"Well," he said thoughtfully, "we could use a lot of paper towels!" So she gave him some paper towels, and she went and got the mop.

As she was telling me what had happened, I realized how important it was that my wife had been able to catch herself between stimulus and response. She made a proactive choice. And she was able to do it because she thought about the end in mind. The important thing here is not having a clean floor. It's raising this boy.

It took her about ten minutes to clean up the mess. If she had been reactive, it also would have taken her about ten minutes, but the difference would have been that Brenton would have met me at the door and said, "Daddy, I am a bad boy!"

Just think about the difference it made in this family for this woman to act instead of react! This little boy could have come out of this experience feeling guilty, embarrassed, and ashamed. But instead he felt affirmed, appreciated, loved. His good intentions and his desire to help were nurtured. He learned how to help in better ways. His whole attitude about himself and about helping in his home were positively affected by this interaction.

How was this woman able to turn what could have been a very frustrating experience into an actual deposit into this little boy's Emotional Bank Account? As her husband observed, she had clear in her mind what was most important. It wasn't having a clean floor; it was raising that boy. She had a purpose that was bigger than her problem. And in that instant between what happened and her response to it, she was able to connect to that purpose. She acted with the end in mind.

The End in Mind: Your "Destination"

Habit 2-Begin with the end in mind-is to create a clear, compelling vision of what you and your family are all about. Going back to the airplane metaphor, Habit 2 defines your destination. And having your destination clearly in mind affects every decision along the way.

Habit 2 is based on the principle of vision-and vision is powerful! It's the principle that enables prisoners of war to survive.1 Research shows it's what gives successful children the drive to succeed.2 It's a moving power behind successful individuals and organizations in every walk of life. Vision is greater than "baggage"-greater than the negative baggage of the past and even the accumulated baggage of the present. Tapping into this sense of vision gives you the power and the purpose to rise above the baggage and act based on what really matters most.

Now there are many ways to apply this principle of vision-to begin with the end in mind-in the family culture. You can begin a year, a week, or a day with the end in mind. You can begin a family experience or activity with the end in mind. You can begin a season of dance or piano lessons, or a special family dinner, or the building of a new home, or a search for a family pet with the end in mind.

But in this chapter we're going to focus on the most profound, significant, and far-reaching application of "begin with the end in mind" in the family-the creation of a "family mission statement."

A family mission statement is a combined, unified expression from all family members of what your family is all about-what it is you really want to do and be-and the principles you choose to govern your family life. It's based on the idea that all things are created twice. First comes the idea, or the mental creation; then comes the reality, or the physical creation. It's drafting the blueprint before constructing the building, writing the script before performing the play, creating the flight plan before taking off in the airplane. It's like the carpenter's rule: "Measure twice, cut once."

Can you imagine the consequences of the opposite-of beginning with no end in mind?

Suppose you were to go to a construction site and ask the workers there, "What are you building?"

"We have no idea," one of them replies.

"Well, what does your blueprint show?" you ask.

The foreman replies, "We have no blueprint. We feel that if we build with great skill and craftsmanship, in the end we will have a beautiful building. We must get back to work now so we can complete our task. Perhaps then we will be able to determine just what it is we have built."

Or, going back to the airplane metaphor, suppose someone were to ask you as a pilot, "Where will you be flying to today?"

Would this be your reply? "I really don't know. We have no flight plan. We'll just load the passengers and take the plane up. There are a lot of air currents up there. They blow in different directions on different days. We'll just catch the current that's blowing the hardest and go wherever it takes us. When we get there, we will know where we were headed."

In my profession, if I'm working with a particular organization or client-particularly with the top executive cabinet-I often ask all the members to write a one-sentence answer to this question: "What is the essential mission or purpose of this organization, and what is its main strategy in accomplishing that purpose?" I then have them read these papers out loud to the others, and they are usually shocked at the differences. They cannot believe that everyone sees it so differently, particularly on an issue of such governing importance. And this sometimes happens even when the company mission statement is on the wall in that very room.

You might consider trying the same thing in your family. Tonight, just go and ask each member of your family individually, "What is the purpose of our family? What is this family about?" Ask your spouse, "What is the purpose of our marriage? What is its essential reason for being? What are its high priority goals?" You may be surprised by the answers you receive.

The point is that it's vital to have the entire culture aligned-to head toward a mutually agreed upon destination. It's critical to have everyone in the cockpit knowing that all are heading to the same place, rather than having the pilot thinking they're going to New York and the flight engineer thinking they're going to Chicago.

