Family Values - How To Be a Great Parent

Every home needs family values and a clear mission. Sadly, most parents know their company’s vision-mission statement more than their own. If the family does not have a proper agreement on these things, setting core values and building a vision board is a real challenge. And without them, both parents and children will have a hard time living under one household in harmony.

Join Julia and Travis Gentry as they talk about family values. Learn how to construct a mission-vision statement at home to strengthen your bond and set an example for other families. Discover how to use a vision board to set your goals, keep your core values aligned, and journeying together in life with a clear purpose.

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Family Values – How To Be a Great Parent

Welcome back to the show.

We’re glad that you’re with us.

We’re going to dive into family, family values, mission, and vision. Last time, we talked about mastering your mind. This is an offshoot from last time.

I think that it’s important. The reason that we wanted to give a whole segment on this is again, not because Travis and I have this figured out and we’re the picture-perfect Instagram family who you should subscribe to us because we know all the right things to say. We’re willing to get down and dirty and talk about how we’re doing it, what’s working and not working, and how we’ve taken so much of these concepts that we talk about every single episode in the show and in the book, how we’ve incorporated it into our family unit. I think these topics, people know about mission for a business or vision in the Bible or values you see when you walk into a company and they’re on the wall, and we have all of these things in certain areas of life, but we don’t have them. What I think is one of the most important areas of life, which is family.

That’s what I was thinking about when I was working out. Whether you’re self-employed, you have a big business or you work for a company, there is a mission and vision, and you probably know that better than your own family’s mission. Quite frankly, most people probably don’t have one.

A lot of people know their company's mission more than their own family's mission. Click To Tweet

If you’re reading this right now going, “That’s me,” that’s probably 99.9% of families. We are not here to shame you or guilt you. We’re here to talk about it. You’re right. If you think about mission and values within a company, in theory, if they’re doing it the correct way, it’s the guiding decision-making markers for how a company produces and executes their product and services to the people around them.

If we ever do it, it’s the last thing we do as a family. We wonder why, statistically, 50% of people are getting divorced. At the eight-year mark within marriages, that’s when we start to see it shift the most. It is because they have no idea who they are as a family, what they value as a family, or what brought them together in the first place. What’s going to keep them together during the hard moments? That’s probably why we’re sitting at staggering statistics around the family unit.

If you stop and think about that, it’s crazy how much you know about someone else’s vision and mission than having your own. If you’re not married, you don’t have kids, you still can have your own. You write it down and it evolves and changes. We’ve been married for many years. We have five kids and we’ve had successes and failures as being self-employed and having little businesses. It evolves. It changes. Don’t get fixated on, “This is it forever.” I could also see people sitting down to write this and making it more than it needs to be right now.

Just start. What is your mission for your life? What are your values? They’ll change and evolve, and you’ll add and you’ll tweak them because that’s what we’ve done over the years too. That’s why I want to plant the seed too. If you don’t have one, like Julia said, you’re probably 99% of people out there that don’t have mission, vision, and values for your life or your family. Take it like slowly and start. If you have no idea where to start, go to Google or YouTube. I’m sure there’s a video and/or you’re listening to the right podcast.

I’m going to say this. Don’t google yet. I think we’re going to do this real time because we will stand before you as an example to say we have a mission for our family and we have values for our family. How we got there and how we thought about it looked very different. Travis and I have not rehearsed this. There’s no course that you can buy at the end of this for us to tell you exactly how to get your values.

Maybe we could do a download or something to give you.

We are going to show you ours. We’re going to give you examples of how ours is. We’re going to talk tactics. We’re going to do all of those things with you. We want you to know that this is not some sales pitch for a course. That’s why we’re doing this. It’s because we want to meet you where you’re at and to go, logistically speaking, this makes all the sense in the world for businesses to do. This is what they’re built upon. This is how they sustain the hard times. This is how they grow in these amazing times. Yet, we’re probably not doing it within our family.

