Hello Everyone.  Happy New Year!

I hope you had time to rest and reset yourselves for the new year.

I wanted to kick this year off by sharing with you a little family tradition I began a few years ago.  This is our 3rd year following this tradition and while I continue to refine and modify the details, the basic concepts have been constant.

I’m sure you have all heard of the concept of goal setting.  We do it each year when we work for big companies.  We set goals for our performance at work so we can measure how we did.  Often these goals can be tied to bonuses and incentives at work.

Have you ever consider setting goals with your family?

Well we started doing this a few years back and I have to say that it’s been great!

Now, I’m no goal-setting guru.  Search the internet and you can find hundreds of experts sharing their tips and tricks on goal setting.  For your reading enjoyment, I’m linking this little article from http://www.success.com which includes some of the tried and true concepts for goal setting and also has a little tip I took inspiration from called “Define your dreams and goals“.

But as I said, there are lots of articles like this, so if this one does not inspire you, do your own search and find one that does.

For us, our family resolution setting happens in multiple parts.

First, at breakfast on January 1, everyone writes their goals down.  Even my 8 years old (who began this process when she was 5) writes out her goals for the year.

The way we document these goals is simple.  We break down our goals into 6 parts (we came up with these six categories together the first year).

Here are our 6 categories of goals:

1. Section 1: work/school.
2. Section 2: Family
3. Section 3: Friends
4. Section 4: Personal
5. Section 5: Health
6. Section 6: Spiritual

We each write these down on a piece of paper and then share our goals with the whole family.  We also coach each other on how we can improve or add to the goals we came up with.  Once we have all read our goals out loud, we place them in a shoe box that sits on our mantle for the whole year.

Second, we review our goals and rate ourselves on how we did.  Initially we did this ONLY on New Years Eve, but we found that many of our goals were dated or our circumstances had changed throughout the year, so last year I began a quarterly review of our goals.

Now I know you are thinking this is overkill, but it’s actually a lot of fun and it’s essential for reminding yourself of what you planned for the year.

We open the goals up every three months and see if we are on track and whether anything needs to be changed.  We look forward to it and we have a great time seeing how we are doing towards our goals.

We find this to be an effective way of giving our family purpose and direction for the year.  This process helps us all share in our family’s successes and find ways to improve on our failures.

So I hope you find this to be inspiring for you and your family.  Let me know if you plan on implementing this in your family.  If you do, let me know how you do your goal setting and share your best practices so I can continue to hone ours.

Happy New Year!