In order to determine your family’s future, goal setting is an important tool that can lead to a healthier and connected nuclear family.
In general, personal and professional growth can be attained by goal setting, but it can be just as valuable for families.
By setting and working towards common goals, families can improve their family relationships and focus on success as a whole unit.
However, parents already have a lot on their plates, and additional responsibilities are something they would much rather avoid.
So, in this article we will take you through consistent and easy ways in which you can do goal setting as a family and why it should be done.
Why is Goal Setting So Important ? Why is it Important to Set Goals and Share Them with Others?
Before we talk about goal setting as a family, let’s first review goal setting as a standalone topic.
The Washington University has defined setting goals to be a continuous process of making changes, developing habits and foregoing bad ones to reach a final desired end result.
When you set goals, you decide that concrete steps will be taken to improve career, profession, health or relationships.
However, research also indicates that goal setting, when done in collaboration with another person.
It can be a supervisor, coach or even a support person, but as long as you have somebody to share your success and losses with, it is more likely that you will overcome challenges and reach the goals together.
To understand how this works, a study on Springer used the mediating role of family and friends in achieving and setting goals.
Findings revealed that perceived success increased through emotional support systems, by being forced to see things from a positive perspective.
This decreased the sense of losing or being inadequate, hence increasing the chances of achieving set goals.
Why is Goal Setting with Families Important? How can Family Affect One’s Goal in Life?
The same logic, as the one used in the study by Springer can be applied to family goal setting because each person has an emotional support system, who encourages them to do the impossible.
However, as family members, the process of setting goals and achieving it as a common goal has different benefits, given as follows:
1) Thinking about Goals Prompts Us to Think About What Matters
When you begin setting goals as a family, you start be reflecting on who you are as a joint and where you want to go. This reflection is critical in allowing you to stop and realizing what really matters to you.
It can be to spend more time as a family, go on adventures, grow academically or have more fun. It also gives you a chance as parents to instill values within your children as a family unit and work on improving your family life.
2) Setting Goals as a Family Can Be Very Beneficial for Everyone Involved
When you work towards goals that ensure family’s success as a whole, you tend to forego your personal goals and think for the betterment of everyone.
For example, instead of focusing on professional milestones, you start evaluating how your career can benefit your family.
The goals not only benefit your own self, but can help your children grow and progress as well.
You start thinking from the perspective of your partner and work on those goals as a single family unit.
3) When We Work Together We Strengthen Our Relationships
In families, there are so many different personalities and different perspectives that it is normal to argue and not look towards the future in the same light.
However, when you set goals as a family, you think of the family’ success and are bound to think in the same perspective towards the future.
Goals like increasing savings, traveling together and learning a skill can encourage even opposing family members to come together and work together.
This then makes it inevitable that you improve family relationships and learn to live family life more openly as parents. Also it is important to remember;
By Setting Goals and Working Together as a Family Unit, You Can Improve Communication and Create Lasting Memories!
4) If We Don’t Look Ahead as a Family We Won’t Move Forward
Setting goals as a family is another way of saying that you are investing in the family’s success.
Stagnation in any role inhibits an individual from progressing and developing into a better version of yourself. This same logic can be applied to families as well.
When you identify goals like good health, save money or achieving skills, then you are working on the family’s future.
A future that sees improvement in your children’s school and education, as well as you and your partner’s business or health.
The underlying factor is to base family goals on good intentions and achieve it through great conversations.
5) When We Develop Goals our Children Learn Important Life Skills
As parents, our first priority are our children. But, if that’s the case, then why don’t we work to instill important values to improve their future?
When you work on setting family goals, this is exactly what you are working towards. Your goals can represent what you want your children to learn and then work together with them, and in the process grow closer.
An example of this can be to set a family goal of doing charity work or volunteering, so that the kids can learn empathy and compassion. Your goals can also be based on different areas;
Families Can Set Goals for Different Areas of Their Lives, Such as Health, Education, Relationships, and Career!
Examples of Family Goals
Now that it is justified, why family goals must be set and sharing goals with other family members has its benefits, lets delve into the examples of goals you can set.
This section will make setting goals and coming up with creative goals much easier as a family, instead of burdening one family member to decide the goals.
So, a few examples are:
Spend More Time Together
As parents, we have a hundred different things that need to be done, on top of all the work that needs to be completed in the office.
Even if you are a stay-at-home parent, there are a multitude of things that need cleaning, sorting and inventory.
Among all this hassle of making sure your kids stay alive, we tend to forget that they’re growing up and most of all just need our time and attention.
So as a family, set a personal goal to lead yourselves into spending more time together.