If I were to toot our horn for a minute, because for those of you who are reading that have never heard our show, and you’re like, “Who’s Travis and Julia? Are they egocentric?” No. I want you to know that we have had so many failures, setbacks, learning experiences. We have had some wins. We have had some good goes and some successes. The thing that I will say from the bottom of my heart is that I feel like we have done incredibly well and I am the most proud of is the way that we do marriage and family. With that being said, that’s why I want to do this show. It’s not because we’re the best at all of the things. I will say this is one of those lanes that we have done well.

Continue to define and redefine. Let’s talk about ours.

I’m going to paint the picture of my mental space too. I have been doing this for many years now with companies too. Mission, values, vision, conviction. Here I’ve been doing this and it wasn’t until a few years ago maybe, that we were like, “We don’t have this for our family either.” That was that moment for us that we were like, “We don’t have this either.”

How I went into this is the same way that I did with all the companies. The mission statement tells the world what you do. Your vision statement tells the world why you do it, and your values tell you how you do it. Mission is tactical. It tells about the products and offerings and services that you produce. The vision is your why. It’s your conviction, it’s your fire. It’s the reason that you get out of bed, whether the public knows it or not. The values are the pieces on the days you’re like, “I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know the mindset. I don’t know how to keep it fresh. I don’t know how to keep it real. I don’t know how to state true.” Those are the keys to tell you how to do it.

In my mind as a family, when you and I went to go do this, I went, “What are we doing? What do we want to bring to this world that nobody else can bring?” I went to the place of our vision of why. Why are we going to do this? Why is this important to us? I then went to the place of how are we going to do this so our soul feels alive, so we are totally connected, so the world gets the best version of us? What are the things that feed our soul that when we do it, we’re alive and on? When we don’t do them, we’re depressed and unmotivated and not into it.

We talked about this.

We were tested on the same lesson at 5:00 AM.

It’s a checks and balance. It’s consciously living where most of the time for me, in looking out at the world and people, you start to do the same things day in and week out, and week out and month out. You look back and there’s no real progression or there’s no growth. There was no like, “Am I living the life that I want to live?”

I think for me it’s important. We have these posters that are framed, and we have six of them at the top of our stairs. We see them every day. It’s not something we wrote down and put in a notebook and then never look at it again. They’re on our wall that we see every day. Knowing when I start to feel a certain way, it’s probably because I’m not living one of our values.

That is okay. I love that you’re saying if we’re continuing to define what all of this is that the mission, vision, and values are your choice to live consciously. It’s going to be your checks and balance. It’s going to support you in progression and growth. It’s going to ensure a pattern interrupt. Ultimately, it’s going to be the ticket to keep you alive. Having a mission, vision, and values as people is the thing that keeps us going. It’s the heart. It keeps us motivated when we don’t feel it. It’s the energy.

Having a mission, a vision, and values is your ticket to keep you alive. Click To Tweet

It gives you hope for the day and the week and the year to keep moving forward.

It’s even so tactical that, in theory, it’s not like, “It’s here to make you feel good.” No, it’s here to make you be good. In theory, it’s going to give you direction on how to make decisions moving forward. Not what everybody else does, not what your neighbor does. Not how Instagram says you should do it. It’s how us, the Gentry family, approach conflict, relationships, money, food. It’s how we decided to live our lives consciously.

To your point, it’s a practice of you’re never there and you get it. It’s a constant circling of these things. When you’re off, you’re probably not living in them. When you feel “on,” you’re probably right on target, which was an example of like, “I think I’m a little off.” If we looked at all of our values, yeah, you are. We’re not on point with some of our main core values.

We have six. It’s faith, creativity, ownership, joy, adventure, and love.

These are values. If you’re like, “What are all these?” those are our actual core values as a family.

Under those values we came up, what does that mean to us? Love could mean something different to you than it does for us and our family. That’s how we live that out. It’s like adventure. That’s what adventure represents to us and our family. Adventure in a business setting or in a different context could mean something totally different.

