The Leader in Me

The school that our boys are attending has been very suprising to us in their approach. They use the book by Stephen Covey titled The Leader in Me based on The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. The habits instantly sounded familiar to me. My husband told the boys that he had learned in college what they were learning in elementary school. It has brought a different sort of language to our home. They are talking about proactive, synergize and sharpening their saw. Even our priest used Sharpen Your Saw in his homily a couple weeks ago. James instantly recognized it and realized they were learning something big.

I found the book at our library so I could learn more about how they were implementing these habits. I love that the book ties in how to further the habits at home as well. One of the statement in the book is "Treat a man as he is and you make him worse than he is. Treat a man as he has the potential to become and you make him better than he is." My boys are growing fast. This tells me that I need to be envisioning the men that I want them to become and start communicating that potential to them now. They will have more opportunities for practicing leadership with joining scouts this year as well.

One of the recommendations in bringing it home is to create a family mission statement. I have seen this suggested before and avoided it because it seemed vague and unrealistic without means of measuring success. But I want our home environment to be a result of all of our goals and ideas. The boys had helpedbwith creating a class misdion statement the first week of school. I knew they woul be familiar with the process. So we sat down this week and made a first draft. Some of the suggestions were kindness, respect, honesty and love. We started it with our anchor in our faith and ended with regular goals for each family member so that we are growing and measuring our progress realistically.

As we mull over our ideas we wrote, we will make a plan to come back and write it out clearly. Then begin to align systems so that we are successful in creating the culture that we all want. From the two pages we have written, I think it will look more like a family resolution.

Great book! There is also another book mentioned called the 8th Habit so I think I will look for that one next. I appreciate that this journey in public school is inspiring growth in more than just academics