Vital part is to plan activities ahead of time and go to a picnic, have a no mobile phone dinner or start taking interest in the games your kids play.
Adventure Travels
An important family goal is also to teach your kids to overcome fear and learn to have fun.
Adventure travels, therefore is a neat and effective way to start building a healthy and active lifestyle with your children.
Another idea in adventure travel can be to go bungee jumping, sky diving or if you would rather not do extreme sports then go hiking and swim in the lake.
Learn a Language
A successful way of spending more time with your children, is to start learning skills together.
Within skills, strategies that will help them in their academic career is learning a new language.
You can choose one from the coursework of your children or pick a random language, just to teach your children the different cultures and values there are on this planet.
Eat Healthy
A responsible adult makes sure that they are eating a well-balanced diet, instead of munching on snacks. So, turn a personal goal into a family goal, and get everyone involved.
Also, remember healthy eating does not necessarily mean eating boring tasteless food. You can learn new recipes and get your children involved for dinner preparation.
Save More
To be able to save more, it is imperative that everyone involved in the family knows the goal.
In this way, you can conduct routine family meeting and remind everybody the goal for which you are saving and might need their help to decrease expenditure.
You will learn to appreciate your family members and also save money.
What is Important When Interacting with and Communicating with Families?
If you are having a hard time communicating with your family, remind yourself that they know you more intimately than even your closest friends and colleagues.
You just have to opt for a few strategies that can help you become a better communicator and you can work towards interacting heart-to-heart with your family members.
To do so, follow these steps:
Step 1: Schedule a Family Time
Haphazardly trying to communicate with your family will never help you interact with them. Instead, pick a time of the day when everyone is available, after school and before bed.
In this time, you can set family goals, share your personal goals and encourage others to do the same.
The process, although should remain to first identify a free time space where everybody is available.
Step 2: No Mobile Phones
The reason for putting away mobile phone is to show that you are putting in the effort to actually listen to the other family members.
Mobile phone are distracting and if they are shoved in your face then one-on-one time can be tricky to manage.
So, even if it’s 15 minutes, put away your phone to talk to your family.
Step 3: Do Any Activity Together
The term goals does not necessarily mean to be constructive, as long as your goals are making some improvements in your life.
So, to become a better communicator, you can simply buy a board game and encourage your family members to play together.
You can also eat dinner together, to improve family relationships and put in the effort.
Step 4: Active Listening
Challenges of communication often arise when you feel you are not being heard. So, as a solution, you can work on your learning skills as a family.
Take it as challenges that you need to become an active listener, and learn from lectures or remind yourself to let the other one complete their sentence.
In this way, you can know much better about your children’s health, wellbeing or education.
Step 5: Be Kind
When taking out time to improve family relationships and communicate better, you have to remind yourself one unflinching rule, Kindness.
The whole family will be able to build better relationships, communicate and set goals together as a team, if everyone works on being kind to one another.
Remind yourself that attacking the problem is better than attacking one another with words, and you will accomplish more when you try to make sense of underlying issues.
Goal Setting Activities: Imagine What Your Future Holds
Up until now, you have read all about family goal setting, but now it is time to turn this theoretical learning into practical activities.
For this section, we ask you to work together with your family as a team and conduct these 2 activities for goal setting. To accomplish effective goal setting:
Activity 1 – Bucket List
As an individual, making a bucket list is considered a very fun and creative way to encourage yourself to do thing outside your comfort zone.
However, you can apply the same strategy to family goal setting as well. Besides, a family bucket list gives a sense that you are not dictating goals to your kids, instead listening to their voice as well.
For this activity, pick a free time like Sunday or Saturday afternoon or during dinner.
Ask your kids and partner about what they would like to do if money, time, schedule etc. weren’t a problem.
As each child gives their answer, write them down on a piece of paper, fold them and put it in a bucket.
Now every time, you get some time off, ask one child to pick out a paper without looking and spend the whole day achieving that goal.
If it requires some planning, then spend the day getting things in order, so that you are creating plans and achieving goals.
Activity 2 – A Vision Board
If a mystery goal is not your thing, then go for a vision board because you have much more time to plan ahead and know exactly what to expect.
For the vision board activity, get the whole family around and pick out a bunch of magazines, photo albums, snippets etc.
You can also ask your children to do a little bit of homework for the activity and collect pictures representing them.
The importance of a vision board is to visualize what you want to become. So begin by asking your kids a simple question, what represents their hopes and dreams, give them time to reflect and then help them pick pictures that represents it.
The vision board can have as many sections as family members and you help one another set family goals as a unit or personal goals for each child.
One thing is common that the goals have to include at least one other family member, so that it can allow you to work together.
