“My family comes first” – almost every father I know.
There is a ton of content out there for business leadership, for church leadership, for every type of leadership. There are books, consultants, coaches, blogs, podcast’s and even mastermind groups. I consume some of this content and I have learned some good stuff.
Business and church leaders often work on leadership skills so that they can lead their business or churches more effectively.
Most would say that “family comes first”or “my family is the most important thing in my life”, we have careers to support our families. But think about it, how much planning, how much strategy, how many goals and how many meetings do we have about our family lives? I think most of us just allow our family lives to happen as they will. What if we applied our leadership wisdom, skills and talents to our families? starting now!
Families need leadership as much or more than do businesses. We can shape our children’s lives with our parenting skills. This can effect our children for a lifetime, for good or for bad. The concept of family leadership goes beyond parenting only. Parenting is just one of subset of family leadership, because not all families raise children. Family leadership embraces what is unique and special about a family. It doesn’t try to change or manipulate and make a family into something it is not. It accepts the family for what it is, it helps and guides family decisions and focus for decades and for generations. Families are the foundation of a civilized society and provide stability, so of course we should strive to lead our families well.
There are three things that the leaders of families can do to lead well.
Assumptions: there is a roof over the family’s head, adequate clothing on everyone, enough food to eat and plenty of love in the home.
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Define the family’s mission.
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Create a sense of unity and oneness in your family.
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Set specific goals for the family.
A family mission is that one most important thing that your family focuses on in the near-term. Perhaps it is improving relationships with one another, perhaps it is teaching our faith, perhaps it is doing something together like a big vacation, perhaps it is working on a financial struggle. Don’t spend too much time on this, just pick something you can agree with and go for it, there are no rules and you can change things on the fly. Is your family just existing, or does it have a unique mission? whatever you think that mission is or should be, start to talk about it, write it down, discuss it with your spouse, tell it to your children until they know it by heart. I am just beginning this process with my kids and they seem to enjoy the guidance.
Does your family have a sense of unity and oneness, is your family united? do family members suffer alone with problems? Does everyone tend to dump things on mom? or dad? everyone should share the burden of life together, help one another, defend one another and forgive one another.
As part of that mission and unity it is a good idea to set yearly goals for your family. Set less than 10 goals and write them out, make them achievable but ambitious and make sure everyone in the family knows them.
These all sound great right? But how to begin? We can start by coming up with a family mission then simply say it out loud often, talk about the goals for the year, start creating that UNITY that ONENESS in your family by teaching unity and expecting it from everyone. This wont happen overnight but with consistency over time we get there.
Family life is important, more so than is our careers, our businesses, even more than our churches, so lets strive to lead our families well. Children are counting on us, our spouse is counting us. When death comes many years from now our family is what will matter to us, not our nest egg.
Don’t continue another day in an unhealthy or toxic family life, make effort to restore and to lead our family well. If necessary get marriage counseling or parenting counseling, there is no shame in that, determine to fix what is broken.
The only thing more painful than confronting and uncomfortable topic is pretending it doesn’t exist.
