Welcome to Family In The Arena

Welcome to Family In The Arena

Welcome to our "how we do life" movement, or as we're calling it Family In The Arena.  We've been a fan of many Teddy Roosevelt works and principles over the years - the strenuous life, travel, and sacrifice summed up with the Man in the Arena poem printed and displayed prominently on one of our walls.  This poem has helped guide and steer our family's decision-making and raising of our children.  We hope that the posts and content here help inspire your family by generating meaningful conversations for you and yours that shape where you're heading.   

Planning is a 
process we can 
get better at 
with practice.

As we unpack the expectations of what you'll find here at Family In The Arena it is the intentional, meaningful, proactive, strategies and tactics to live your best family life.  In the intersection of what we perhaps have talent, interest, and a need in the world we came up with a couple of buckets or themes from our family to yours.  The three buckets in the description above make up Family In The Arena.  Raising Adventure is our sort of "so what" around our mission statement/vision for how we raise our family - adventure being central to that.  In our observation, in many ways, screens are polluting if not outright killing adventure, especially in our upcoming generations and Raising Adventure is an intentional pushback.  

You'll notice a theme here...
we cook a lot of hotdogs.

Plan Fam is a sort of "how to" movement and set of tools to help you be more efficient and effective in your "what" and "why" through intentional living.  FIRE for Adventure is a bit of an enabler regarding financial systems that allow you to push back on the status quo and really live your best life without the financial yoke around your neck that society tells us is required adult attire.  

The sentiment conveyed in Man in the Arena was one of the overlapping circles in our discussions.  From there, we worked on variations that matched our lifestyle...we're in it as a family.  The idea of "stand" became an active participation...anyone can "sit" and watch from the sidelines...regardless of your ability, you can certainly take some meaningful actions (or more likely series of small, progressive actions), to get where you're going.  

Go explore the 
places you call your
arena.

Our name comes from Family being the team you're doing life with.  And you can define your Arena, both the ones you're presently standing in and those you desire to stand in down the road.  Chances are, you'll likely end up having to ignore the critics in all the parts of our work.  When you're working on strategic planning for something, we often start with the strategic level mission/vision/values, then dig deeper to find the buzzwords, tools, and systems to enable the high level of success you desire.  To that end, the happy luck of URL availability combined with a catchy name aligned to bring you Family In The Arena as a movement.  We hope you leverage the tools here on the site and use the content/blog articles as a weekly reset or re-centering where you look toward and re-orient to your North Star.  Like most things in life, you'll get out what you put in, so use the articles to provoke thought, but more importantly, dialogue in a meaningful manner with your loved ones.  

With you in the arena, from ours to yours...Happy Trails!

Call to Action: 

• Think about the calls to action that you would like to see from our Family In The Arena community and let us know in the comments below.  
• 1 - ___________________ 
• 2 - ___________________
• 3 - ___________________
• Discussion: Consider what you/your family could/would/should (level of commitment) and start/stop/sustain (action) in terms of your interaction with this - discuss at dinner, date night, don't just read it and let it float out of your head.  We've both missed the boat in that case.  

Further Reading, Motivation, and References:

-   StandInTheArena.com or FamilyInTheArena.com.