If you want to have a Great! family life, then you have to put more of your life’s precious resources into being the Great! leader of your family. Being Great! at work is one thing. Thriving as the leader of your family requires even more work at home. Work is your main vocation. Being Great! at home has to become your avocation.
Being Great! at home does not come easy. It takes some of all of your types of life’s precious resources. It takes all seven steps of the P10 Principle. It takes letting work be your vocation and then making your family be your avocation.
Here are seven ways to make your family your avocation.
- Be proactive. People often expect their families to run on autopilot. If you want to thrive, then you have to drive.
- Perceive your family has a higher priority than your work; perceive in immaculate detail the next activity you want to do with your family, then perceive how you are going to use your POWER and proceed only with every resource you have and invest some of each of your self, time, effort, energy, emotion, intellect, property, and people into making that activity come to pass.
- Plan in immaculate detail each step of how you are going to use those resources to make this activity a reality. Begin with the end in mind and work back from there. Go back to that perception in immaculate detail of this activity coming to pass. Then back up one step and ask, “What did I have to do to make this happen?” Then back up to the step before that one and do the same thing. When you get all the way back to where you are now, then you will have the complete plan. What are you going to have to do first in order to get ready to do what you want to last? Proceed to step 4.
- Prepare everything you are going to need in order to both pull off and enjoy the activity.
- Practice the activity by beginning to do the first step and keep on going until you are at the last step.
- Persist in making the practically perfect performance of what you want to do actually happen the way you want to do it.
- Promote the activity. Talk about it positively until it comes to pass and then talk about it some more after it has happened to reinforce how Great! it was.
Here’s how I pulled off last week’s Thanksgiving Day at our new home in Easton, Maryland.
- I got proactive. I told my family how much I liked having as many of them as possible come to be with us on Thanksgiving Day, because they are the thing Susan and I are most thankful for in our life.
- I perceived in detail how I wanted the day to come off. Where we would be (home, at a nearby park for some playtime, back for more games and food at home), what we would do (chat, eat, chat, go play, come back, eat, play some games at home, eat some more, talk some more, kiss everyone hello, be blessed by blessing them, and let them go back to their own lives at the end of the day), what food, what games, etc.
- I planned from the point of everyone leaving happy (all the details of that), then stepped back to the last activity of the day (dessert), then the thing before that etc., back down to my task list to get started and my shopping list of food etc. to buy.
- I began to prepare the food on Sunday (which preparation began with a shopping trip) and worked in all the things I had to do over the next four days.
- I practiced the plan, first in my mind and then in reality as it occurred and it occurred almost exactly as I planned it.
- I persisted in making the plan come to pass despite some setbacks. The most northern two of my six kids couldn’t make our celebration and two of my nearby kids couldn’t stay all day and meet their prior commitments to their spouses’ families. Susan lost her job two months ago, we had to move to a new town to get her the best job available and had to downsize to a two-bedroom apartment to make our life work better. We did not let those things stop us. We were going to drive to thrive no matter what.
- I promoted the heck out of the idea of having as many of the kids come and stay for as long as they could. And we recapped how good it was with them several times already since it happened just days ago.
You can apply these same strategies to any activity you want to do in order to be a Great! leader of your family. Be on the lookout for my coming book, Great! at Home.
Question: What’s the last thing you did to put your family ahead of your work?
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