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What traditions and rituals should be set up?

While the obvious answer is… “it depends”… there is a basic premise for setting up rituals that can help a family decide what to focus on. There are daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly rituals that eventually shape traditions in a household.

Daily

These daily rituals shape the habits of daily living. This includes, but not limited to, how one brushes their teeth, to turning off the cell-phones at night, to where and how people sit at the dinner table, and what times the family wakes up in the morning.

While a great way to help young children learn the ways of a family, these rituals can be tweaked to help adults run the house better. Once you know what a ritual is, you can modify it and improve on it to serve you better.

Example: If the goal for a given year is to get into better shape, tweaking the morning wake up ritual can allow the family to eventually get up earlier and workout together as a team… increasing the chances of success towards that goal. Same with devotions as a family or eating healthier meals.

Once daily rituals are well practiced, they become habits that can be life long. Once it becomes life long, it becomes part of the culture and tradition of the person and family.

Weekly

For some, it’s going to church on specific days. For others, it’s shopping on specific days. Whatever the case, these weekly rituals form a body of traditions that influences the quality of life in the home.

It doesn’t have to be complicated either. It can be something a simple as the ritual of welcoming the weekend as a family and changing the sleeping pattern over the weekend… as in everyone piles into the parent’s bed for a story only on weekends.

It can be date night that keeps the romance alive… once a week… throughout the marriage. It can be more mundane as to how to teach the children to take the trash out weekly or how the budget is set for the week.

These weekly rituals may take a bit more planning to initiate and keep going until they become automatic. Once they’re in place, it helps with coping with changes life throws at you. If a parent changes from day shift work to night shift work, the daily and weekly rituals will help the family adjust faster than if these were not in place.

These practices helps pace the week, helps give a sense of normal for the week, and keeps the bonds in the home feeling secure.

Monthly

These types of rituals are great for planning the direction of the family. It could be something like the monthly budget meeting, or the monthly review of goals, or celebrating the victories of the month, or welcoming a new month. It’s up to the family to decide how they want to handle these.

A mentor of mine taught his family a lot about business through their monthly budget meetings. They learned enough about running their lives that they’re doing very well compared to their cohort. Now, I’m trying to learn to do the same with my own, because it helps keep everyone on the same page each month.

Because of the levels of cognition needed for some of these rituals, it’s not appropriate for all ages. A two year old who barely understands the days of the week will not benefit from a family budget meeting… but a three year old could benefit from the celebrating of changes of the month rituals.

Change of seasons, by the way, can fall into monthly rituals as well as seasonal rituals.

Yearly & Seasonal

Nothing like a good birthday party to celebrate a milestone. Yes, birthdays are both traditions and rituals. Not every family celebrates a birthday the same way.

The larger arched rituals and traditions are part of the family culture. A reminder of progress, growth, and a sense of direction forward.

In the case of celebrating my grandma’s 90th birthday some years ago, we learned a lot about the legacy she had built, we learned a lot about the hopes she has for her lineage, and we all found common ground in the way every branch of the family tree celebrated the event. We had a shared set of rituals and traditions. It made us all feel closer while learning something very special.

Can’t wait to do this for her on her 100th soon.

The yearly and seasonal traditions are a great way to remember the victories and blessings we often can take for granted in the daily grind.

Conclusion

It is one thing to have rituals and traditions in place. They’re helpful. Understanding how they work is key to helping CEOs shape the future of their household.

Without time to examine patterns, we’re often in auto-pilot and letting the ship steer us. We’re called to lead the home. This means understanding all the nuances of how the home is run and being able to make adjustments as we need to.

The biggest advantage of understanding how rituals and traditions work, we can pull out the positive and celebrate the victories each person makes within the various rituals.

Example. We often cheer and celebrate when a child takes their first steps or goes to the bathroom on their own. We don’t remember that the cheering is part of a ritual of promoting success. When we realize that, we can decide to continue that ritual and promote more successes later in life. Such as the first good grade, the first stepping up to a higher grade, the first date, the first job.

But it’s not just the positive either. It’s how we address things we feel are failures. If we’re already in the habit of championing success as a tradition, when someone in the home has a setback, like the loss of a job or bad grade, we can help them find the positive and the lessons in the setback and pull them back into a winning hunt.

As CEOs of the home, it is our duty to help everyone inside the home advance in life. Let’s make sure we have winning attitudes backed by winning rituals that shape a tradition of winning.


Below will be a list of all the blog posts related to this series…

 

Empowering the Home Through Rituals and Traditions

Every family has their own rituals and traditions. Some are seasonal, others are life long. How we curate and shape our rituals will impact our traditions which impacts our legacy. The roles of the CEOs of the home in shaping rituals and traditions changes over time. Being intentional about these will greatly empower your family.

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Championing Success Through Empowered Communications

Words have an impact. They paint amazing images. When words are backed by actions, they leave a lasting impression. What we choose to speak, how we speak it, when we speak it can make or break the motivation of a family member. The CEOs of the home are mindful and careful to champion the success of their home.

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To Improve a Family Tree, Improve a Family’s Network

Everyone has a network. Each family has a network. The strength of the various connections impacts the net-worth of the network. The network of networks isn’t limited to bloodlines either. The CEOs of the home knows how to leverage connectivity to empower the homes connected to the network.

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A Model of a Resilient Home

When things get tough, that’s when you see how tough you really are. Thankfully, resilience is a skill that can be learned before tough times arrive. Between strong bonds and habits, one can practice and learn the craft of rebounding through adversity. The attitude of gratitude finds a way into the mindset that gives CEOs of the home an edge in facing life.

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The Graciously Empowered Family

CEOs of the home have many duties. One of which is to leave their homes empowered. The skills and grace required to achieve the vision is ever changing. This overview posts captures part of a seminar’s experience in helping heads of families improve their skills at leading their homes. The Chief Empowerment Office is a very busy place where magic seems to happen. Good thing there is a bit of science to the art.

There is a list of supporting blog posts at the end.

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