If there is one area of our lives that the world tells us is perfectly okay to neglect, it’s our marriages. What we don’t see often enough is the correlation between neglect to divorce and what that really means. We have begun to normalize the fallout of families, the rebuilding of new ones and simply accept the odds. By the end of this post, you’ll walk away with all the tools you need to write your own Legacy Statement.
I share with you today a simple yet life-changing system that will catalyze you and your husband to engage and turn off the autopilot. Start today and begin changing the future for not only your marriage but for the lives of your children, their children, and for all of the people around you.
Listen below for the entire episode on The Systemize Your Life Podcast
How a Legacy Statement Changed Our Family for Future Generations
Blaine and I both grew up in families where our parents were super involved and just awesome. Our parents were married throughout all of our childhood. Once we grew up and went to college, our parents got divorced. We both saw this. Our parents were happy, but we both learned from those marriages that there is a lot to be done outside of raising kids together to keep your marriage healthy and whole.
The season of raising kids is busy, it’s hectic. You have a lot of mouths to feed, a lot of places to go, a lot of laundry to do, and as individuals, we can get lost in those things. Sometimes women get lost in their jobs, or they get lost in their side hustles, and men typically get lost in work. Marriage becomes the last thing on the plate. I have always had this spark inside of my bones that said I’m not doing it that way.
Use a Legacy Statement to Create a Strong Foundation in Your Marriage
When I met Blaine, he was very serious about what he wanted, which was very yolked with what I wanted. I came to him and told him that I cared a lot about us not being roommates. We used this resource called XO marriage. It’s a biblically based support for marriage based out of Texas. We used their youtube videos when we were dating long distance to ensure things we believed in lined up together. We used this as a starting point to discuss what we wanted our lives to look like together.
Although we came to our marriage later in our lives with things already established, we still had a good foundation underneath us because of our intentional conversations going into our relationship about what we wanted our life to look like.
One thing we wanted to ensure our marriage had was this overarching goal for what we were to accomplish together. I have always been adamant that you and your husband can do more together than you can on your own. You can get more done in your home and business if you are a teammate with your husband than if you aren’t working with him.
“I have always been adamant that you and your husband can do more together than you can on your own.”
That goes for everything. For the impact, you can make not only on your children but on other family members around you and your community. You have a greater impact when working as a team with your husband. I don’t know many people that do this, to be honest. I learned part of this from XO marriage.
What Do You Want Your Marriage and Life to Look Like?
One thing that Blaine always said was that he wanted a family creed. Something that I wanted was a legacy statement. Like a mission statement, but something that will permeate for generations to come. It is what we wake up and live for.
Do you know what you and your husband as a couple are waking up and living for? Is it to raise your kids? To clean your house? To make money to pay bills? It needs to be defined and tangible. You need to know what that is, or else you are aimlessly doing routine things on autopilot without real meaning and depth.
We were just trying to get our feet underneath us with everything we had to take on for a while. From the word go, it’s been trial by fire. Most relationships are, but marriage retreats are one thing we have done through it all. From the very beginning, we have gone on marriage retreats. It started out as a one or two-day, and now it is a three-day marriage retreat. We had the kids with us for some of them, and a babysitter came with us.
Work Together To Define Your Family Legacy
This is where we started to define our legacy that fulfilled what we believed we were called to do together. These are deep and meaningful conversations. If you have never had them with your spouse, a lot of stuff will come up, but it’s worth it. There is so much joy that has come from Blaine and I knowing what we are achieving in our lives every single day.
We stopped and thought about when our kids were grown and what we wanted our life to look like. While raising our kids, what do we need to do for our lives to look like that? We aren’t just coming up with these things and creating on our own. I truly believe that we are given visions that are meant for us.
My vision for my life with Blaine, and his vision for his life with me, no one else will have those. Maybe your vision and your dreams and what you want to do in your marriage may look similar to ours, but it’s so unique to what you and your husband are, and it’s such an incredible thing when you actually sit down and articulate this.
Choose a Legacy Statement That Is Unique To You and Your Marriage
Whenever we went to a marriage retreat, I would open this can of worms. He would rattle off these things he would want for a family creed, but I would say I want it to be deeper than that. I don’t want it just to be this thing where we write the principles and values we live by. I want it to be what we were called to do when paired up.