I think that this is important. We would say, “We all know what adventure means.” No. Travis and I would even go, “We both love adventure.”

Our adventures are a little different. Julia’s adventure is going within an hour of our house. My adventure is potentially jumping in the car and driving for hours or jumping on an airplane.

Travis’ adventure is having no plan. Mine is we need a plan.

“Where are we going? What time are we getting there?”

What’s also interesting is that when we think of adventure, like for me going to Florida and doing the Dare to Dream conference and building something new within work, that’s my adventure. I love that. I could build and build within the business. That is my adventure. For you, you like working. I’m not saying that you don’t adventure in your business. You do, but your adventure is literally the world, going to a different mountaintop and going to a different city and trying different food.

This was important to us because, for a long time, we were even saying the same word. We know that adventure is important to us as a family, but your definition and my definition were so different that I could come back from a work trip and be like, “Yes, I’m on fire.” Travis is like, “That was awesome,” but it wasn’t the adventure that you needed.

I didn’t go, first of all. The adventure was I stayed home with our 3 out of 5 kids.

Let’s say the trips that we have gone on together, when we come back, if we’re both fueled by the experience, generally, we’re also fueled for different reasons.

If we both had gone on that trip hypothetically, the awesome trip and experience that you had, if I were to went, it would have looked different because I would’ve wanted to try new things and go experience like where we’re at. Yours is you get fulfilled by going somewhere and making an impact.

Same word, but different interpretation of that word. This is our definition of adventure. We believe you don’t always need a plan, just go, and go often. Life is short and God’s beauty is in everything. Taste and see that he is good. We believe in fully experiencing this life by trying new things, taking risks, making a few mistakes so we can learn a few lessons and to let his creation fill our soul. It’s worth the return on investment. Here’s why we put that in there. It could be easy for us not to take adventures and not to go do new things and not to, “What about the money and what about the finances and what about this and what about that?” and all the things that we all do as people?

We’re going to talk ourselves out of our core values. I’m going to talk myself out of love because I feel like I could be rejected. I’m going to talk myself out of faith because I feel like God has forgotten me. We will without recognizing A) We have a value, but then B) We won’t even realize that we’re going to talk ourselves out of them because they’re hard to do.

We have this in here that adventure for us is an investment, and it’s worth the return on investment because we know what it does to our mind, body, and soul. We also know, for you and I, that it’s part of what God’s created us to do because it’s infused in our story. Part of our story has been built on every single time we’ve been willing to go on an adventure. Sell everything, travel in an RV, travel all the country with an Airbnb. That was all part of our adventure. This took some time and some thought, but it was so important because those moments that we told ourselves that we don’t have the time or the money to go on adventure, we go, “We can’t not.”

Even as we’re saying this, and we had a conversation at 5:30 in the morning because I’ve been feeling off. Now looking at this and revisiting it again and as we’re talking about it, it’s like if I don’t go on an adventure, if I don’t disconnect, because I’ve been working probably 5:00-ish every single morning and working a lot throughout the day.

I’m excited about it and I’m learning a ton, but I also need to not control it. That’s where I start to feel where I’m controlling it and trying to make everything happen in my own power as opposed to saying, “God, I put in the work. Faith without work is dead. I’m putting in the work. Now, it’s up to you.” I need to disconnect, get full, fuel my soul. I experience things when I’m on adventures. I’m typically outside or on a hike or doing something.

If I don’t disconnect and allow myself to hear God and hear myself and not be so caught up in what I’m doing, that’s when the best opportunities and breakthroughs happen for me. Now, as we’re talking about this, if I don’t, it’s going to set me back and/or us back if I don’t go on an adventure and fill up again to come back just like you did with your work. You came back on fire and I have been a little depleted. It’s now looking at it and saying, “I need to go do this for myself and for my family.”

