family plan

I'm on my third day as CEO and I can say that my first two days went amazingly well. Having a new mindset has completely changed the way I feel about what I'm doing. I think that I was having a case of the Stay at Home Mom Doldrums. I was needing to reinvent my seemingly mundane life. My life hasn't really changed that much, but my attitude towards it has and now I'm feeling more accomplished and better organized.

My first order of business was updating the Jones Family Plan. We originally created a family plan two years ago. Ceomom.com has the model I used to create our family plan. We followed their guidelines and did this together as a family. It seemed super cheesy at first {which is usually not a problem for me}, but it's amazing how useful this family plan has been. When we made this plan we started by setting goals; daily, weekly, monthly and yearly goals. We've discovered over the past couple years that some of these goals work really well for us and some don't work at all. Ceomom also has a great article on how to set goals as a family. After setting the goals, we incorporated them into our family plan.

One of the crucial parts of our family plan is the Mission Statement or Family Motto. We all worked together to come up with our motto. We didn't want our motto to be complicated {our boys were 6, 4 and 2 months old at the time}. We wanted it to be simple, yet reflective of our family values. We decided we should stick to one word. After much deliberation, the one word we ended up choosing was "POWER," which is an acronym for Polite, Obedient, Workers, Enthusiastic and Righteous. Ironically, yet so special, after later talking to my Mom we realized that our family {the one I grew up in} had the EXACT SAME family motto with almost the same exact acronyms. How had I forgotten? {Clint, Krista, Erika...do you remember that?} Suddenly, our family motto became perfect!

This family motto has become an incredible tool in our family. Whenever my boys are getting out of control, fighting with each other or whenever there is tension in our home, I can call all the boys together to do a "Jones POWER" cheer. That's right, we do cheer's around here. It's more of a huddle, "go team" type cheer. My boys absolutely love it and it immediately bonds our family back together. I usually give the boys a quick pep talk about team work or whatever the situation demands and then I remind them that we have "Jones POWER." Whenever I say those two words it always puts a smile on their face. No matter what was going on before, we all put our hands in the circle and yell...

"Jooooones POWER!"

I hesitated sharing this for fear of the harassment that I might receive and because it really is a special, personal thing that we do together as a family. I wanted to share it though because it has become an extremely effective tool in our home for bringing our family together. This silly little motto, I believe, brings my children security and comfort. When we put our hands together it actually helps us all feel more united to each other.

As we sat down together on Monday night and reviewed our family plan, I realized that this company really is on the right track. I feel so blessed to be the CEO of an already successful business. I've realized that so many times in our lives, it's just making a few tiny adjustments that make all the difference.