Setting Family Goals with Family-iD - MetroFamily Magazine
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Setting Family Goals with Family-iD

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If you call Greg Gunn on a Wednesday, he won’t pick up. His voicemail message kindly informs callers Wednesday is his family day and he won’t return any calls until Thursday. It’s one of several things he decided to do years ago when he started intentionally planning for his family. That planning he started in his family decades ago has grown into a full-blown business providing workshops and resources to thousands of families across the country. 

Gunn is the founder of Family-iD, an organization that provides tools to enrich parents and families. MetroFamily is partnering with New Covenant United Methodist Church to present Gunn’s Family-iD workshop to local families next month. 

Gunn was inspired to start Family-ID after some successful family goal-setting of his own. In 1996, Gunn was a business owner and a married father of three who had never considered setting family goals. He heard a friend talk of his annual family goal-setting weekend, a time he and his wife escaped to spend three days writing goals for each other, their marriage and their children.

“I was very convinced of the importance of written goals because of the fact I was a business owner,” Gunn said. “I’d been to so many self-improvement courses and one thing they all had in common was the importance of having written goals. I was a fanatical goal-setter. But the thought of doing it for my family wasn’t a thousand miles within my head.”

So Gunn asked his friend to walk him through the process of setting goals for his family and creating a vision and a mission statement to guide them. Gunn then took his wife on their own goal-setting weekend and his life changed forever. 

“I was very short-sighted in my thinking as a father and a husband,” Gunn said of his life before he started setting family goals 20 years ago. “We had three children at the time, our youngest was 6 months old. It has just been absolutely mind-boggling how all that changed. We couldn’t go back to just being unintentional about the way we thought about our family and our future. We were ruined in a good way.”

He came back from the weekend with a family mission statement. He had practical goals for himself and his wife like losing weight and spending more time together. For his kids, goals ranged from spiritual and character goals to simple tasks like brushing his or her teeth without being asked. 

As his employees and friends began to see how his family life had improved, they began to ask him to share his goal-setting agenda. That grew into invitations to more formal speaking engagements, which grew into Gunn founding Family-iD. 

Since then, about 4,000 families in North America and 5,000 in India have gone through the Family-iD workshop. The workshop follows four simple steps to help families set goals and live with intention:

  • Stir It Up: Gunn aims to stir up the vision that’s already in families. People who attend the workshop will discover what’s important to them as a family unit.
  • Write It Down: Audience members will have the time and resources to get that unique vision on paper so they can start living with intention.
  • Live It Out: Through Family-iD’s ongoing resources, people who attend the workshop will have encouragement as they leave the event and begin to live out their values.
  • Pass It On: Family-iD presents a multi-generational plan to set the foundation so people who attend the workshop can watch successive generations live out important values.

Two identical workshop sessions will be available: 9 a.m. to noon and 1:30 to 4:30 p.m. on March 5 at New Covenant United Methodist Church (2700 S. Boulevard, Edmond). The cost of the workshop is $25 per family and child care is available (for those kids who are not readers) for an additional $10 per family. Click here to purchase tickets. 

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