As it says in Proverbs, "Without vision the people perish." The opposite of Habit 2 in the family is to have no mental creation, no envisioning of the future-to just let life happen, to be swept along with the flow of society's values and trends without having any sense of vision or purpose. It's simply living out the scripts that have been given to you. In fact, it's really not living at all; it's being lived.

Because all things are created twice, if you don't take charge of the first creation, someone or something else will. Creating a family mission statement is taking charge of the first creation. It's deciding what kind of family you really want to be and identifying the principles that will help you get there. And that decision will give context to every other decision you make. It will become your destination. It will act like a huge, powerful magnet that draws you toward it and helps you stay on track.

Creating Our Own Family Mission Statement

I hope you'll excuse the long personal reference that follows, but we learned the power of all this not in the reading, observing, teaching, or writing but in the doing. Please understand that this is a very intimate sharing of our personal and family life. It reflects our own deep values and beliefs. But know that we recognize and honor the principle of respect for all, including those who believe differently.

If you were to ask Sandra and me, "What has been the most transforming event in your own family history?", we would answer without hesitation that it was the creation of our family mission statement. Our first mission statement was created in a sacred marriage ceremony some forty-one years ago. Our second mission statement was developed in stages over a period of fifteen years and several children. Through the years these mission statements have created the common sense of destination and manner of travel that has represented the social will, the culture, in the family. And either directly or indirectly, consciously or unconsciously, almost everything else in our family has grown out of it.

On the day we were married, immediately after the ceremony, Sandra and I went to a park called Memory Grove. We sat together and talked about what that ceremony meant and how we were going to try to live our lives by it. We talked about the two families we had come from. We discussed what we wanted to continue to do in our own newly formed family and what things we wanted to do differently.

We also reaffirmed that our marriage was much more than a contractual relationship; it was a covenant relationship. And our commitment to each other was total, complete, and for always. We also recognized that our covenant was not only with each other; it was also with God. And we determined that we would be able to love each other more if we loved Him first.

So we made the decision to put principles ahead of each other and ahead of our family. And we feel that one decision, more than any other single factor, has given us the strength to apologize, to forgive, to be kind, and to keep coming back to the flight path time and time again. We've discovered that the more we are able to center our lives on these principles, the more wisdom and strength we can access-especially in situations where it would be very easy to be centered and even controlled by other things, such as work, money, possessions, or even family itself. Without that decision, we are convinced, we would have been far more dependent on each other's moods or on our popularity with our children for our sense of security, rather than on our own inner integrity.

Putting principles first has given a sense of appropriate priority to everything else. It's been like a set of glasses through which we view all of life. It's given us a sense of "stewardship"-a sense that we are both responsible and accountable for the way in which we handle all things, including family. And it's helped us realize that family itself is a principle-universal, timeless, and self-evident.

That day as Sandra and I sat in Memory Grove, we also began to talk about the children we would have. We took seriously the words of Daniel Webster: If we work on marble, it will perish. If we work upon brass, time will efface it. If we rear temples, they will crumble into dust, but if we work upon immortal minds, and instill into them just principles, we are then engraving upon that tablet that which no time will efface, but will brighten and brighten to all eternity.

We began to identify some of the principles we wanted to use in raising our children. Then and over the next few years as children began to come, we often asked ourselves, "What kind of strength and abilities will our children need to have in order to be successful when they're grown?" And out of these discussions came ten abilities we thought were vitally important-ten things we felt these children would need to be able to do when they became independent and started families of their own. These included the ability to work, to learn, to communicate, to solve problems, to repent, to forgive, to serve, to worship, to survive in the wilderness, and to play and have fun.

Part of our vision was to gather together at the dinner table at the end of the day and regroup, share experiences, laugh, bond, philosophize, and discuss values. We wanted our children to enjoy and deeply appreciate each other, to do things together, and to love being with each other.

As the children grew, this vision gave direction to many family discussions and activities. It caused us to plan each of our summers, our vacations, and our leisure time in a way that would help us realize our dream. For example, one of the ten things on our list was the ability to survive in adverse conditions, so to help the children develop this skill, we enrolled our family in survival programs. We were trained and led into the wilderness for several days with nothing but our wits to sustain us. We learned to survive through our ingenuity and through the knowledge we had gained about what we could and could not eat and drink. We learned techniques that would allow us to survive in freezing conditions, extremely hot conditions, and conditions where there was no water.

Another item concerned the value of education. We wanted our children to work in school and get as much education as possible, and not take shortcuts to simply get grades and diplomas. So we read together as a family. We organized our home so that our children had a time and a place to do homework. We became interested in what our children were learning in school, and we gave them opportunities to teach us what they were learning. We focused primarily on learning, not grades, and we hardly ever had to encourage the children to do their homework. We rarely saw a grade lower than an A minus.