I think what’s so good is that as parents it could be easy for all of us to go, “I don’t go on an adventure,” or whatever the value is. “I don’t do this because my kids need me or my family needs me.” It’s so easy to play that card. What I would like to propose to all of us is that what our world and what our kids don’t need is one more parent putting their dreams on the shelf of life.

Our kids need our souls alive. Our spouses need our souls alive. We need our souls alive. The world needs our souls alive. This isn’t the cheap like, “I just need another drink or I need to disconnect.” No. I’m talking about those things that are connected to the things that God has put on the inside of us to bring to the world. That’s what our kids need.

It’s easy as parents I think, to fall into that guilt or the shame pattern and not have something to point to. When we go on an adventure, we say to our kids, “Mommy and daddy are doing this.” You and I teach like this. We go, “We believe that adventure is important.” We start to show them, “Here’s what adventure looks like to you guys. Here’s what adventure looks like to daddy.” It’s the principle that we start coaching our kids through good days and bad days, how we make decisions and how we think about things. We’re not like, “Here goes daddy again on one more trip.” No. That’s where daddy lives into a core value we have as a family.

As I said at the beginning, if you don’t have a family, if you’re not married, this is a great practice for guiding and a standard of your life. When you do meet someone, that’s something that you guys can talk about and say like, “Here’s what’s important to me. Here are a few words that I’ve come up with and here’s what it means to me.” You don’t want to get into a relationship or a marriage and you can’t get on the same page.

Adventure means we both like adventure. It just means something. Now we both have a clear understanding of what that means for us. I think it’s important when you’re getting into a relationship. We got into a relationship and we figured it out through there. You can do that as well. It doesn’t matter where you’re at. It’s so important and crucial to have something and definitions behind words to understand so your spouse and/or your kids know what you’re doing. Joy is one of them and love is one of, but what does that mean? How do you know that I’m joyful in love?

For those of you who are tactically reading this going, “I get that, but where did you start?” where we started was also this idea of the mission. Our mission is we believe in a world where everything is possible and we live by example because we know who we are because we know whose we are. That is our mission.

Our greatest product and services that we bring to the world as a family is that we believe that anything is possible and we believe in living by example. That’s it. That is our core message for ourselves and our kids. When Malachi comes home and goes, “Yeah, but nobody else was doing it,” or Aslan says, “Yeah, but my friends were doing this and I didn’t know if I should do that.” We continue to point back to that’s not your job to look like everybody else.

Your job is to live by example, which means you might look different, talk differently, go in a different direction, or you might approach it differently. That is your mission. It’s the tool that we have to correct our kids and remind them of who they are. We remind them who are you and whose are you? It’s a constant pointing back to this is an alignment with God’s word and what he says about you.

At some level, when they grow and they go make choices for their own, my hope is that they’re continuing to filter it back through who am I and whose am I? When I know who I am and I know whose I am, that anything is possible the last I checked with God. He’s called me to live by example. It’s supposed to look different.

I believe in God and so I’m supposed to make the world a better place. That’s all I got with parenting. The rest is technique and learning your kids. I feel like that has been so huge for me as a parent because when I don’t know what else to say, it’s the only thing I can say. That’s what a mission statement would sound like. It is the thing that you as a family or you, as an individual would bring to the world that no one else can bring.

If I keep going, I’m going to preach for a second, then it tells, “Why are we going to do this?” because our mission tells us what we do. Our vision tells us why. Our vision is found in the book of Matthew. It’s from the passion translation. It says in Matthew 6:9, the disciples are talking to Jesus and they’re like, “How do we pray?” In theory, what Jesus is saying is to pray at all times on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests. The disciples say, “Good, then why don’t you teach us how we’re supposed to pray?”

