Over the past few days, you’ve taken two important steps toward developing a personal mission statement: identifying your values and envisioning your values in action. For most people, it is truly an eye-opening process to write out your values for your life and then compare them to how you actually balance your priorities. Today, you will put the exercises from Day 4 and Day 5 together to complete your personal mission statement. But what, exactly, is a personal mission statement, anyway?
Personal development website Dumb Little Man offers this great definition:
Your personal mission statement should be a concise representation of what’s most important to you, what you desire to focus on, what you want to achieve, and, ultimately, who you want to become. In its purest form, it’s an approach to your life, one that allows you to identify a focus of energy, creativity, and vision in living a life in support of your inner-most beliefs and values. Also remember that your mission will change over time as you and your life change.
I developed a personal mission statement a few years ago and it literally changed my life. Since then, I have trained over 200 people in my personal development workshops to develop their own personal mission statements and it is often a life-changing process for them. There’s something really powerful and empowering about being able to say YES or NO to opportunities that come into your life based on whether it fits within your personal mission and how you want to live out your values.
Estimated Time to Complete: 30-60 minutes
There are many ways to go about creating your own personal mission statement, but I will highlight my three-step formula that I use in my workshops here.
Values + Values in Action = Personal Mission Statement
Now that you’ve identified your values and what your values look like in action, you should now take at least 30 minutes to begin drafting your personal mission statement. You should take as much time as you need to reflect and write out your mission statement. It can be short-term or long-term, and should encompass your values and how you’d like to express them in your life. You don’t have to use ALL the values in your Reset 10 if you don’t want to. It may serve you best to only include your top three or you could include all 20 of the ones you came up with during your brainstorm. It’s up to you to decide what would be most useful.
The statement itself can be as short or as long as you think it needs to be, but the process and the final statement should serve to help you make different kinds of decisions about how you will live your life from now on. And remember, it will continue to change as YOU change over time, so don’t worry about it being perfect and final. This should be a work in progress, just like you!
As an example (please don’t feel like you have to do yours this way), here is what my updated personal mission statement looks like:
I value learning, independence, travel, creativity, achievement, and social change. I deeply appreciate laughter, good food, music and poetry in my life. I especially value authenticity and love in myself and others. Before I die, I want to have made a positive impact on the world for young people, women, and people of color. As a writer, speaker and coach, I will use my one life to affect many lives by helping people realize their goals and dreams. In my work and life, I will always tell my truth and make space for others to tell theirs. In my journey to empower others, I will not neglect my own family, friends, finances, health, or spirituality. I will remember that love is the only religion and that forgiveness is the highest form of love. And that fear means GO. I will remember that failure is only failure if you don’t learn anything and that nothing is ever so bad that you can’t get up and dance when the music comes on. And I will always, always choose love over fear.
Take Action and Reflect: When you’re done, please share your personal mission statement with us in the comments! How did you feel as you were writing it? If you blogged about today’s assignment, please post the link in the comments so we can read it
And away we go
I value family, friends, love, helping others, self, honesty, growth, travel, communication, and anything that does not look like depression. I ill strive in my life to show with visible signs what I value.With friends, family, and self – I will find new ways to improve relationships and release and forgive old hurts. I will find new ways to help others and improve on what I am currently doing. I will no longer run from honesty. I will attempt to always provide it to myself and to others. My personal growth will continue – stagnation no longer lives in my house. Using effective communication, I will achieve all the above goals. Then I will travel to celebrate my success.
day 6 is done dude.
