Anyone who chooses to blend two families is on a mission to have a healthy, happy, fulfilling family life experience. That’s WHY you choose to become partners in a relationship. The ways that you go about creating and maintaining fulfillment may be with effective, tried and true strategies for success, or may be based in patterns and beliefs from the past, and not based in what really works. How you actively blend your families comes from each of your beliefs about the best ways to be parents and partners.

When a person decides to start his or her own business, he or she makes a huge commitment of time, energy and money towards that business’ success. Experts recommend that one starts off the formulation of a new business by creating a strong, powerful mission statement for the business. The more that mission statement resonates with your core values and what matters most to you in the world, the more likely your business will succeed. Once your mission is clear, the next step is to clarify your VISION – the ways in which you will successfully bring your mission into the world through a business.

A businesswoman with a clear mission to, say, promote world peace with anti-violence education and materials would not succeed if she chose to open a gun shop and sell weapons. She would be approaching their mission from a place that is counterproductive and at odds with her values. Sounds silly, but many families do this very thing. People blend their families with the mission of having a peaceful and loving home, and they end up attacking each other with sarcasm, accusations, blame and shame. They want to have fulfillment and they focus on everything that’s wrong in the home, what needs to be changed, and where they are most unhappy.

By having a clear vision that supports your overall mission as a family, the likelihood of success greatly increases. If your mission is to truly have a peaceful, loving home, then your vision could be to: practice active gratitude towards each member of the family at least 5 times a day; show outward, genuine affection to every member of the family at least 3 times a day; say thank you and please as a regular habit to everyone in the family for even the littlest things; etc.

By knowing your vision and acting from it daily, you will experience true fulfillment in your family.

ACTION STEP

To help you take action towards achieving your family vision and mission, visit http://www.blended-families.com/stephero/vision.php and work through the Action Step section.