{"id":206,"date":"2009-07-31T12:14:01","date_gmt":"2009-07-31T17:14:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.familycrossings.com\/?p=206"},"modified":"2014-02-25T13:20:23","modified_gmt":"2014-02-25T18:20:23","slug":"using-familycrossingscom-to-grow-your-connections","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.familycrossings.com\/index.php\/2009\/07\/using-familycrossingscom-to-grow-your-connections\/","title":{"rendered":"Using FamilyCrossings.com to Grow Your Connections"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Imagine if your great, great grandfather or grandmother had left you a book with their secrets for living. Maybe it contained nuggets of wisdom, yummy recipes, favorite jokes, or just insights for how to lead a good life. Ever since people learned of my next book,<strong> Life&#8217;s Missing Instruction Manual<\/strong>, people are curious how to create their own &#8220;manual&#8221; for life.<\/p>\n<p>You can leave such a book for your own family. What are the key lessons you&#8217;ve learned in your life? Are you ready to share them with your children and grandchildren &#8211; or with your friend, siblings, parents, and grandparents?<\/p>\n<p>What you&#8217;ve gleaned from your life experiences can make things easier for your children or your relatives. In fact, the lessons you&#8217;ve earned from trial and error can be the perfect gift for everyone in your life &#8211; or for one person who matters to you. Here&#8217;s how to commit your insights to writing and share them with your fellow life travelers.<\/p>\n<p>    * Carry a pad of paper around with you everywhere for a week.<\/p>\n<p>    * Jot down your thoughts and observations as they occur to you. Don&#8217;t judge them. Just make note of them.<\/p>\n<p>    * Add personal stories and memories, as they come to mind. Again, don&#8217;t edit your thoughts. Just commit them to paper.<\/p>\n<p>    * Take a few days to go through your notes, and underline the most important passages, and make additional comments in the margins.<\/p>\n<p>    * From this, distill the lessons you most want to share with others: your perspective, your values, what matters most to you, and your reactions to the world around you.<\/p>\n<p>    * Find a beautiful journal or blank book &#8211; one that you feel a strong connection with. You might find it at a bookstore, an antique store, an online auction site, a craft store, or even a flea market. Where you find it doesn&#8217;t matter. How you feel about it does.<\/p>\n<p>    * Fill the journal with your own instruction manual for life. Make sure to include a title and your name.<\/p>\n<p>    * Find a special person to share it with, and turn the presentation of the journal into a celebration.<\/p>\n<p>If you don&#8217;t feel comfortable writing your notes and stories, you can dictate them into a portable tape recorder, and later, you can transcribe them into a journal. You don&#8217;t have to be a bestselling author, academic, or philosopher to create a instruction manual that can helped your loved ones every day of their lives&#8230; and be passed on to future generations as well. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Imagine if your great, great grandfather or grandmother had left you a book with their secrets for living. Maybe it contained nuggets of wisdom, yummy recipes, favorite jokes, or just insights for how to lead a good life. Ever since people learned of my next book, Life&#8217;s Missing Instruction Manual, people are curious how to &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.familycrossings.com\/index.php\/2009\/07\/using-familycrossingscom-to-grow-your-connections\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Using FamilyCrossings.com to Grow Your Connections&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[38,212,41,9,207,43,13],"class_list":["post-206","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-social-media","tag-children","tag-family-fun","tag-family-history","tag-family-networks","tag-family-sharing","tag-family-stories","tag-grandparents-bond-with-children"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.0 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\r\n<title>Using FamilyCrossings.com to Grow Your Connections - FamilyCrossings Blog<\/title>\r\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\r\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/blog.familycrossings.com\/index.php\/2009\/07\/using-familycrossingscom-to-grow-your-connections\/\" \/>\r\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\r\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\r\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Using FamilyCrossings.com to Grow Your Connections - FamilyCrossings Blog\" \/>\r\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Imagine if your great, great grandfather or grandmother had left you a book with their secrets for living. 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