If you’ve been around this space for any length of time, you know I’m a big believer in vision setting and planning. It’s the perfect way to combine my love for embracing the journey while making progress towards a meaningful destination. That’s where the elements of vision setting, planning, and reflecting back on the previous year come into play. At the end of each year I spend time doing some personal visioning (usually in early December). Later, Samantha and I set aside time to jointly plan. Afterwards, we bring the whole family together and involve the kids in a process that takes literally no longer than an hour. Over the years we’ve tried a few different methods including chalkboard outside when the kids were younger. Now we’ve evolved to sticky notes and dry erase boards. This year I introduced a new element, videotaping their intentions with a plan to send them their clips at intervals throughout the year. Overall, it’s a process that allows us to celebrate together and build strong habits of reflection and intention setting which I believe helps us all grow.

Below is an overview of how we spent our one hour as a family vision setting, hopefully it inspires you to find the time with yours. But first, here’s a few tips:

Tip 1: Pre-Work for the adults to create structure and set the stage for engagement.

We have a family of six, 2 adults and 4 daughters ranging from 14, 12, 9, and 6. In order to maximize the time with the girls I knew Samantha and I would need to arrive with structure. Samantha and I first did our own generating a list of wins and challenges so that the kids would have something to build off of. This particularly helps with younger kids where you may have to generate the entire list and ask them for feedback. I also gathered the materials we’d use like sticky notes, markers, and dots for our voting process. Last, I always try to do this activity outside. In years past we wrote down our ideas using chalk on our driveway when the girls were younger (it was a fun way to keep them engaged and I found the adults had fun too).

Tip 2: Three easy steps. Keep it simple. The fewer the instructions, the better.

Every year our process stays pretty much the same: wins and challenges, glows and grows, highs and lows, or some version of these themes. Then we prioritize what felt the most important. Then we talk about what we want for the new year (which we call intentions rather than goals). This year since our girls are a bit older, we added the question, and what do we need from each other? This turned out to be one of our more interesting conversations. Ultimately these simple steps helped us to keep everyone’s attention (even the littles).

Here’s our process:

Step 1: Looking back. Here’s a quick overview video of our looking back process. As you can see it took me less than a minute to explain what we were doing and why. I then gave the girls a few minutes to add to the list (which they did). The key questions here are: what were our wins and challenges? Afterwards, I asked the girls to help us rank and prioritize which wins meant the most to us (this is an extra step- we used dots to help us rank which the girls had fun with), and it led us to our next step. Here’s our ranking and prioritizing video.

Step 2: Looking forward. This is the part where you get to dream. I asked the girls 3 simple questions: who do you want to be, what do you want to do or accomplish, and how do we want to live together as a family in 2025? Here’s the video for setting intentions. I gave each person sticky notes and told them to put their ideas on the board. I then recorded each person sharing their ideas to the family.

Step 3: Looking around. This is the part where we named for ourselves and each other, what type of support we would want to help us reach our goals. Here’s the video of us sharing what we need from each other. The girls were unsurprisingly honest with us (they need more grace from me for example) and each other (Riley needs more space from her sisters). But the theme turned out to be: we all need to extend each other grace as we grow in the coming year.

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