Newlywed Tip #6: Goal-Setting Together

About a week ago, SimpleMom posted about creating a family mission statement. It's a pretty inspiring post and makes a ton of sense. The basic premise is that as a family, how do we decide what our priorities are? If we create some type of mission statement, we can always ask ourselves whether or not something falls under our main priorities, especially when life feels too cluttered and we're trying to decide what activities to back away from.

While Javier & I have yet to create a mission statement, SimpleMom's questions have helped us have some very meaningful conversations about our goals and priorities.

Benefits of this process so far:

• Increased communication between us. We're naturally both talkative, but our conversations have taken a turn that's a little deeper than normal - getting at the heart of who we are and the direction we'd like to go as a family.
  
• Seeing what's most important to each other. I think it can be pretty easy to lose sight of this on a day-to-day basis - this is helping us appreciate each other for who we are, not who we want the other person to be.
• We get to think about our priorities as a couple. 
• We already have somewhat of a sense of "Is this really important to me right now? Or is there a better way I could use my time?" While everyone will have different priorities and different Most Important Resources, we're realizing that ours is definitely time - and we want to make the most of it.

So, whether or not you want to actually make a family mission statement, I strongly encourage you to talk with your spouse or family or just think through for yourself what some of your main priorities are. Hopefully it will be as much of a learning process for you as it has been for us!