Frantic Family: Part 4

The last step we took in answering the Three Big Questions for a Frantic Family was to define our Rallying Cry.

The Rallying Cry is a family's current top priority. When a family gives a second of thought to this, it is pretty easy to know what one thing needs the most attention at the time. This Rallying Cry is something that will take between two and six months to tackle. In the book, one family identifies their top priority as getting the husband/father healthy. Another decides to get serious about a house remodel. For Kent and me, we knew ours is to put our finances in order.

Once the Rallying Cry is defined, a family decides what four or five things need to happen to accomplish that priority. We attached a timeline to ours because one step generally feeds into the next. However, if we had decided that our family needed more quality time together, we could make time for each other without deadlines. (Note: The Rallying Cry can focus on a Standard Objective, although it doesn't have to.)


To achieve our Rallying Cry of Putting Finances in Order, we defined the following points:
Update our Books by Oct. 15--this means categorizing all receipts in Quicken and balancing all account statements
Increase our Income by Nov. 1--this step stands on its own, but it was very helpful to have a deadline for it
Establish a Budget by Dec. 1
Create a System for Handling Bills and Mail by Dec. 31--so we don't get overwhelmed and lose track of our financial health again
Clean the Office by 2/28--this long-term deadline may sound silly to you, but the whole thing still sounds daunting to me because we have to Purge All Old Paperwork and Create a Working Filing System

(Another note: If you have a system for mail/bills or filing that works great, I would love your input.)

I have loved having a Rallying Cry. For years I've muddled through with a huge to-do list. The only items that ever get done are the ones with looming deadlines that stress me out. With no deadlines on family finances, home repairs, cleaning, etc., I get very little accomplished on any of those things and I felt guilty about my snail's-pace progress. The Rallying Cry has given me permission to neglect the rest of my deadline-less to-do list (I love hyphens!) and has focused me on the finances. When I have 20 minutes to kill, I don't wander around trying to sort mail and pick up the family room and load the dishwasher and water the roses. I know that time is now dedicated to entering receipts in Quicken. And we are making progress! The Oct. 15 deadline has me a little stressed this week, but I think it will propel me to get our books caught up and ready to serve our financial decisions again. Go finances! Yeah!!

Frantic Family: Part 3

It's about time to finish this series of posts. I suppose my inability to find computer time for this demonstrates the franticicity of my life. (Yes, I know the word is supposed to be "franticness", but I like my coined word better. Even the sound of it is frantic!)

After we came up with our family's statement, we listed those things that must be underlying to all we do. In other words, the things that are are necessary for our family to be on the right course. When those things are neglected, we experience problems. These objectives are based on our values, and they tended to be the things that Kent and I both identified as necessary on an individual basis and overall for the family. The most important part of this step was agreeing on what these words mean. The vocabulary doesn't perfectly portray what we are getting at, but after discussing these objectives, Kent and I know what they mean and we can communicate their meaning to our children. The point is to have categories of family health that we can look at objectively on a weekly basis to determine if we are getting off track.


We call this list our "Standard Objectives". Here are ours.
Discipleship
Individual Well-Being (of every family member)
Maintaining our Household--we broke this category into Finances and physical Home Maintenance (cleaning, repairs, etc.)
Education--with subcategories for formal Schooling and other Individual Pursuits
Relationships with Others--we consider this on several levels: Date Nights (for spouses and parent/child), Family Time for all seven of us, and time with Extended Family and Friends

Your own list might include descriptions or not. Kent likes to think of these items as a dashboard. Just as the dashboard tells a driver if the oil is low or the engine needs to be checked or the radiator is not cooling--all things that could spell disaster for the whole automobile--our standard objectives give us critical points to look at that indicate how well our family is running according to what is most important overall.

Frantic Family: Part 2

When I started this series of posts, I didn't intend to drag it out over the course of a few weeks. I guess prioritizing the elements of our frantic life has pushed blogging down a few notches. It's good that life is a lot less frantic at five in the morning so I can send some thoughts out to the world. (That's an early morning yawn, not my operetta impression.)

After reading the book, Kent and I sat down for several conversations to dissect those things that make our family unique and to identify the values we hold. We used a couple of date nights to this purpose. One date was to Kent's office where we used the conference room's white board to draft some lists. Another night found us in the Cafe Rio--do I have your attention now, Christy?--parking lot where we hashed out value statements over take out. Talking and writing together was nice.

Kent added a first step to Patrick Lencioni's process. He (Kent) suggested that we could identify our family's unique qualities by looking at those things that give him and me energy. So we began some lists, which became fuel for thought and observance about me as a person. I'll include my other thoughts on that subject in a sequel post titled "What I Have Learned About Myself".

