Goldman Family Principles

My husband and I have been spending some time articulating the values and principles that we feel are most important for our family to live by.  As the parents of two young children, we thought it was a timely conversation; as a non-religious family, we want to solidify our core values and begin to think about how best to impart those to our youngsters.

We started with a list from Donna Skeels Cygan's book The Joy of Financial Security.  After individually narrowing down the checklist to our top 20 values, my husband and I went through them together to develop a common list.  We found that many items on the list could be grouped together, like Public Service with Charity, Volunteering, Giving Back, and Generosity, which made it easier to keep our list at 20 values.  Here's our combined list, in no particular order:

Service
Appreciation of Beauty
Equality
Willingness
Honesty
Curiosity
Serenity
Creativity
Optimism
Open-Mindedness
Humility
Financial Responsibility
Kindness
Patience
Courage
Cooperation
Acceptance
Tolerance
Clarity of Communication
Healthy Living

We then wanted to unpack those values, defining what they each mean for our family and how we can incorporate each one into our lives.  At first I thought that some sort of hierarchy flowchart in Word or PowerPoint would work well, but after playing around a bit, I found Prezi to be the best tool.  You can take a look at my work in progress here.  Then I decided to make a Wordle as a handy and pretty reference sheet for our values (see image above).  I plan to print it in color and hang it somewhere in our house--maybe the upstairs hallway?