Most of us belong to a family. We love our family. We get together and try to have fun and we feel a sense of connection that has more to do with habit and genes than and specific set of values that we decide to bring to the relationship.
Here are 18 things you can do right away to improve the texture of your family experience on a daily basis:
1. Does your family love just because you are family? Would they give you the time of day if you were not? Would your attitudes and actions win their respect and admiration? Would they think you are a nice person? Cultivate 3 habits in your life that would make your family think the world of you even if you were not related
2. Call a family meeting for a few minutes and define 5 specific values that you want to be prominent in the family.
3. Have a specific time to get together and share every day or every week. Make it a priority. Create a routine and stick to it.
4. Take pictures together. Tell the story and note the kind of story the family is telling.
5. Control the reputation of the family. Ask the question, “From the way we live our lives, what qualities do the neighbours attribute to us as a family? Who do they think we are?”
6. Decide collectively to live in such a way that your family would make a positive difference in your neighbourhood.
7. Get together and laugh. Make happiness a priority and do simple things to lift up one another.
8. Profit from your family tradition. Every family is unique. Know what makes your family unique. Identify one or two things from the history of your elders, decide what is good and decide to promote it in the context of the family and pass it on.
9. Honour your family. Don’t look down on your family because other families might be more affluent.
10. Create opportunities for the members of the family to collaborate on a project – build something together. Visit the homeless together. The more you work together the happier you will be.
11. Help other families that are not as fortunate as you. Find a specific way to do it.
12. As a family, get together and give. One Christmas each member of a particular family decided what amount of money they were going to spend on gifts for each other. They then put that money together and gave it to a poor family overseas. This was the happiest Christmas they ever had. They changed the lives of others and their own lives were changed for the better.
13. Live with the happiness of each other in mind. Let compliments fall like rain.
14. Decide on 5 things that are important to your family and install them.
15. A good family is never found but created. Create a safe environment for each other within the family where each one feels free to tell the truth, however ugly but each person must be able to stand the truth from each other without rushing to judgment and condemnation.
17. Do something spiritual that will lift you all up together every week. Go for a walk, visit a sick person, meditate, contemplate or worship together.
18. Remember that you have the health of your family members in your hands. You can drive them crazy. You can make them sick. You can be a source of constant irritation and stress. This affects the heart and the immune system in negative ways. Aim to boost health at home in everything you do or say, so that you will strengthen the physiology of those who are closest to you.