No other two people on this planted can do what Blaine and I can do. No other two people on this planet can do what you and your husband can do together. It is so unique to your gifts, personalities, strengths, and weaknesses, to what your family looks like with your resources or lack of resources. There is so much power in what you two can do together when you simply sit down and agree on what you will work toward every single day.
To keep us from going into autopilot, to keep us from backsliding into the worst versions of ourselves that end up falling in love with other things and not each other. All the potential I have for myself as a person depends on our marriage’s potential. When I think about what my life would be like without my marriage, I am nothing. It is truly the foundation of what I was created to do now. It’s such a huge deal that people have lost sight of it. That is how we came up with our legacy statement.
Finding The True Purpose of Your Marriage
It’s something that I have always been so passionate about. It was me not turning my cheek to that voice. It’s taken me a long time to understand that a marriage isn’t going to be perfect, but it can still have a purpose.
I have helped Blaine, and I define our purpose by creating a legacy statement and a family creed that goes with that. I’m sure there are many ways for you and your spouse to be intentional. There are always multiple ways to do one thing; this is just how I have done it, and I feel very strongly about it and how it has changed our lives. Having this one simple statement for everything we do helps us in every aspect.
How a Legacy Statement Can Strengthen Your Marriage
When I’m feeling frumpy, he will come up and remind me of our legacy statement. I will remind him of the legacy statement when he is kind of grumpy about mundane things. It’s very clear what happens when you don’t live with intention. Even further than that, you can intend to live one way, and your husband can intend to live another.
But this specific legacy statement allows you to have a purpose outside of raising kids. Having that impact on your children impacts how they choose their spouses, who they don’t choose, and how they raise their children, which then impacts generations and generations to come.
If you, out of all your siblings, are the only married couple that chooses to do this, you are going to impact your nieces and nephews. So all of those little cousins are going to be impacted. Anyone you welcome into your life and welcome into your home will be impacted by the choice for you two to sit down and craft this legacy statement that allows you to make a generational impact and change.
Not just so that you can have a happy empty nesting party and a happy retirement party without your kids, but for the health and wellbeing and the success of everything that you do and your kids do, and your grandkids do and so on and so on.
How We Wrote Our Legacy Statement
The Moore family legacy is to live out a fun-filled marriage so that we can inspire stale and disengaged couples to live more thriving and deeply connected marriages. That is why Blaine and I truly believe we were put together. That statement is a couple of years in the making. It took us a few marriage retreats to figure out many things and get to know each other. Now we have been living on this legacy statement since then, and we have refined it and honed it.
I have a very specific formula that allows you to fill in the blanks of your legacy statement. I have an entire video that we recorded together inside of the The Systemize Your Life Academy and Blaine comes inside of tier 4 in those videos to give his feedback from his perspective. It was so fun and really awesome to watch that play out and come to life.
What we aim to do is to make it really fun and really simple for every woman that comes through the Academy to be able to walk away with not only a legacy statement but also their family creed. The creed is what allows you to know which actions you need to take to be able to fulfill your legacy statement.
Step 1 To Creating a Legacy Statement: What Problem Do You Want Impact With Your Marriage
I want you and your spouse to sit down together, and I want you to figure out what kind of problem you see in the world that you want to impact through your marriage. You have to know what you are trying to accomplish. What Blaine and I saw growing up that we didn’t want to see happen again was our families being broken.
Although our families had fun, the marriage wasn’t what was having fun. The marriage, in and of itself, was kind of disengaged. We sat down and thought about a bunch of different problems. Whatever problems you are passionate about, we put it down and work out what we both were passionate about and want to make a difference in together.
The problem that Blaine and I really want to impact through our marriage was a resounding yes. It’s for other families to see that they don’t have to be disengaged. They don’t have to be sucked dry from the day-to-day and end up divorced with broken families. It doesn’t have to be that way.
Are there any other things you must do to keep that from happening in your marriage? Absolutely, but if we could be just one drop in the bucket, that would help. When you pick a lane, you stay in it, and you stay focused, you are able to make more of an impact. We want to make an impact on this specific problem.
Step 2 to Creating a Legacy Statement: What Would The World Look Like Without That Problem
The next question is, what would the world look like without that problem? For healthy marriages, there would be lower divorce rates, and there would be better mental health with our kids, with our families and our communities. There would be more thriving people. Divorce is sometimes necessary. I was a single mom, and that was extremely necessary, but not always.
