Practices to Integrate Your Family Vision Statement

A family vision statement can provide both grounding and excitement for your family. To begin turning your family vision statement into meaningful action, you need to find the practices to incorporate for your family. Let’s talk through a few ideas and then how you can build your own action plan.

What’s the Purpose of Family Vision?

As a quick refresher, the goal of a family vision statement is to set a picture of the ideal future state. It is the thing that only God could make possible. Having a vision provides a clear direction of not only where you want to head but why it matters. Vision can help reduce the noise in our families’ lives since it provides clarity about how and why you live. Finding ways to activate and integrate your vision are important parts of family success.

Activating Your Family Vision Statement Ideas List

To begin to use your family vision statement effectively, you need practices that help reinforce it and make it practical. Use this ideas list to start your own plan and to help add your own ideas. The goal isn’t to make it complicated or lots of steps to complete but rather identifying a few, simple key ways that will integrate with your family’s own rhythms. (See our guide here on Family Habits and Rhythms to help!)

1. Write a prayer related to vision that your family can use to pray and reflect on a regular basis.
2. Use assessments regularly to evaluate how you are making progress or where change is needed. (Watch our training video here for more information.)
3. Print off your vision statement and have it displayed in your home, or find other ways to keep it in front of eyes. (an image you text each other, a t-shirt, a display coin or stone, etc.)
4. Build a tradition related to your vision statement. What is a consistent, repeated behavior or ritual that you return to that reinforces your family vision statement? (ie. A way you serve, a way you repeat & refresh on the statement, an annual discussion etc.)
5. Identify core behaviors that are best aligned with your vision statement, and make sure those are recognized and repeated in your family.
6. Evaluate where you are spending time as a family. Is it in alignment with your vision and mission? Regularly review how to refine where you give your time.
7. Add it to your family meeting agenda. Set time to repeat the vision statement and include how to use it in the agenda as well, such as using it when making decisions.
8. Create regular times to practice celebration when achieving milestones related to your vision.
9. Develop your family’s list of stories related to the family vision statement. Continue building an archive both from your past history and current experiences of stories that can provide encouragement to future generations.
10. Practice creativity together and find visual ways to represent your vision statement. (Painting, collage, vision board, etc.)
11. Have your family members regularly bring ideas to the table of new activities or ways they can see the family implementing the vision statement. Make it an ongoing conversation that is encouraged.

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These are just a few ideas that can get you started with integrating your family vision statement. Let it be a springboard for your own ideas and what works for your family’s unique dynamic. There is no extreme right or wrong here; it’s about experimenting and growing through each season.

How to Build Your Family Vision Statement Action Plan

Now that you have some ideas identified, it is time to put them into motion. To take next steps, we encourage you to think through a process like this:

• Hold a family meeting and talk about the importance of the vision statement.
• Brainstorm ideas together of how you can improve living out your family vision.
• Narrow it down to 3-5 practices you want to try.
• Set standards for how you will implement and evaluate these.
• Give family members responsibilities for these as is appropriate.
• Set the date for the next family meeting in which you will evaluate and review.

This is a cycle you can continue to grow and repeat. The goal is to make vision something that gives hope and excitement for your family while changing how you live in a practical way.

Keep Going. Vision is Hope.

As your family develops its vision statement, you are building a lifelong foundation through these practices. The point is more than just tasks you can accomplish but about continually deepening your interdependence as a family and preparing a way for future generations. Vision changes us both today and for generations to come, so lean into these practices.

Ready to go deeper as a family? Explore legacystone.com/families for more ways to get connected.