This is what Jesus says. He says, “Pray like this. Our Father dwelling in heaven the realms, may the glory of your name be the center on which our lives turn. Manifest your kingdom realm and cause your every purpose to be fulfilled on Earth as it is fulfilled in heaven.” That’s our why as a family. At some level, we either believe it or we don’t that we are here to have the glory of his name be the center on which our lives turn, that we could manifest heaven on earth. That we could do something great while we’re here on this side of heaven. That’s our why.

That’s what helps us lead the charge that anything is possible. Why? It’s because that’s our job. We should live by example. Why? It’s because that’s our job. Our why and our fire is this belief and then our values of faith, creativity, joy, adventure, love, ownership is how we do that. I’m done preaching. Back to your early point in the beginning, someone sitting there going, “How in the world am I supposed to do that?”

That was two years in the making of us linking some of these pieces and sitting with the words and digging deep and asking ourselves the questions like, “What are we as a family,” and “What does fill our soul? What is important to us to teach our kids? How do we want to make our decisions?” This was over the course of a few years of sitting, processing, praying, watching and seeking. There it is for you to go. If you’re going to land somewhere, that’s where you could land.

You guys can come up with words. If you’re in a relationship and you’re married, you can come up words separately or you can come up with do a whiteboard session and write down all the words that mean something to both of you. A process of elimination of like, “Do a few of those words mean something similar?” From there, you narrow them down and then put a definition. We have ours on adventure and we had that for each of them. You come up with that for each of those words so you understand what those words mean to each of you.

It is a process. It’s not something that you get done in a couple of hours. I would suggest that you do it. You revisit it a few times and then once it resonates with you and/or both of you, then put them up somewhere that you see them on your mirror, or like what we did, we printed them out and we framed them. We see them constantly and it’s a checks and balance of are we living the vision and mission. If we were to die tomorrow, would our kids or would the world around me potentially look at those words and say, “Yes. Those are words that described how they lived.”

That’s so good and I think on point. For those of you who would take us up on this challenge, let’s give them a couple of prompts or questions to think about to unpack this. First and foremost, I will say Travis and I are guilty of this too. When we first started, we had to put this as a meeting on our calendar. It wasn’t like, “As a family, just organically, it’ll come and we’ll all know.” We had to set aside time that felt non-efficient. This isn’t making his money and I could be doing all the things that we could be doing.

First and foremost, you have to make time to do this or it won’t come to find you because it’s not the urgent things. That was number one. I love that you’re saying that, so when you sit down together, here’s a couple of questions, in no particular order, but that could serve you. Write it down. I think that the first one is it’s the end of your life. We’re at the family funeral. People are getting up on stage and saying, “This family represented these things to me.” What would you want people to say? If people said, “I love this family because they bring out the best in me and blank,” what would those blanks be? What do you want the world to say about you and your family that is most important? I think that’s one place to start.

Your family's mission is what you want the world to say about you and your family. That is the most important thing. Click To Tweet

I think another is, to your point, you said earlier, I notice when I’m off. What’s lacking when I’m off? Those days that I’m not doing well or I don’t feel like the best version of me. Why? In theory, I know you well enough to know I would say you’re probably not doing adventure. You’re probably not walking fully in faith and you’re probably not tapped into your joy zone. The same thing for me. I’m probably controlling. I’m not loving. I’m probably bored. I’m not creating and I’m probably blaming somebody else for not doing what I want. I’m not taking ownership and leading. It’s like you go first. If you look at even those ones, I know when I’m off. I’m not doing one of those, but I have to sit with the question. When I’m off, what’s not happening and when I’m “on,” I’m at my best, what’s going on at a deeper level?

I think we’ve talked about those in the past. I don’t believe in balance. I think that there are times in your life, it could be days, weeks, or months that your attention and your energy go into something. This is not also like, “For this week, if I don’t go on an adventure, I need to go on an adventure.” No. “I’ve been working diligently for a few months now. I need to disconnect.” I think it also puts that in perspective of where you’re at. If you’re pursuing something and you have to keep digging deep and go through it. Have a waypoint or understanding of like, “When I get here, here’s what brings me life again and I need to do that. I need to schedule it.”

