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Ep. 232 | How to Lead an Annual Family Summit · The Family Teams Podcast

• 0:00
  Just take a stock and an assessment of how did the family do this year? Was it healthy? Were we thriving? What worked? What didn't work?
• 0:10
  What's up, guys? Jeff and Jeremy here. We want to talk about this week, how to lead an annual family summit. Now, if you're listening to this, don't think it's too late also, because we're still in like the first month-ish of the year. And to me, that's really, you know, still a really good time to do it because you still have the entire year ahead of you. So don't think like, I got to wait till the end of this year or whatever.
• 0:30
  to do it, but then how do we do it or why is it important? And I think a family summit is deeply, deeply important for a couple of reasons. One, there's no other organizational structure that doesn't do something like this. Almost all businesses do offsites, do retreats, do quarterly summits or meetings. And then they certainly do some type of end of the year review is sometimes what they call it. Churches do this with like planning out the content and the sermons and the vision from the elders. I mean, every single organizational structure is,
• 0:57
  has some level of kind of marking the annual rhythm to look back, look forward. And what is also really true about those that also we don't do as much in our personal ones is a lot of them spend almost as just as much time looking back as they do looking forward, right? I think so much when we get to the personal, we just like goals, goals, goals, future, future, future. And I'm like, you know, I think they do that in those. But a lot of times, like even what I just said with the business, it's called an end of the year review. So that actually has nothing to do with next year.
• 1:23
  It's like, you're just looking at this last year. And what that does is looking back at the last year, automatically already starts kind of setting the tone for next year, if that makes sense. Like you almost know what you need to work on by looking at last year. You almost don't even have to have that conversation by looking at the review. And I think reflecting is really important. We and Alyssa did a whole episode on this on the real life podcast, but on how we kind of craft it. But I think, yeah, in general,
• 1:45
  What would it look like to set a day or two aside? And for us, when I say a day or two, I mean, we did it in kind of blocks. Like I would just kind of a couple hours here, back with the kids, a couple hours there, where you're kind of setting aside time to ask yourself the big questions, right? To ask yourself what worked, what didn't work, to look at everything from the spiritual, the emotional, to the physical, and just kind of assess that.
• 2:05
  Just take a stock and an assessment of how did the family do this year? Was it healthy? Were we thriving? What worked? What didn't work? How was our team, right? Just like any team should assess their team and looking at all of those different things. So Jeremy, how have you guys kind of done this? What does that look like?
• 2:20
  Yeah, we just finished our annual summit. We love this rhythm. You know, when you think about the idea of a summit, it's a really good analogy because what you want to do is in your year somewhere you want to get up really high and kind of lets you look both directions. And so the first part of a summit is you turn around and look at the
• 2:37
  Where have you come from? You celebrate, you review, you talk about how it went. And so, like Jeff said, a lot of what you need to do in terms of future strategizing oftentimes really comes from the reflection, asking good questions about what were the high points, what were the low points.
• 2:55
  And so just those questions, those reflections, the way our family does that is we have we spend about an hour. Each of the kids, we just do lots of journaling. We give them a bunch of questions and then we go out to a really long meal, dinner, and we just sort of go around and spend a couple hours really reflecting on the last year. And then the next morning and the next day we get up and we start working on the future. What are things we need to strategize?
• 3:22
  And in our family, you guys know we live into a seven-day rhythm really intentionally. And so a lot of the most effective ways to plan going into the future is just tweaking that rhythm. And so what are things that felt like were a little off that could have worked better? What creative ideas can we generate that would help us make some really thoughtful tweaks to our rhythm? Or are there things we just need to drop or things we need to add?
• 3:46
  And those conversations happen the next day. And so that's kind of like looking forward. You're on top of that summit and you're looking at the paths and you're kind of like seeing multiple paths. You're like, where do we want to go? Let's plot our course and figure out how we get from where we are now to to even a better place next year. So I love the idea of having that. Like Jeff said, everyone who is leading a healthy organization does these kind of offsites. And so families need to have these as well.
• 4:12
  Yeah, guys. And one thing and one resource we want to give you a shout out to, and actually where we work on the Family Summits, is Homeroom. Now, if you don't know Homeroom, it's closed right now when you're probably listening to this, but stay tuned. You can go to homeroomonline.com to get on the waiting list. But what it is, it's basically a membership program, man, where it's this entire community of, you know, I think 2,000 of us now at this point.
• 4:32
  rolling up our sleeves and month by month, leaning into new content, new questions, working on kind of challenges and problems of what does it mean to be a multi-generational family team on mission. And so every month centers on one tool, one resource, one challenge. And then we all just dig in and we all, and we have a Facebook group where we're all sharing and sharpening and asking ideas and what works, what doesn't work. How's that working for you? What are you seeing? Really, really powerful. And enrollment only opens twice a year for a couple of days. I think we're opening again in March. So stay tuned or you can go to the waiting list at homeroomonline.com.