Over the years, the focus on these and other "ends in mind" made a powerful difference in our family direction and in our family culture. But then, starting about twenty years ago, we developed a whole new level of family unity and synergy. At that time we started developing and organizing the 7 Habits material. We began to realize that successful organizations of all kinds have mission statements. Many were sincere and became the major force in all decision-making; many were written only for public relations purposes. We began to realize what more recent research clearly shows: that the sincere kind of statement is an absolutely critical ingredient of high-performance organizations-fundamental not only to the productivity and success of the organization but also to the satisfaction and happiness of the people who work in it.3 We realized that even though most families begin with a sacred marriage ceremony (which represents a kind of "beginning with the end in mind"), for the most part, families don't have the kind of mission statement so critical to organizational success. Yet family is the most important, fundamental organization in the world, the literal building block of society. No civilization has ever survived its breakup. No other institution can fulfill its essential purpose. No other institution has had its impact for good or ill. Nevertheless, in most families members do not have a deep sense of shared vision around its essential meaning and purpose. They have not paid the price to develop a shared vision and value system, which is the essence of the character and culture of the family.

So we became convinced that we needed to develop a "family mission statement." We had to create a vision of what we wanted our family to be like, what we would live by, what we would stand for-even die for. It would be a vision that was shared and owned by all family members, not just the two of us.

So we began the process of creating it. We met as a family once a week to talk about it. We had different fun activities for the children that helped them tap into their four human gifts and get their ideas out on the table. We brainstormed together. Between family meetings we privately pondered these things. We sometimes discussed them one-on-one or at dinner. One night as we met, we asked the children, "How do you think we could be better parents? In what ways can we improve?" (After twenty minutes of being bombarded by the ideas and suggestions that flowed freely, we said, "Okay, we think we get the idea!") Gradually, we began to address a whole range of deeper issues. We asked family members: What kind of family do we really want to be?

What kind of home would you like to invite your friends to?

What embarrasses you about our family?

What makes you feel comfortable here?

What makes you want to come home?

What makes you feel drawn to us as your parents so that you are open to our influence?

What makes us feel open to your influence?

What do we want to be remembered by?

We asked all the children who could write to make their own list of things that were important to them. They brought back their ideas the following week, and we had an open discussion about why these traits were so important or desirable. Eventually, all of the children wrote their own mission statements about what they felt was important and why. Together we read and discussed each one. Each was thoughtful and special. We had to smile when we read Sean's. Coming from the teenage football frame of mind he held at the time, it read: "We're one heck of a family, and we kick butt!" Not too refined-but to the point.

It took us about eight months to develop our mission statement. Everyone participated. Even my mother was involved. Today we have grandchildren who have also become a part of it, so there are now four generations involved in our family mission statement.

A Destination and a Compass

It is almost impossible to communicate the impact that creating a family mission statement has had on our family-both directly and indirectly. Perhaps the best way to describe it is in terms of the airplane metaphor: Creating a family mission statement has given us a destination and a compass.

The mission statement itself has given us a clear, shared vision of the destination where we as a family want to go. It has been a guide to our family now for a decade and a half. We have it up on a wall in our family room. We look at it often and ask ourselves, "How well are we living up to what we have decided to be and to do? Is our home really a place where the sounds of love are found? Are we being cynical and critical? Do we use cutting humor? Do we walk out on each other and not communicate? Are we giving back or only taking?"

As we compare our actions to this statement, we get feedback that tells us when we're off course. In fact, it is this statement-this sense of destination-that makes feedback meaningful. Without it, feedback becomes confusing and counterproductive. There's no way to tell if it's relevant. There's nothing to measure it against. But a clear sense of shared vision and values enables us to evaluate feedback and use it to make continual course corrections so that we can eventually arrive at our destination.

Our sense of destination also allows us to better understand our present situation and to realize that the ends and means are inseparable; in other words, the destination and the manner of traveling are interwoven. When the destination represents a certain quality of family life and of love in the relationship, is it possible to imagine any separation between that destination and the manner of traveling to get there? In reality, the ends and the means-the destination and the journey-are the same.

Certainly our family is not free from problems, but much of the time, at least, family members really do feel that our home is a place of faith, order, truth, love, happiness, and relaxation. We try to act in ways that are responsibly independent and effectively interdependent. We attempt to serve worthy purposes in society. And we're grateful to see these things manifest in the lives of our married children who now have families of their own and have developed their own mission statements.

