Somehow Maximus and i missed reviewing our Relationship Vision, Values, and Goals last year–that should tell you just how chaotic last year was! We’ve never missed a year, so this was a big deal.

Values

We started with our values. As before, we brainstormed values and i wrote them on Post-It notes. We came up with quite a lot!

We came up with:

• Travel *
• Friends
• Fun
• Entertainment (Parties, Movies, Theatre) *
• Adventure
• Fitness *
• Family
• Learning
• Work
• Financial Stability
• Home *
• Support (emotional, physical) *
• GOT *
• Health
• Mindfulness *
• Patience *
• Contentment *
• Happiness *
• Balance *
• D/s *
• Sexuality
• Honesty *
• Disclosure *
• Communication *
• Accountability *

Then i compared them with what we came up with in 2014. A * indicates a new value from last time. i stacked duplicates and added what we felt were relevant from 2014:

• Faith
• Organization
• Compassion
• Cleanliness
• Autonomy
• Selflessness
• Creativity
• Spontaneity
• Order

We then worked on ranking them as to their priority in our lives together. As we went along, we realized several were supportive of major values, so it ended up as a tree of sorts. As always, this process lead to a lot of discussion on meaning and level of importance–which is just as important, if not more so, as the exercise itself!

Here are how our values worked out for 2017. It’s a bit more complex than last time. The bold text is a major category, supporting values are bulleted beneath. It has surprised us both times that faith has come in last. i think that the events of 2016 really influenced us, in that health ranked second this time, above family and career.

 Our 2017 Values

Our GOT Relationship

• Support
  • Emotional
  • Physical
• Patience
• Mindfulness
• Compassion
• Selflessness
• Autonomy
• Accountability
• Communication, Honesty, Disclosure
• Sexuality
• D/s

Health and Fitness

Family

Work, Career, Lifelong Learning

Financial Stability

Home

• Cleanliness
• Order
• Organization

Fun

• Friendships
• Travel
• Entertainment
• Adventure
• Spontaneity
• Parties
  • Vanilla
  • Kink

Faith

So going forward, these are the values we will use to guide our decision making processes.

Relationship Vision

Now that we’d completed our values, we looked at our existing relationship vision to make sure that it still applied. And we found it did:

GOT – a lifelong, harmonious, loving, committed relationship together.

There was some discussion about this as Maximus thought it should simply say, “GOT,” but i need it spelled out.

Goals

We started by going through our 2015 goals since we hadn’t worked on 2016 goals and reconciled 2015. Turns out, we did a pretty good job of completing our 2015 goals. We noted that some were completed in 2016, so while we hadn’t written down goals for 2016 we did have an idea in our minds of what we wanted to accomplish based upon the task two years ago.

i’m not going to include the goals here as i have them in an Excel spreadsheet that i use to track our goals on a quarterly basis.

It feels good to be back on track with our Values, Vision, and Goals. It is a nice way to start a new year, knowing we are on track with each other and have things to check ourselves on.