The deal with vision board is same as a bucket list. You choose one activity from the vision board every week, and it can be done in an order of age, life, success rate etc.
Why is the Goal Setting with Families Important? How to Do It?
Now that we have established setting family goals and families’ important role in goal setting, this section will provide you a step by step guide on how to avail this important activity.
Research studies have found the family can help you accomplish, give you a sense of progress, while at the same time creating lifelong memories and getting the chance to reflect on what’s really important.
Follow this guide of six steps, to keep yourself involved in family discussions, share ideas, discuss life and write down expectations from life in a fun way.
Ready? Aim. Aim. Aim. 15min – BRAINSTORM
The first step is to brainstorm ideas and your definition of success or fun for you. The step of brainstorm is to share ideas, no matter how otherworldly and unfeasible they may sound.
Ask your kids to share their wildest dreams and write them down. This step essentially helps you overcome your brain fog and lack of clarity about goals.
For this you have 15 minutes!
System Overload! 20min – TOO MANY IDEAS
By the second step, it is inevitable that there are too many ideas, long term goals or short term goals, and the whole family has something to input.
However, this step is when you start clearing up the bran fog into actionable steps and then goals.
For this you have 20 minutes!
Write down similar sounding ideas into groups, filter out unrealistic goals that may be too expensive or not possible.
For example, if your kids wants to buy a dragon then you cancel out that goal in this step.
By the end, you must have filtered down 100 something goals into 25 to 35 clear goals, and work as a team during this step.
For this you have 20 minutes!
Overcoming Obstacles with a WOOP! 20min – FAMILIES TO HELP NAVIGATE
The second step can be overwhelming because everyone wants to achieve something and wants the focus on themselves.
However, with emotional skills and managing arguments into constructive discussion will help you grow closer to one another.
Learn emotional intelligence, learn to work together and understand the importance of creating memorable moments with one another.
For this you have 20 minutes!
Air Traffic Control at Home 20min – LEADER OF THE FAMILY
As much as we would all like to think we live life on our own terms, you know that there is one person in a family unit making all the decision actually.
Usually, this is the mother, but it is highly personalized and the leader will be the one having the last word.
They will decide what goals to achieve first, how to settle an argument and who is arguing without being constructive.
In family goal setting, my advice is to create a balance between parents and kids to become a good leader.
For this you have 20 minutes!
Set a Learning Goal 25min – ONE GOAL
After you are done setting goals effectively, make sure to filter out goals that are leading to progress and skill development from those that are solely for fun.
This is not to take away the fun goals, rather it is to compile goals in a manner that makes you learn and allows for a break from learning as well.
This step has critical importance in allowing communication between parents and kids, as it ensures that each side understands what the other wants to do to have fun and to progress.
For this you have 25 minutes!
This step also has the highest time to do things up until now and it is primarily because you should spend the extra minutes to give it a thought.
Aimlessly family goal setting will not you lead anywhere, instead a planned approach will likely lead to better outcomes.
Say What You’re Thinking 25min – REFLECT
The last step finally is to reflect. You reflection can be post activity and pre activity, depending on what you want to learn or want your children to learn.
Ask one another questions like:
What happened?
What how did you feel during the activity?
What went good?
What went bad?
How would you do it, if it happened again?
These are a few prompts to get your kids talking and also reflecting on how you’re and your partner feel about the goal.
To support the last step, a research paper can be included which included the benefits of reflective writing for students.
The study led to the result that reflection helps younger students make sense of their learning material, surrounding environment and own feelings.
Goals, Overload, and Your Brain (3 Activities)
At this point, you might be overwhelmed by how many ways family goal setting can be done, types of goals, types of activities and the steps for effective goal setting.
So, to make sense of this topic, do these three activities:
Activity 1 – Personal Goals
If family goal setting is daunting and seems too much outside the comfort zone, then begin by following these same steps but narrowing them down to your own self.
Follow the same steps, but only apply them in your own thinking and ideas, rather than calling a family meeting. This will help you practice goal setting.
Activity 2 – Begin With Your Partner
To ease into goal setting as a family, you can get your partner involved.
Both of you can brainstorm ideas about goals that your children might have fun in achieving and plan a few activities in this way.
Activity 3 – Prioritize
If you do not have the time to take a deep dive into family goal setting, then prioritize your time more productively.
All of this does not need to be completed in one weekend, instead give yourself the space to have the mental capacity to plan with your children and achieve goals as a family.
The bottom line to remember in family goal setting is to have fun and create memories with the kids, do not pressurize yourself into becoming a perfect parent and partner who always has the solution.
Life is hard, complicated and overpowering at times, so ease yourself into goal setting and learn along the way.