The process of creating our mission statement has also enabled us to turn our four unique human gifts into a "compass" to help keep us on track. We had been aware of some of the principles we wanted to live by-principles such as those mentioned in the Emotional Bank Account deposits in Habit 1-but as we came together and talked about them as a family, we reached a whole new level of understanding and commitment to live by them.

As we interacted, self-awareness became family awareness-our ability to see ourselves as a family. Conscience became family conscience-the unity of the shared moral nature of everyone in the family and the clarity that came from discussing these things together. Imagination became creative synergy as we hammered out the issues and came to something everyone could agree on. And independent will became interdependent will or social will as we all worked together to make it happen.

This was one of the most exciting things that developed out of our family mission statement work-the creation of this social will, this sense of "we." This is our decision, our determination. This is what we have decided we are going to be and to do. It represented the collective awareness, the collective conscience, and the collective imagination that came together synergistically to produce this collective commitment, this collective promise or expression of collective will.

Nothing is more bonding and more binding than for everybody to be involved in the process of synergistic interaction and communication until this social will is fashioned and formed. When you create a social will, you produce something that is much more synergistic than just a collection of individual wills. And this gives an entirely new dimension to the concept of synergy. Synergy is producing not just a third alternative solution but a third alternative spirit-the spirit of the family.

In our family, by combining our unique human gifts in this way we were able to create a family compass that helped us determine our direction. That compass serves as an inner guidance system to help us keep our destination clear and move continually toward it. It also enables us to interpret feedback and helps us keep coming back to the flight path time and time again.

Creating Your Own Family Mission Statement

Our own family experience-plus my experience with thousands of families worldwide-has led to the development of a simple three-step process any family can go through to create a family mission statement.

Step One: Explore What Your Family Is All About

The goal here is to get everyone's feelings and ideas out on the table. And depending on your situation, you may choose any one of a variety of ways to do this.

A Mission Statement for Two

If your family is just you and your spouse at this point, you may want to go someplace where you can be alone together for a couple of days or even just a few hours. Enjoy some time just relaxing and being together. When the atmosphere is right, you may want to try to envision together what you want your relationship to be ten, twenty-five, or fifty years down the road. You may want to seek inspiration by reflecting on the words spoken as part of your marriage ceremony. If you can't remember them, you could make it a point to listen when you attend the weddings of relatives and friends. You may hear words such as these: Cleave unto each other and none else.

Observe all the laws, covenants, and obligations pertaining to the holy state of matrimony.

Love, honor, and cherish each other as long as you both shall live.

Be blessed with joy in your posterity.

Have a long life of happiness together.

If words such as these resonate in your heart, they can become the basis for a powerful mission statement.

Or you might find other words to inspire you. In our marriage, Sandra and I have found great inspiration in the Quaker proverb, "Thee lift me and I'll lift thee, and we will ascend together."

You might also discuss together questions such as these: What kind of marriage partners do we want to be?

How do we want to treat each other?

How do we want to resolve our differences?

How do we want to handle our finances?

What kind of parents do we want to be?

What principles do we want to teach our children to help them prepare for adulthood and to lead responsible, caring lives?

How do we help develop the potential talent of each child?

What kind of discipline do we want to use with our children?

What roles (earning, financial management, housekeeping, and so on) will each of us have?

How can we best relate to each other's families?

What traditions do we bring with us from the families in which we were raised?

What traditions do we want to keep and create?

What intergenerational traits or tendencies are we happy or unhappy with, and how do we make changes?

How do we want to give back?

Whatever method you use, remember that the process is as important as the product. Take the time together. Build the Emotional Bank Account. Interact deeply on the issues. Make sure that the final product represents all that is in both of your minds and hearts.

One woman said this: When I met my husband twenty years ago, we were both very frightened of relationships because we had both been burned in marriages before. But one of the things that really impressed me about Chuck from the beginning is that he had actually listed everything he wanted in a marriage relationship and put it on his refrigerator door. So every female who tromped through his apartment had the option of saying, "Yeah, this is what I want" or "No, that's not what I want." He was really clear and up front about it.

So right from the very beginning we were able to work from that list. I added things to it that were important to me, and we worked together at hammering out what we wanted in our relationship. We said, "We will have no secrets from each other," "We will hold no resentments," "We will be totally up front with each other about our needs," and so on.

And going through this has made a tremendous difference in our marriage. It's written in our hearts now. We don't have to go back and say, "Hey, this person isn't living up to this or that," because whenever we feel resentment or whenever we feel something going on that we don't like, we immediately talk to each other. And this has grown out of what we originally agreed to do.