Kent had three lists for himself: "Who I Am" (finder of information, humorous, night person, etc.); "What Gives Me Energy" (reading, serving, work projects, etc.); and "What Sucks Away Energy" (half-hearted effort, lack of down time, etc.). In compiling my list of "What Gives Me Energy", I felt complete enough to not need the other two lists. Of the 26 items I listed, I was surprised how deeply important some of the items were to me, to the point that tears came to my eyes, for example, when I thought about how much I need date nights and girls' nights out of the house. Following are other items on my energy-giving list that initially surprised me by showing up there:

-Clean stand-up comedy
-Bike riding
-Personal devotional time
-Having meaningful discussions
-Editing the written word (mine or others')
-Attending meetings (except sales pitch meetings)
-Shooting things (I don't do this often, but I do like aiming a laser gun, arrow, or Airsoft rifle at a non-living target)
-Eating meals that I didn't have to prepare
-Pursuing passing interests (photography, inventions, and so forth)

I truly enjoyed putting this list together for its own merits as well as the aim to recognize traits and values that our family holds. I'll come back to that first thought in my sequel post.

Next, we put together a list that represents our family currently. We left aspirations out of the list and tried to get a snapshot of the family we really are with all the constraints we face. Here is a sampling:

-We aren't helicopter parents.
-We don't watch much TV.
-We all work in our garden.
-We like game nights and having friends over.
-We volunteer in the school, community, and Church.
-We read to our kids at night.
-Kent resents the pets.
-We have holiday traditions.
-We eat dinners together.
-Our kids take piano lessons.
-We are entrepreneurial.

Kent and I merged all the lists to identify those things that make our family unique. We considered involving the children in this process, but as we talked about our observations of the children's values, we recognized that our values represent pretty well what they would contribute. This is probably partly because they are young and have not developed their identities much, and partly because as their parents, we model our values and they incorporate them into their own lives. We came up with four stand-out values and three others that are important to us and put them all together in the following statement:

"In our family we each work to better the household, and we like to play together. Our home is open to friends and family, and we deeply value intimate relationships. We strive to be grateful and to serve others. We pursue our passions and interests. We take care of our minds, bodies, and spirits; we make time for self-renewal. We value humor, even when it gets us into trouble!"

In his book, The Three Big Questions for a Frantic Family, Lencioni encourages writing a statement so a family will have a basis for making decisions and so we won't try to be all things to all people. You can see more examples of family statements here.


To keep these values at the forefront, Kent and I hung a whiteboard in our kitchen so all family members will see it frequently. We wrote our statement at the top, and then moved on to the other two steps in the process...which I would really like to blog about now, but reality will probably postpone that by several days. We asked each of our children if they thought the statement applied to us well, and they nonchalantly agreed with a shrug, or a "Sure". (I'm glad we didn't waste their time or ours involving them in our processing conversations!)

Frantic Family: Part 1

Kent and I recently read "The Three Big Questions for a Frantic Family" by Patrick Lencioni. The author uses a fable to demonstrate how most Americans "wing it" with their family life. Literal tears welled up in my eyes as I empathized with the main character, a mother who was barely balancing all the demands of running her family: volunteering at school, chauffeuring children to extracurricular activities, keeping active in their faith and church, hosting get-togethers with friends, maintaining a semi-clean house, and on and on. I felt her stress because it described so much my own feeling of barely keeping up with life. Frantic is the perfect word for how I've felt for at least five years. The husband in the fable, who owns a consulting firm, mentions that if his clients ran their businesses the way he and she ran their family, those clients would quickly be out of business. The story develops from there and gives the protagonist and the reader some tools for bringing clarity and purpose to the running of any family.

(Side note about the book. Kent loved it. I could have done without the fable and skipped right to the summary at the end where the author leaves the story and gives real-life examples of families who have practiced the points of the book. Either way, it opened a conversation for Kent and me and as a result, I think we'll make some great progress as a family.)

I have a degree in business management, so the idea of running a family the way a manager would run a business makes a lot of sense to me. In fact, I'm surprised it didn't dawn on me earlier. For the past few years, I've embraced the idea that motherhood is my full-time job right now and I answer to my Father in Heaven as my "boss". I've taken parenting courses and tried various job charts, reward systems, etc. to run my household as a good "employee" would. However, this book helped me shift my paradigm slightly. I am not an employee. I am the co-owner, with Kent, of this business of running a family. Heavenly Father is a stock holder in our company (though the parallel falls apart a little there). Basically, He wants me and Kent to be successful in running our family because the "dividends" that come back to Him are our righteous children and those whose lives they will affect for good.

The book also gave me permission to not be a perfect parent and leader of this family. Part of the process outlined in the book is to set goals toward strengthening one familial weakness at a time. Throughout our marriage as I've looked at all the things that we could do better at (more time with our children, organized finances, a finished landscape, decluttered house, etc.), I never know where to start. I chip away at each problem area simultaneously, but never really conquer any of them. I now feel free to let some weak points wait while our family defines and tackles whatever one weakness is taking the biggest toll at the time. The strategy doesn't have to be perfect. We just need a strategy.

Stay tuned... I'll cover this topic more over several posts (with the label "Frantic Family") and let you know our experiences going through the process and fixing our first weakest point. Kent knew this book would be helpful, so he purchased an extra copy to loan out. Let me know if you'd like to be on the "waiting list". (It's already on loan to one family and another is in line. But the wait should be short because it's a very quick read.)