Do you have a vision for where you’re going?
In this episode, we talk about FOUR essential elements of a family culture that help to build a great family story – things like family mission/vision, rhythms, planned adventures and how to document and retell your stories.
Let’s start with some definitions:
What is culture? Webster’s Dictionary defines culture as “the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution or organization.” Andy Crouch adds to that definition in his book Culture Making as “meaning-making.” It’s a way that we make sense of the world through the activities we choose to live out daily. We’ve also heard it said that culture is what most people do most of the time.
It really just points to your values-
What is important to you?
What matters to you?
Whatever you hold as important is how you’ll act. When your culture or set of values is ingrained in you, it becomes like second nature, and it’s hard to change.
So what is a family culture? It’s when we have a specific set of clear values, a vision for a way of life, and a mission of living that out daily. Like Crouch says, family is one of the first places we find meaning in the world. Over time, it’s become one of our high priorities to BUILD IT INTENTIONALLY and to BUILD IT WELL.
When we’ve walked through building this for our own family and others, here are four main areas that we focus in on –
1. What’s your family goal/mission?
- This can look like writing out a list of goals or a mission statement
- When you look at the big picture, what kind of legacy do you want to cultivate in your family?
- What matters to you most?
- In our family, we have a “Family Creed” – we got this idea, years ago, from good friends of ours, the Payleitners. We’ll link ours here, as an example, too!
2. What are your regular, daily rhythms – what are you doing daily/weekly/annually?
- Daily rhythms
- Weekly schedules
- Seasonal Traditions
- Sunday Night Meetings
- Family Meetings
3. What are your planned adventures?
- Big trips, mission trips, annual trips – how will you make them memorable?
- New experience are BIG building blocks in memories!
- Milestone years + taking special trips with kids around those years
4. What are you going to do to remember or retell it?
- Document the little + big things
- THEN, Print SOMETHING every year – a good goal to start with is 100 photos or an album, every year. For us, we’ve been photographers for over 15 years, so not only is it part of our job to document stories, but we also try to do this for our own family with an annual photo album.
- Write down the top 5-10 stories you’d want their children and grandchildren to know
- Some backstory here: In Jewish families, from birth to about age 5, parents aimed to teach their children two things:
- First, they taught the Shema(sheMAH): Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one. And as for you, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength. Think of the Shema(SheMAH) as foundational to the life of the individual and the life of the family. It’s not only about me, there’s a much bigger story.
- The second big area of teaching for Jewish children was to focus on teaching their cultural stories. These would be the baseline stories of creation, Noah and the flood, Abraham going out to the promised land, Abraham & Isaac, etc. These stories helped children understand they were part of a bigger story—life was not just about themselves.
- We would say, along with that, we should gather and write down our own FAMILY STORIES
- Some backstory here: In Jewish families, from birth to about age 5, parents aimed to teach their children two things:
- Within the stories, we find the emotion—what it cost, the moments of heartbreak, the moments of joy—and within it we find our family values.
- Recording this is also a great option via audio/video
- Over the past 3 years, our kids went from knowing their 3 living great grandparents to all of them passing away, the end of an entire generation, the end of a lot of stories that we might never know.
- Before my grandpa passed in 2020, we sat down with a video camera and asked him a bunch of questions about his life, all the way back to his childhood. If you need a resource to guide you in this, we recommend the website StoryCorps.
- On a lighter note, we LOVE the 1-second everyday app for quick videos stories of simple, everyday moments
- Recording this is also a great option via audio/video
If this was helpful to you, and you’d like to have a written version of these four elements to creating your family culture and story, you can download it here – we will definitely be diving into some of these topics (like a weekly planning meeting and family adventures) into more detail in future episodes, so be sure to subscribe to hear more!
Resources Mentioned:
Sample Family Creed
Our Family Creed
StoryCorps
1 Second Everyday App
FREE DOWNLOAD: Four Questions to Create Your Family Culture
“The bigger the change we hope for, the longer we must be willing to invest, work for, and wait for it.”
― A quote from Andy Crouch, in his book, Culture Making
To connect, send us an email at podcast@rayandkelly.co
