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Value of Writing a Personal Mission Statement

1. It forces you to think deeply about your life, clarify the purpose of your life, and identify what is really important to you.

2. It forces you to clarify and express succinctly your deepest values and aspirations.

3. It imprints your values and purposes firmly in your mind so they become a part of you rather than something you only think about occasionally.

4. Integrating your personal mission statement into your weekly planning gives you a way to keep your vision constantly before you.

Process of Creating a Personal Mission Statement

1. Identify an influential person in your life. Define the qualities you most admire in that person. List those and then ponder the qualities you would need to practice in order to achieve the future you desire.

2. Define who you want to become; not just what you want to have and do.

3. Define your life roles. You may have roles in relation to your profession, family, community, or other areas in your life. Describe how you would like to be described in each of these roles.

4. Write a draft of your personal mission statement. Carry the rough draft with you and make notes, additions, and deletions.

5. Write a final draft. Refer to it frequently. Use it as a standard by which you judge all your activities.

6. Periodically review and evaluate your personal mission statement to keep yourself in touch with your own development and keep yourself in harmony with your deepest self.

7. The final test of the value and effectiveness of a mission statement is: DOES THIS STATEMENT INSPIRE ME?

Developing a personal mission statement.

A personal mission statement answers questions like these:
-What do I want from my life?
-What do I value?
-What are my talents?
-At the end of my life, what do I want to have accomplished?

A personal mission statement is the beginning of personal leadership. It sets guidelines for life. By referring to it and internalizing its meaning, we make choices that serve values and reject the things that oppose them.

A mission statement often includes a set of personal beliefs.
A mission statement often answers another important question: What do I believe in?
Writing a personal mission statement is as much an act of discovery as an act of creation.
A mission statement is not exactly a piece of creative writing. We write what we sense to be true about ourselves, although often it seems we are writing what we would like to be true.

Writing what is true about ourselves isn't as easy as it may seem. We sometimes don't know ourselves as well as we think we do. We perhaps believe things because we are expected to believe them. We feel inclined to pursue a certain path because it is socially approved. We may fear other people's criticism if we do what we feel is right for us.

So writing a mission statement is really an adventure in self-discovery. We are working to uncover our talents, our interests, and our deepest desires for life. Writing a mission statement can be a tool for clarifying things that we otherwise might not know. Most people, at some point in their lives, long for a sense of meaning and purpose. They sense that they have talents and contributions to offer but are not sure what their talents are. The mission statement is a way of discovering that sense of purpose by coming to know ourselves better.

We clarify our personal mission by dividing it into roles

A mission statement gives us general guidance. We can make it more specific by applying it to specific roles. A role is a function that we serve in life.

Some of the roles we may have are family member, student, worker, or community member. The idea is to find some sense or order about life by dividing it up into meaningful patterns of related activities.

Roles are key to creating balance in life.

Perhaps the most useful aspect of roles is that they can help us maintain balance in our lives. For example, if, as we plan our day, we consider each role and ask what ought to be done within it, we will be more balanced in our effectiveness than if we simply attend to the most pressing problems. In fact, the way we define our roles can help us maintain the balance that is so critical to effectiveness in life.

Goals define what we want to achieve within each role.

Roles are more specific than our mission, but they still aren't specific enough to let us make clear plans. We need to take another step, this time breaking our roles into goals. We do this by asking, "What do I want to accomplish within this role?" In answer we create goals, specific results we want to accomplish at specific times.

These goals become the basis for our weekly and daily planning. Goals are the building blocks of our mission and our roles. From these goals we can create specific action plans that will help us succeed in our roles and fulfill our mission.

Goals can be lifelong, intermediate, or short term.

Goals have a deadline. They are broken down into steps, with each step having its own deadline. When all of the separate deadlines are reached, the overall goal has been achieved.

Some goals are lifetime goals-, meaning that we intend to achieve them before we die. To achieve them, we break them into smaller steps, perhaps ten year goals or five year goals. These intermediate goals are then divided into smaller steps, until we have subdivided the lifetime goals into immediate goals that we can work on today.

The best goals are consistent with our personal mission.

Goals serve us by organizing our actions and by giving them meaning. When we sense that our actions bring meaningful results, we have greater incentive to perform those actions. Our mission provides the purpose for our goals and actions, and goals that are backed by a sense of mission tend to be both more satisfying and more motivating.