[callout]This is a guest post from Alex Colόn. Alex is an entrepreneur, author, speaker, teacher, pastor, blogger and best of all, husband and father of four. He helps people by writing on personal and leadership development, vision, and time-sensitive productivity, related to the whole person and to the family on his blog, TheRebrandedLife.com. You can also find him on Facebook. If you want to guest post on my blog, check out my guest post guidelines and submit your post.[/callout]
Somebody once said that if you aim at nothing, you’ll hit it every time. As a minister, life coach, blogger, business owner, husband and father, I’ve learned of the importance of providing vision for success.
My wife and I have been happily and successfully married for almost 27 years. We like to combine our yearly anniversary celebration with a time to develop a yearly vision for our family. Today, I want to give you exactly the steps we take to do this.
Our vision development takes many forms. We craft our vision for each area that affects our family unit. This normally takes us an entire day – a fun and energizing time. Hard work? Yes – but the benefits outshine such investment of love.
This process doesn’t have to be rigid, but it is one that has worked well for us and for others. Here are the 4 Steps To Lead Your Family with Vision
1. Take a long weekend (minimum) to celebrate your anniversary.
Your marriage is one of the best and most important decisions you’ve made – so celebrate it the best you can. In addition, add some vision crafting spice to it. It’s a lot of fun.
2. Take Friday to celebrate.
Go out. Whatever both of you enjoy doing together just do it and enjoy yourselves. Your first day is not a good time to work on the vision – you need to “wind down” and enjoy each-other first.
3. Saturday — vision day.
There is much to consider during this process. I am working on a downloadable ebook for this process soon. For us prayer is the main source of discovering how to approach this process based on God’s will for our lives. In my book, “Discovering Your God-Given Vision” I point out the difference between a vision and a dream in that a vision is first birthed in prayer.
During this step, this is what we do and how we roll:
- Pray together. For days, prior to this weekend, we seek God for direction about this time so that we don’t pray in a hurry just to get our vision done.
- Begin with the marriage vision. We talk about every area of our marriage. We then prayerfully brainstorm about conferences, books, teaching materials, etc., that could help us in this area and begin to write things down.
- Focus on family values, and mission. What are we designed to do, demonstrate, and reveal as a family? Families are what make a country, a church and a community. So we develop strategies to enhance the quality of our family for strong leadership.
- Children’s vision. With four children, this takes a couple of hours. As good stewards of our children, one of the things we should do is be closely involved in their lives’ decisions. We value their personalities and their God-given design and we want to work within that perimeter
- Lunch break. Sometimes we bring snacks to the bedroom so we don’t have to interrupt the flow of our vision investment process since we enjoy it so much.
- Fashion your financial vision. Financial increase. Contemplate vacations and their costs. Write it down and plan for it. Savings, retirement, college funds, automobiles, etc. You get my point.
- Business vision. We plan our ministry vision and our business vision. Each one has its own separate vision, so we set goals accordingly.
End of day two. This planning is something you do once a year. Revisit it every so often to make sure your decisions in life is moving in sync with it.
Truth is, having a vision and setting goals for it will move you to living a life that is above average as a family and in your career as well.
4. Sunday celebration
Enjoy a lazy morning. Go for a nice brunch! Take it easy. Also deal with the feelings of being bummed out that vacation is almost over. If you can take more time for this vacation/vision planning, then go for it. I highly recommend it.
We have learned that this type of yearly preparation is something we can’t go without. I encourage you – celebrate your anniversary, invest in your family with a vision and you will enjoy the benefits. I promise you, it is a much easier and better way to successfully lead your family.
[reminder]What other tips can you give in providing vision for your family?[/reminder]