I think what’s interesting that I found is that I would notice that if we even approached how we do everything from this place, even going, “How could I take my kid to parkour for the seventeenth time this week in an adventurous way?” For me, “Here I am having to cook dinner one more time.” If I went, “How do I get creative with this?” I did that after our conversation. I was like, “Here we go again. We’re going to do Friday and we’re going to do dinner, and then we’re going to go to bed and we’re going to brush teeth, all these things.” I was like, “No.” That’s when I was like, “Can we do vision boards tonight? Can we do a movie night and do the popcorn and put out beds? Can we make this more fun tonight?”

Why? It’s because I don’t want to create when I get there. I want to bring creativity into my everyday mundane routine tasks. This means that I’m going to schedule things, and I’m going to have time to do all of these things. We’re going to have trips that we go on that are planned. The question that I think some of us overlook is, “How do I bring this into my everyday life and make sure that anything could be an adventure and everything could come from a place of faith?” It’s a little bit more about how do we make this as micro as possible?

I think you brought up a good point because we’ve been talking about it. We’ve had vision boards in the past and we accomplished, I think, everything on those vision boards. We haven’t done any for quite some time. We’ve been talking about it and so now it’s taking this, as you said, that the vision board is also something alongside the mission and values of like little waypoints of faith.

What am I doing within my faith that I can put on a vision board to know that I’m accomplishing it? Is it serving? Is it giving adventure? What is that? Where do I want to go? Where do I want to experience creativity? What am I that fills my soul? How am I being creative? As you said, as opposed to doing the same five dinners that we’ve done in and week out, how do we mix it up?

By the way, if anyone wants to send me better recipes, I would love you for that. I need a pattern interruption. If you’re reading and you’re like, “I’ve got good recipes,” please ping me. I think you’re right. The vision board is basically saying, “This is what adventure looks like. This is what faith looks like. This is what love looks like.” It’s not just a vision board to have one more thing. It’s to represent a visual, tangible result of what a value would look like in action.

I think to us there, again, defining what a vision board is, it’s not just stuff. It is stuff. There are certain things that, yeah, I want that, but it’s also experiences. It’s also about what am I doing for the world around me? Within my faith, am I serving, am I giving a certain amount? What am I doing that also fills my soul that is not for me?

That’s what I think if we’re talking about a vision board. You and I say this all the time. A lot of times, we’re not getting the benefit of the tools that are out there because we have to unlearn what we think about it. Someone already has a preconceived notion or bias around vision boards. Those are for people who dream but do nothing. I’ve had a vision board and I never stick with it.

Here’s what a vision board. I’d like to invite you into unlearning what you think that you don’t know. A vision board should have not only what you want to have but what you want to do, who you want to be and what you want to give. To do, to be, to have to give. Those are all areas as people that speaks to our safety, security, and stability. It speaks to our love and belonging. It speaks to our success and to our ability to give more than we oftentimes receive. It’s a call to greatness in our life. We’re looking at it. Most of us are like, “What’s one more thing I want to have?” That’s a piece of the pie of a vision board, but it’s not the whole point.

Just piggybacking on that. Money is a tool. If you want something and you need to make more money, you have to increase your value to the world around you to get paid more. You are doing something for other people around you to get that thing that you want. As you said, it’s so important. Who are you going to become to make more, to sustain more? You’re obviously doing something that people see value in and they’re giving you money for that thing, which then, in turn, you can buy the stuff or the thing that you want.

If you want to make more money, you must increase your value to the world around you. Click To Tweet

The good news is our next episode is all around financial resiliency and unlearning all the patterns that aren’t serving you about money. Everything that Travis is saying is spot on, and we might lose ourselves there if we keep going. Stay tuned for the next episode because I think that’s incredibly on point. Money isn’t what we think it is, which is why we’re not getting more of it.