As children, we don’t always know what that looks like and what that means, but what I do know is that if my parents had had a bunch of fun together, it’s likely they maybe wouldn’t have wanted to divorce if they were excited about the fun they were having together all the time. That is what we then came to.
Step 3 to Creating a Legacy Statement: What Solution Can Your Marriage Provide to Solve This Problem
What solution can your marriage provide to solve this problem? Blaine and I looked at our strengths. What strength do we have that could make a real dent in this problem? Fun. Blaine and I love to have fun. That is what we have been doing since we met. We love it. We actually have too much fun most of the time. When he’s home, he’s such a terrible distraction for me. I just want to have fun with him.
We want to use that. We want to capitalize on that strength that we have. Resources that we have in our lives allow us to be a fun couple, from the spirit we carry to the time we have because of his schedule and where we live. Blaine relocated from Ohio to Arizona because it is fun here.
That was the solution we came up with. We wanted to inspire other families to have lots of fun through dates and, enjoying our kids and being involved in different activities, doing fun things. So that is how we came up with the Moore family legacy.
Make Your Legacy Statement Your Own
Write down our legacy and just replace it with yours. Replace our problem with your problem, our outcome for your outcome, our solution for your solution, and you will come up with your legacy statement.
Ours reads: The Moore family legacy is to live out a fun-filled marriage so that we can inspire stale and disengaged couples to live more thriving and deeply connected marriages. If every day that is what Blaine and I choose to do, what an amazing legacy we could leave.
How to Use Your Legacy Statement In Your Day-to-Day Life
When Blaine is having a really hard time with the girls, I’m across the room and will yell, “Fun Filled! How are we being fun-filled?” He knows, ok, I’m not being fun right now, and he switches into fun mode, and things get better right away. His attitude turns to, “How can I make this fun-filled”.
Since this is our marriage legacy statement, this is not about our children, not about what we want to be as parents and children, it’s what we want to be as a couple. That’s the kicker. What do you believe you and your husband were put together to do? What does that look like?
When we are having a hard time, we sit down and look at the last time we had fun. The big thing for me is, have I laughed today? I’m so serious. Inside of my dream board, I have the word laugh in all caps, really big, with a picture of us laughing hysterically because I don’t laugh enough. Sometimes, if I’m cranky or uptight, Blaine will ask if I have laughed today. It is a moment where I don’t get defensive because this is what we aim to do.
Don’t Lose Sight of Your Legacy Statement
If we lose sight of this day after day, guess what seven days turns into: a week, then a month. Do you know how easy it is to lose sight of this vision and this dream, and your legacy when you are caught up in the mundane of the day-to-day? It’s really easy, and you will go weeks, months, and years where you have completely lost sight of what you and your husband are called to do together as a couple.
This is our fix for that. It is our system to keep us on track and show our children that there is purpose and there is meaning to Blaine and me. No matter what happens, that is what we try and aim to do. To live out a fun-filled marriage to inspire stale and disengaged couples.
Use Your Legacy Statement to Nurture Your Marriage
We hope that through our stories, we can share all the fun we have. Do we share all our messes? No. Do we have struggles? Absolutely. So do you. But we aim to have fun as often as possible because it brings us joy and closer. It allows us to have an intimacy together that I can’t share with any other human on this planet. It’s a joy that only he and I can experience.
The more that we infuse that into our marriage, it becomes the legacy that we live as we raise our children. As they go out into the world to become their own individual, they will carry that out with them for the rest of their lives. So please, use this moment to sit down and create something that will provide something for generations to come from you and your husband.
I would love it if you came over in the Facebook group with me and let me know what you are working on in your partnership with your husband. I want to know what you thought! If you want to dive in even deeper, come on over and check out The Systemize Your Life Academy, where we dive into all the systems and spend some time helping you develop and grow your partnership with your spouse.
Frequently Asked Questions
I love the idea of a legacy statement but are there any day to day suggestions you have for systemizing your marriage?
Sure do. The first thing I want you to realize is that you need to be intentional with your time. If you haven’t discovered my Fundamental Needs (yes…there is a free workbook!) start there. Make sure that you prioritize your marriage within your fundamental needs.
