Leader in Me at Home: 5 Tips for Creating a Family Mission Statement

This blog post, Leader in Me at Home: 5 Tips for Creating a Family Mission Statement,  is a partnership with The Leader In Me. All opinions are my own. #TLIM

My husband and I have been wanting to create a family mission statement for some time now, but we didn’t have a lot of direction in how to do it.

This summer, as part of our time at Family Forward, we attended a Leader in Me at Home workshop with our kids. Since our elementary school is a Leader in Me School, our children are accustomed to hearing about the 7 Habits of Highly Effective Leaders. They are encouraged each day to be leaders and are learning what it means to develop the Seven Habits in their lives. During the workshop this summer, we were inspired to be more strategic about our parenting and help our kids develop into the leaders we know they can be.

Our family has never had a mission statement, but we were challenged to create one, so we set out to build it together. Along the way, we learned many things, so today I want to give you 5 Tips for Creating a Family Mission Statement.

Tips for Creating a Family Mission Statement:

Begin with the end in mind: This is the second habit in the 7 Habits of Highly Effective Leaders, and talking through it it helped our kids understand why we were creating a mission statement in the first place. If they don’t understand what it is, they’re not going to want to participate. We explained that our mission statement is not necessarily about what we are right now. We are growing and hope to get better by letting the mission statement guide our family’s activities.

Everyone participates: We wanted to make sure that everyone understood that everybody’s voice and opinion counts. To do that, we made sure each member of our family was present and had an opportunity to participate. Everyone listened to what the others said, and each comment was treated with respect. This is our family’s mission statement, so our whole family needed to be involved. It was great to hear our kids articulate their values and what they think is important in life.

Have a plan: In order to do this as a family, you have to have a plan and ask the right questions. Sometimes you have to let there be time for thinking and quietness as they come up with their own answers. It’s easy to want to answer the questions for your kids, but you have to be patient and let them respond. I got a list of questions from the Franklin Covey website and adapted them for our family. Here’s a PDF of the sheet we used. Feel free to download it and use it with your family.

Work in short bursts: We usually want to rush this, but the truth is that kids will not sit and talk for a long time about this. They will get fidgety and want to take a break. That’s okay. So work in short time periods, especially if your children are fairly young. You can have fun while doing this, too. We ate a snack while we talked, which helped them engage even more.

Be Creative and Display it: After you’ve worked hard to create your family mission statement, make a poster of it and put it somewhere in your house so you can be reminded of it daily. Our poster hangs proudly on our bulletin board by the front door so we can see it as we come and go each day. The hard part is living by the mission statement, but if you can see it, you will be inspired to act according to it.

Here’s the mission statement we came up with:

My hope is that our family will adopt and adapt this mission statement throughout the months and years ahead.

As we continue to develop and grow, our mission may evolve. The values will stay the same, but maybe the details will get clearer.

We don’t have it figured out, but we have started something we have been wanting to do for a long time.

Here’s a video of my husband explaining the process. Hopefully it will help you see a little of how we developed our own family mission statement.

Create your mission statement now!