kids to grow up close to one another. We want them to know their grandparents. It’s begun a new era in our family.
Notice how, even though he wasn’t the parent in this family, this man accepted a proactive leadership role. Notice how he worked in his Circle of Influence and created an experience that bonded and unified the entire family. Now what kind of difference is this going to make to the entire family in years to come?
The reality is that it all comes back to you—what’s going on inside your mind and heart and the proactive choices you’re making to create family change.
I will never forget an experience I had with a group of parents on the East Coast of the United States. These parents were also presidents of companies, and they had brought their spouses and teenage children with them to attend this family conference. The whole purpose of the three-day conference was to learn how to develop a family mission statement.
For the first day and a half we focused almost entirely on building relationships. We worked on learning to listen to one another and expressing ourselves in ways that affirm and show value to others, rather than belittling them or making them feel put down or embarrassed.
As we moved into the afternoon of the second day, I began to focus on creating a family mission statement. They had already done a great deal of work and reading on the subject prior to the conference. But as we came to the question and answer session at the end of the day, I could tell that these people were really struggling.
They were bright—very bright. They had tremendous talent and capacity. They had accomplished great things in their professions. But they had an underlying problem: Despite their expressions to the contrary, many of them simply did not assign high priority to marriage and family in their own lives. They had a deep habituation and commitment to a working style where the family was essentially a sideshow to the main tent of career. They had basically come to the conference expecting to learn quick-fix techniques that would enable them to rebuild their family relationships and create a great family culture so that they could check “family” off their “to do” list and get back to focusing on their professions.
I tried to connect with them on a different level. I confronted them as forcefully and directly as I felt I could with this question: “Suppose you had a new product you wanted to introduce that you felt had great potential, and you wanted to carry on a nationwide marketing program to do it. Would that excite you? Would you do what was necessary to accomplish the task? Or what if you had a competitor move in on your territory and take away a sizable hunk of your business. Would you be determined to take immediate steps to remedy the situation? Or what if one of your services or products was being unusually accepted in one test market, and you had a two-year lead time on your competitors. Would that turn your talents and energies on? How would you organize yourself to capitalize on that situation as far as you possibly could?”