Most of the time, you’re chasing money and it’s running away from you. There’s probably a reason why.

You can see a visual. I feel like if you look outside right now, people running down the street, chasing money and that’s not how it works. The money is being attracted to the people that know what it is that we’re going to tell you in our next episode that you need to know. Going back to the vision board, so that’s where we’ll land.

In theory, when you embark on this journey as a family or as an individual looking to have a family or starting to forge these relationships, our encouragement is that when it’s “done,” the goal would be to have a mission that tells you what you bring to the world. A vision that tells you why, values that tell you how, and a vision board that puts it into a visual image, so you know what it looks like when it’s happening, when it’s manifested. There is no perfect way to do this.

It’s just doing it. It’s getting started and rinsing and repeating and revising it as needed. When you start to go, “That value is not instructing me today on how to make this decision,” then it probably means you forgot one. I want to say we didn’t have ownership for a while and we were looking at all of these other places. Just take ownership. We don’t care if you make a mistake or you fail. Just take ownership. It was like, “That’s a value that we had forgotten.”

It comes back to it’s my fault for not going on an adventure. I have to take ownership. No, I can’t blame anybody else. If I start to go down the path of, “I can’t do this,” and feeling this way, at the end of the day, it’s my fault. I need to take ownership of it and say, “I’m feeling this way. Why am I feeling this way?” We’ve talked about it in the past. Typically it’s the thing under the thing. I’m not living true to some of these other values, so I need to live true to the value that is important to me too, which is ownership. I need to take ownership of, “I need an adventure. I need to go fill my soul so I can come back and be joyful and live in love and be creative.”

That value has been so huge for me since knowing you. I think that you’ve always been that voice. My shame was so large and in charge for so long, I was petrified of making mistakes. I was petrified of failing because of the levels of rejection that I’ve experienced. That value has given me space to make mistakes and to fail and to own it with so much grace. It’s so interesting because you have so brought that value to our family and I didn’t know that world. I grew what you hid the mistakes or the failures because there was so much fear. Our definition has been so healing for me and instructional as I parent our kids because now I’m like, “You’re allowed to make mistakes. You’re even going to fail. Just be real with it.”

We say that to Malachi all the time, “You are allowed to make a mistake. You are not allowed to lie because when you own your mistake, that’s a value. When you lie, you’re not taking ownership. We will stand with you if you make mistakes and fail. We can’t stand with you if you lie.” That’s one more example of how a value can bring so much healing in your family and connection in your family because it allows me to be fully seen.

We could probably do an episode specifically on each of our values because it is deeper than that. Ownership is if you can’t take ownership for something that you did, you can’t learn. If you always put the blame on other people, there’s no space for you to say, “Where did I fall short?” Could it be other people or circumstances? Yes. At the same time, you were involved. There’s a piece of it that you have to take ownership of that, learn from it and grow from it. That’s what you’re talking about with Malachi.

What I would say is join our Facebook community, and we will put a picture of each of our value and our mission in the Facebook group so you can see what ours are. That’s what we do all the time. Who has what we want? Who is doing something that is a good idea that we can maybe emulate and then you come up with your own? This will give you a good idea of what we’ve come up with.

Join the Facebook community, and we’ll put those pictures in there and you can see them and then ask some questions. We’ve talked about it before with other people in the community. Maybe they have some different thoughts and ideas specifically on how to help you think about this if you’re struggling.

That Facebook group is called Dream Together. I will say that I have a couple of companies and families that have done this because this is what I teach. I will have them post their examples of their values so you can get more ideas and try to borrow ours until you have your own. I think that’s great. Here’s to you and your family. Wherever you are in your journey, whether you’re single, getting ready to tackle your marriage or you are already married or with kids, or wherever you’re at, we hope that this meets you where you’re at, and gives you hope to realize that you do have a mission, vision, and you do have values as a family.

Until next time, dream on.