Your Guide to Successful Decision-Making

Successful decision-making is a challenge. There are so many different caveats to a decision, especially when it affects your family. Today we are going to put our family purpose statements to work for us. It’s OK if you haven’t completely finished yours yet. If you remember, yesterday I mentioned it took me a couple of weeks to completely work through our family purpose statement. So, take your time!

Today we are going to use my family’s purpose statement as an example on successful decision-making. Does it mean we are always successful? Nope, so don’t think that I have all the answers! Again, this is just one tool that you can use to help you get to the life you love, and want to live, with your family.

My Family’s Purpose Statement

Successful decision-making is a process. Again, it won’t always be successful. You won’t always make the *right* decision. But, that is OK! That is all part of the growing process. We all make bad choices in life. It doesn’t mean that we throw in the towel and continue to make bad choices. We correct the path we are on, and consider why the choice was bad, and how to move on from there.

I shared my family’s purpose statement with you yesterday, and will do so again today because I am going to use this statement to show you how to make decisions. How you filter decisions through your family’s purpose statement.

Put God First.  Live simply.  Be good stewards of God’s creation and the time we are given.  Promote peace in our home.  Encourage creativity and learning.  Always show our love for one another.

The most important thing to remember in this entire series? You DO NOT need to copy what my family does. However, if there are ideas that carry over to your family’s life, feel free to use them. Remember, yesterday I said that I spent a lot of time reading what other people wrote for their family purpose or mission statement before I was able to write one for our family.

What is Successful Decision-Making?

We probably should start here. What exactly is successful decision-making? How do we figure out whether a decision will be successful or not? It is trial and error a lot of the time, at least at the beginning. But, as you start to filter decisions through your purpose statement, and you have a firm yes and no list, it becomes easier.

Successful decision-making will be whatever decisions you make to help lead you down the path of a fulfilling life. It will not look the same as someone else’s life decisions. Even if it is something that you think would be amazing for you, it might not be the right season of life, in which case you have to make a different decision than you may want to.

Does it sound too broad? How do you know they will be the right decisions? Well, you don’t always. This is why we have tools like a family purpose statement to help us on our way.

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Your Family Purpose Statement as a Guide

If you look at our family purpose statement, you will see that the first thing is put God first. Quite simply, this means that, as a family, we put God first in our lives. What does this look like practically though? The best example I have is keeping a Sabbath. God created the Sabbath for us to rest. What that means for my family is that we say no to outside activities on Sunday mornings. We know that Sunday is our family’s day of rest, and so we make sure to keep it free from regular weekly commitments outside of fellowship with friends and family.

That means, we don’t participate in sports or other activities that have Sunday morning commitments.

This is one, super easy way, that our family purpose statement acts as a guide to successful decision-making, while also letting go of decision fatigue. The decision has already been made, we don’t have to consider it anymore. If there is going to be an activity that regularly meets on Sunday morning, we say no to it.

Now, this is a very easy decision for us to make in the moment, but it does have ramifications that we also have to address. When we made the decision to keep a Sabbath, it automatically ruled out a lot of activities my kids wanted to do. Not in the early years, but when they got older, the Sunday morning games became a big part of sports. And so, we had to say no to the majority of sports because we weren’t able to participate on Sunday mornings.

Filtering Your Family Decisions through your Purpose Statement

When you look at your purpose statement, you will start to see themes. You will see the things that are most important to you. Then you are able to filter your decisions through this purpose statement. This is just a jumping off point. The filtering gives you a way to have a strong yes and a strong no list. These are the things you don’t need to think about when you are faced with the decision. The decision has already been made, you just need to follow through with either a yes or a no.

If service is really important to your family, you know that when someone asks for volunteers at the local soup kitchen, your family will be on board for that because service is a central theme in your family’s purpose statement.

Some Ideas

Let’s look at my family’s purpose statement and see if we can come up with some practical ideas on how decision making happens

Put God First

• Keep a Sabbath
• Encourage both personal and family Bible Study
• Pray and demonstrate prayer in our home

Live Simply. Be Good Stewards of God’s Creation and the Time we are Given

• Create Margin in our Days
• Don’t be wasteful
• Keep clean spaces and no visual clutter
• Garden & Cook from Whole Foods rather than processed foods
• Consider our days
• Practice our version of minimalism

Promote Peace in Our Home

• Always be available for conversation
• Listen to one another
• Consider others feelings when talking
• Don’t yell (I struggle with this one quite a bit!)
• Understand the differences of our personalities and give grace to one another

Encourage Creativity and Learning

• Provide the resources needed for the interests we all have
• Read as a family
• Have lot’s of books on multiple topics as well as good quality literature
• Open Discussion and Questions
• Give unfettered access to art supplies
• Fill our home with Music

Always show our Love for one another

• Open communication
• Always be available for conversation
• Work out our differences in real time – don’t ruminate on problems, instead address them in a calm manner

The Bottom Line

Using our family purpose statement as a guide to successful decision-making does take a bit of practice. So, once you have your purpose statement, start to flesh it out with other words and phrases like I have above. This is just a sampling of some of the important things we consider under each of the main points of our family purpose statement.

Again, I want to reiterate that you do not need to copy my family’s purpose statement, or our ideas. You can look at the word minimalism from above and it can make you run scared because you have collections that you love. You may love to be on the go, so the idea of margin isn’t strong in your home because your family thrives on the constant go-go-go.

Every family is different. And what is important to me is not necessarily important to you. Or, how you implement it isn’t the same as how I would. That is OK! Remember we are talking about living a life YOU love, not me. While I can give you ideas of what we do as a family, this isn’t a prescription for your best life.

Have you fleshed out your purpose statement? Was there something surprising that came out of it? Let me know in the comments or email me so we can chat about it!