For my Happiness Project, I have decided to combine March and April and focus on family. Specifically my marriage and my children. I will not be posting my specific goals. I have them written down somewhere, things that I want to improve upon or give more focus to. Since marriage and family are such personal things I don't feel it's appropriate to post to everyone specifically what I will be working on. I will, however, be sharing some of the insight I find along the way between study and trial on certain things.
I found on Amazon a book by Bruce Feiler called "The Secrets of Happy Families". The subtitle reads "Improve your mornings, rethink family dinner, fight smarter, go out and pay, and much more". The book is split into 3 parts: 1) Adapt all the time, 2) Talk, A Lot, and 3) Go Out and Play. I have read part one and after reading part one I felt very strongly that I should try to put some of the things I learned into practice before moving on. I feel like family life is about 2% knowledge and 1098% application (yes, I said 1098%, and yes I understand the math makes no sense but you get my point, right?).
Part One, Adapt All the Time, is split into three parts as well: 1) The Agile Family Manifesto, 2) The Right Way to Have Family Dinner, and 3) Branding Your Family. First of all, the people that he interviews and quotes for this book are not only cool but unique examples you wouldn't expect to find in a book like this. Part One includes having weekly family meetings to go over what the family is doing well, what could be improved, and committing to work on that improvement throughout the coming week. It also talks about having regular family dinner together, and that what and when you eat is not nearly as important as frequently sitting down together to have any meal/snack/treat where free conversation is more likely to occur, traditions can be made, and bonding can be cultivated. And finally it talks about creating a family Mission Statement.
Companies use mission statements all the time. A mission statement is a statement of the purpose of a company, organization, or person- it's reason for existing. Some are short and sweet (i.e. CVS- "We will be the easiest pharmacy retailer for customers to use"). Others are long-winded (I'm talking to you, AVON!). Whatever it is, a mission statement is meant for others to see what you stand for and to remind the participating members of their purpose and direction. It is the rules by which you govern all your practices, it is the underlying current of all your endeavors. If you read or listen to anything by Stephen Covey you'll realize that the principles he taught, while intended for the business world, are really applicable to anybody, any group, any organization... even families. In fact, he wrote a book called The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Families, taking his original 7 Habits and applying them to families. He suggested that families create their own mission statement, to allow people who entered the home to know your value system as well as remind everyone within the family of what is expected of them. Bruce Feiler points out that we are often enforcing rules upon our children based on our values, but do our children REALLY know what our values are? And are my values as the mother the same as the values of my husband? What values do we have in common? What do we really stand for? What do we want our children to carry with them into their lives when they leave our house?
He suggests taking a listing of character strengths he compiled (80 in all) that include words like agility, courage, grit, open-mindedness, kindness, and diversity. He has you take this list, sit down by yourself, with your spouse, and/or with your family and go through it, crossing out anything that does not describe your family's beliefs and values, while keeping the things that you do believe in. Then adding to it as you see fit. The list is not meant to be the only source you use, it's more meant to get the ball rolling. From there you get a statement or listing that you feel encompasses your families value code. You could have one statement that sums it up and then add 5-10 supporting points surrounding it, or you can have one singular statement. He suggests keeping it short and simple, but whatever works for your family.
I photo copied the list of words, wrote down some questions, and decided that while I had my family cornered at the dinner table this evening, I would start the process of writing our mission statement. Stephen Covey's first Habit to Be Proactive said to become an agent of change in your family. My name is Sykes... Mommy Sykes, and I'm an internal agent for positive change in my family. The second Habit is Begin With The End In Mind- know the type of family you want to build. This is where the mission statement would come into play.
So I asked my family to chew on the following questions while they chewed on their dinner:
1) What words best describe our family?
2) What is most important to our family?
3) What are our strengths as a family? What does our family do right?
4) What sayings best capture our family?
5) Is there an object or a symbol that represents our family?
The first goal was to picture our family current day, as-is. I went through the list of words and asked my family if they thought a word described us. With some discussion and only minimal disagreement, we made it through the list. A dot next to a word meant that we felt it described our family. If it had a dot and a star it meant that we practiced it, but wanted to improve upon it. A star without a dot meant it's something we wanted to work on cultivating within our family. And lastly, no star and no dot meant we did not feel it was important enough to make it to the final list. I took a large piece of paper (4- 8.5X11's taped together) and taped it to our dining room wall with the heading "Our Family Stands For..." and transferred all the things we'd agreed upon from our list onto our new list on the wall, including the stars where applicable. We then looked at our new list, talked about it a little, added a few more things. When I say we, I mean my husband, my son, and myself. My two-year-old daughter spent most of the time stealing Daddy's knife off his plate, narrowly escaping her death-by-plummet off the high chair, blowing raspberries full of pineapple at us (should I call them "pineapples", then?), and singing the wrongs words to a single line of a song from Aladin. But these values will hopefully be a part of her life as soon as she understands them, and the fact that her older brother played a part in building our statement will hopefully give him a feeling of ownership and responsibility which will help her learn by example.
Over the following week(s) we will keep looking at the list and thinking about our family and those 5 questions above. As we think of things we will add them and eventually distil them into our family's mission statement which will be proudly displayed in plain sight in our home.
The most important part of this is to make it something that YOUR family believes in, to picture the best POSSIBLE version of your family. Do not be led astray by what other people think your family should be doing or should value. Do not try to make your family something it was never meant to be. Every family is unique, with it's own set of personalities, talents, quirks, and goals. I will admit that, over all, their are underlying truths that we as humans should try to live by. But this statement is about your family and no one else. There are enough influences in the world telling us who and what we should be, but not many of those are in line with being true to who we are. And we are who we are for a reason. We were given our differences for specific reasons, therefore the best thing to do is to live your life according to what you believe and truly feel to be right. What works for someone else's family may not work for yours and that's ok. Be true to yourselves and focus on being the best possible version of your family that you can be.
I'm very excited to complete the task of creating my family's mission statement. I think it's a great way to start my 2 month resolution to focus more on my marriage and children. For anyone who's interested in the book, here's the link:
http://www.amazon.com/Secrets-Happy-Families-Improve-Mornings/dp/0061778737/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1362532595&sr=1-1&keywords=the+secrets+of+happy+families
Happy Tuesday evening, everyone!
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