Family Strategy

As part of the birth activism I am involved with in my local community I was given the opportunity to sit in a round table strategy session guided by a professional and highly paid creative strategist who works with small businesses and organizations. He is volunteering his services in support of the legislation and work we are doing. (Hoo-rah!)

Being the entrepreneurs that we are, I have been learning about the value of paying someone for the information they have to offer. Earlier this Fall I had a firestarter session with Danielle Laporte about my business I am working towards launching. It’s tough to bite that bullet and pay when you are just starting up, but it was so damn empowering and pushed me ahead light years. In other words: it was well worth it.

So there I am– sitting in this strategist’s funky office and being guided down an inspirational and creative get-it-done rabbit hole of a journey and I had an aha moment. I found myself wishing Stone and I could hire this guy to strategize for our family. I mean sure he’s working with businesses and organizations, but in many ways a family unit is not any different than a business. (I will be talking about this more in the future.)

I woke up in the moment and realized I was being given a gift in many ways. Not only was he gifting the community and BirthNet his time and expertise, but I could apply what I was learning from him to our own family.

I love it when this happens! There have been many times in my life where I have felt limited by money. For the most part we have everything we need and much more, but there are always those fantastic trainings, or retreats, or trips or creative strategist packages that are a bit out of our reach financially. We have made a very conscious decision to live simply so that Stone could spend more time at home with the family and less time working. This lifestyle sometimes leaves us short of extras, but after I’m done feeling sorry about not having something I want, I usually find a way to get the same or similar experience through a different, accessible and thus self-empowered path.

I wrote about this last year when I took advantage of the environmental lecture up at Cornell and was sitting in a room full of award winning environmentalists, Cornell faculty and students learning about the future of environmental architecture and sustainable city planning for the next generations. I had been feeling like I could not afford to go back to school and sitting at that lecture helped me realize that I could learn anything I wanted to without the hefty tuition bill.

We had a similar realization two winters ago as we mused what we most wanted to do with our time. In the summer you might find us out walking all over the town until late evening with the kids sleeping in the double stroller, but the winter finds us inside our tiny house. We talked about how the winter would be a great time to study things we are interested in and somehow the conversation turned into a full scale, “WE CAN HAVE OUR IDEAL LIFE RIGHT HERE IN OUR OWN HOME!” It was such a radical idea to us at that moment. We didn’t need expensive yoga retreats or classes we couldn’t afford: we could design our own ideal life. We started doing yoga every other night together and doing guided meditations and reading about aquaculture and sustainable home building. It was a very freeing feeling. On our “off” nights we watched netflix movies, ate dark chocolate, drank wine and had dance parties in our kitchen.

We’re making some changes in our life right now. Stone, who has been working under the umbrella of a local business is going to go out on his own this year. This is giving him the opportunity to focus on the kind of work he really wants to do. I am constantly asking him, “But what do you really want to do? Forget about money and need to’s–what would your work look like in your ideal world?”

On my end, I have had visions and passions simmering on the back burner, like a deep nutritious stock for some time now. I feed it whenever I can, but the going has been slow as I grow, birth and nourish my family. I try to stay very clear about what my priorities are (my children’s childhood) while staying true to my personal passions and finding ways to integrate them into a family lifestyle and our need to provide for our family.

Stone has been providing for us financially these past few years, making for foggy dreams as he wonders if it’s possible to provide for a family AND live his ideal life. I’ve had the gift of being with my children and following my passions without needing to bring in money and now I am feeling like it is time to contribute to family income in order to balance dynamics. I want to relieve some pressure from Stone and as we rework how our family works we are trying to keep our visions and goals as high and close to our creative passions as possible.

So while Stone shifts to a place where he believes his passions can provide (and takes the leap of following them!) and I shift towards a place that believes my time and work are worth something in this world we continue to support each other on our individual and shared paths.

It’s been a wonderful week of applying strategy and dreaming and inspiration and I look forward to sharing the process of our unfolding.

Tagged as: family business, the new american dream, the plan