👩🏻🎨 Annual Family Reflection + Goals
A guide to reflect on the year gone by and to be intentional about what you want to focus on as a family for the next year.
👋 Intro
This year was challenging no matter what it looked like individually in our homes. There was pain and loss and isolation and struggle. But there was also prioritization. And a grim call to face the realities and limitations of our lives.
If anything, it was a call to action for when we eventually return to semblances of “normal” - what will we keep and what will we discard from the lives we previously knew?
An annual tradition in my family is to take some time in the last week of the year to reflect on the past year and think about the year ahead. Then, roughly once a quarter, we review our goals and priorities and readjust as needed.
It used to be a thing my husband and I just did (and mid-year we do a "State of our Union"). This year we're involving our daughters as we work to be even more intentional about the kind of family we're building together.
The thing is - this is less about “workout more and drink more water”. Instead, it’s more about figuring out the values that we want to be central to our family and using them to create priorities, goals and everyday intents. Values that guide not only the major decisions but the everyday ones as well. More than that, as a family where both parents work full-time, this is a way that we’re able to be consistent across all the caregivers and teachers about what’s important to our family.
There are many schools of thought on how you might do this, but we take a simple viewpoint: being intentional about what we spend our time, energy and focus on. One of my former professors - Clayton Christensen - a giant in the business business for his thinking on disruption, had an even greater impact for his insights on how to build a life.
So this week, we’re helping parents bring more intentionality into how we all spend our precious time. From figuring out our unique family values to setting goals that we can revisit later in the year.
Choose the way that works for you - from a simple set of questions and a conversation, to joining us in a guided workshop as we dig in and design how we want to raise our families.
- xo
avni
🤓 Design your Family’s Life 101
🌟 Start with values and identify priorities. Most of us have never had a chance to think about what kind of family we want to raise. By the time you see it becoming important, around when the kids are toddlers/preschoolers, you’re in the thick of just trying to get through weeks. So take a massive step back and start with values and only then start thinking about priorities and specific goals.
📆 Use review to drive focus. Reflect on the past year to think about the best moments as a family and the most trying. Use this review to uncover what’s most important and how you can proactively design more of the positive moments.
❣️About emphasis, not exclusion. Choosing the 5-8 values that most reflect your family is more about what priorities you want to emphasize in your lives. It doesn’t mean that others aren’t important but that when it really comes down to it, these are the ones that really define what you’re about.
🤩 No right or wrong. Like with a company - there are no good or bad cultures - just strong or weak. As long as the values and goals are true to your family, you’re on the right track. Same goals with the goals you choose for the year ahead.
🧐 Evolves and changes - revisit each quarter or year. If you’ve never done this before, consider this a bitty baby step of just starting. Done right, this is just the beginning of a journey where you revisit everything from values to priorities. Family phases change so quickly that what made sense when the kids were preschoolers can quickly evolve just 3 years later. It’s why quarterly scheduled sessions will be a great ritual to build.
☀️ Bring into the everyday. Just like any organization, a culture is lived in the everyday decisions. Keeping values and goals front and center makes it easier to lean on those decisions in the little moments of discipling a child or deciding what to do on a weekend. Think about making signs/posters to hang around the house or creating little sayings (eg “we’re a sharing family”) that get shared verbally.
✨ The Options
Here are 3 ways to try it out.
Pro-tip - while some of these exercises are easy to get the kids involved, unless your kids are ~7+, perhaps think of doing 2 sessions - one with kids where you started talking about the important of reflection and intention and one that is just you and your partner as you dig into the harder bits and come to concrete, actionable plans.
📝 The Easy Year in Review. An easy way to get everyone involved.
a) Create a shared 2020 photo album and everyone chooses their 2 photos to represent each month. You’ll end up with ~24 photos per person.
b) Each person writes a story about the past year - what happened, what felt good, what wasn’t so great.
c) Create a family Top 10 - as a family, choose the top 10 moments of the year. Write it down, print out pictures, make a poster, act it out and record it - whatever makes most sense for your family.
d) Now look forward - make a short list of the 3-5 things each want to work on or do. Then make it concrete and actionable by thinking about exactly how and when you’ll work towards it. Make each weekend has 1-2 hours set aside for family projects.📆 3 Questions: Keep it even simpler with just 3 questions to answer:
- ☺️ What went well? Can be achievements or how you’ve lived up to the family values.
- 😒 What weren’t you so happy with? Can be disappointments, things to improve upon or something painful to reflect on and move past.
- 🤓 What do you want to focus on (to improve, change or just emphasize)?
Give everyone their own journals/notebooks to draw pictures or write down goals and pull them out each time you do it.💃🏽 The full review. If there’s one thing 2020 has shown us, it’s that when forced to prioritize, we actually have quite a bit of choice in what we put into our lives. So to be even more intentional about where we spend our time and energy, as Clayton Christensen shares in How Will You Measure Your Life, we need to start with what our family values are, which then guide our priorities and goals.
This option is certainly more in-depth but it’s also the one that connects more deeply to the kind of parents you want to be and the kind of family you want to build together.
🧐 Part 1 - Reflections and Review of 2020 (using the exercises in Option #1)
🥰 Part 2 - Values, Intentions and Priorities - Here is the full How-To on figuring out family values that we shared earlier this year, with a starter worksheet. Take time to figure out the 5-8 family values that will make the goals for the year more obvious. Eg if “Constant Learning” is a value, then perhaps a goal is for the family to learn a skill together.
🗺 Part 3 - Map of everyday life - The last bit is to map your weeks and figure out what we’ll be adding/keeping and what we’ll be consciously cutting out. For example: “Tackling Challenges Confidently” is one of your values, then picking a tricky puzzle to do each month is an easy way to bring that value into the everyday.
Whatever option you choose, the ideal would be to do it on a quarterly or semi-annual basis. Make it a family ritual by scheduling 4 sessions this year: Jan 1, Apr 1, July 1 and October 1 (or the weekends closest to them). Set aside 2-3 hours as a “Family Meeting” time and make it your own with your own agenda, traditions and fun.
🧰 The Tools
❓Thought starter questions:
How do we show our love and support for one another?
How do we treat others?
What do you like about our family?
Think about your favorite memories of our family time? What were we doing? What made that time special?
Can you think of other families whom you admire? Why?
How do you think others describe our family?