Wednesday, November 5, 2008

Frantic Family?

Great new book by Patrick Lencioni.

The Three Big Questions for a Frantic Family addresses the chaos that reigns in many of our homes and how we can tame it using some of the same strategies designed to create healthy companies.

I just got off an interview with Patrick and Daniel Harkavy with Building Champions and I wanted to share some of the stuff that Patrick talked about.

In assessing his life he realized that to be authentic, he needed to make sure that he gave as much thought, attention and intentionality into building and maintaining his family as he did all his endeavors. That's challenging because most of us are so intentional with other areas of our lives but leave our family and our parenting to chance because we think we can. Ultimately, I guess, we really can. We can go on auto-pilot with our marriages and our parenting if we want to. I certainly hope that's not the choice we make, but it is an option.

The better option, I believe is to bring intentionality and meaning to how I lead my family.

I thought this was also a very powerful statement. "Long term, sustainable success for most business leaders means that they have to have a great foundation at home." I work with leaders and pastors every day. It's amazing to me how much thought and passion these men and women put into their ministries and their businesses but when asked about their family or their marriage, they don't have a strong plan if one at all. The one interesting thing I heard Patrick say is that he believes this has been the "little black secret" of the business community. He's had an incredible outpouring of questions and interest in this topic specifically and what's encouraging about that is that it seems that a large number of people, leaders and pastors alike, want to see change in this area.

So here are the The Three Big Questions. (This isn't an excuse to skip buying the book! Click
here and by it.)

  • What makes us unique as a family? How are we different and not generic?
    This begins with core values/convictions. What are your strategic anchors? What is our life situation like? What are the variables that play into this?

  • What’s your families #1 goal (rallying cry) right now? As I look at the next 6 months, what is the #1 single biggest priority in our lives right now? I want to look back in 6 months and be able to say, “We spent our time doing not only the right thing, but the best thing!”

  • How are you going to use the answers from the above 2 questions to affect your life? What do we need to do today to keep it alive? (the book has a lot of suggestions on this point.)

I don't usually post like this but it's a topic I'm passionate about. For those of you that know me, I spend an incredible amount of time and energy on my own fitness and health and I was convicted as to how much time and energy I spent being intentional in my marriage. Just having a date night once a week isn't enough for me. Writing down and having our vision and values hanging on the wall in the kitchen isn't enough for me. I want to raise the bar in my own life and family.

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