Values

Because I know there are many won­der­ful, gen­er­ous peo­ple around here—could I please get you to send some pos­i­tive ener­gy to stephanielynch? She has the flu and is also very depressed and lone­ly. She’s in Colorado.

Here at the Tech­no­Zoo, we’re tak­ing a break for stretch­ing and food. The girls are eat­ing in front of a TV, watch­ing an episode of Sailor Moon from the DVD that was one of G’s presents. We’ve had an incred­i­ble few hours of com­mu­ni­ca­tion as a fam­i­ly and I’m absolute­ly high on this energy.

In our most recent meet­ing with our fam­i­ly ther­a­pist, sam­bear and I were giv­en a home­work assign­ment of com­ing up with the “big pic­ture” stuff that Sam need­ed in order to make the lit­tle dai­ly tasks seem worth­while. In our fam­i­ly, he tends to be a lead­er­ship kind of per­son, focus­ing on vision. I’m more of a man­age­ment per­son, focus­ing on the details of Get­ting Shit Done. We talked about what we need, where the big pic­ture comes from, etc.

This morn­ing, we end­ed up talk­ing about values—what they are, how they deter­mine your goals and pri­or­i­ties, etc. That was­n’t real­ly planned, it just hap­pened. Then Sam asked every­body to split off for 15 min­utes and fig­ure out what val­ues are real­ly impor­tant to them as indi­vid­u­als, how those val­ues inter­re­late, what they mean, etc. Then we spent 15 min­utes goof­ing off, then came back togeth­er. We start­ed with G, the youngest fam­i­ly mem­ber. Each per­son talked about his or her list, explained what each word meant to him or her, and then answered ques­tions from oth­er fam­i­ly mem­bers. realpochac­co even did a Venn dia­gram. We took breaks, of course, to stretch and so on. It was a real­ly good relat­ing time, and I feel much clos­er to every­one now.

After this break, we’re going to try to for­mu­late a fam­i­ly mis­sion state­ment. No, really—not some piece of stu­pid cor­po­rate puffery designed to look good in an annu­al report. More of the Stephen Cov­ey Sev­en Habits of High­ly Effec­tive Fam­i­lies thing. Then we work down to the details, of course.

I’m sor­ta won­der­ing about mak­ing this a fam­i­ly tradition—an annu­al check-in on where we are, what’s impor­tant, and whether or not we’re real­ly on track with how we’re liv­ing in rela­tion to our values.