Last week our Coachwell Team attended the Bend Venture Conference; it was a wealth of information! Part of the event was a seminar entitled “Build Your Company With the End in Mind”   It was so good to talk about making decisions in your company as early as possible with your team to set a course that will your team fired up and committed to the legacy you desire to build.

As I was pondering the statements that had been made concerning how to “begin” a legacy company my mind wandered into realizing that this challenge is the same with our families! Do we truly even think about the “end” as we are busy building our precious families?

What if we built our families with the end in mind?

How would that change the choices you would make with your family today?

Let’s consider a few scenarios:

If you want to be a family who are known for compassion you would need to regularly, as a family, become involved with situations where compassion needs to be applied. Food kitchens, homeless shelters, homes for unwed mothers, and helping your elderly neighbors would be just a few ways you could invite your children to “learn” the beauty of compassion right alongside you.

How about wanting to build a legacy as a family of givers?   I imagine you would want to engage your entire family early on in tithing, missions giving, random acts of financial giving, and financially helping in your local community projects.  There are so many ways to help! Often parents give without their children being involved in the process at all.

I can remember at Christmas every year my parents would gather we girls together and we would use some of our own small coins along with our parents finances to build a special box for our very poor neighbors down the street.  My parents even had us give a piece of our own clothing for the box.  Every Christmas eve we quietly drove to the house and left the box on the front porch to surprise them in the morning.  Believe it or not this was a real joy-filled experience for us all and it helped us tangibly learn to be givers.

Is there something(s) that you can begin to engage your family in together to create a legacy; with the end in mind?

Take a few minutes! If you consider what it means to “build your family with the end in mind” then determine what that “end” is and  begin building that into the DNA of your family life even now! It’s never to late to start!!

Happy Building!