Write a Personal Mission Statement

Write a Personal Mission Statement

Would you like to focus your life on what really matters to you and who you want to be in your life?
Covey described the following pearl of wisdom in his book Seven Habits:
"The key to the ability to change is a changeless sense of who you are, what you are about and what you value."

An interesting instrument Covey describes to acquire this sense is to write a Personal Mission Statement (PMS) about yourself. It's a unique document that can help you focus on your values, beliefs and about how you want to behave in life. In fact it could be a text document, a PowerPoint presentation, a short video, a picture, or a mind map. Its form is not what matters. Irrespective of its precise form, it will help you stay on the path you want to be on, and, in conjunction with the goals you write down, can help you live the life you want.

Just like for a business it is a good idea to have a Corporate mission statement, your PMS can help you think about how YOU want to conduct YOUR life! Note that a PMS is different from writing down your goals, it is generally more about your values and principles and how you want to move in the world. What kind of person do you want to be? What value(s) do you consider most important?

How to Write your Personal Mission Statement

Remember your PMS should help guide your decisions and help you achieve your goals in life. Even in troublesome, turbulent or difficult times.
To get started, open up a Word document or take a blank sheet of paper and answer the 3 following questions:
1. Who do I want to be?
2. What do I want to do?
3. What do I value?
Just write what immediately comes to mind. Your PMS may take some time and several rewrites before you are comfortable with it.
A variant to achieve the same is to write your own goodbye / farewell speech. This will typically reveal the gap between who you are now and who you want to be.

Comments by date▼

Comments by rating

Rating

Jaap de Jonge
Editor, Netherlands

Your Personal Mission Statement Will Change over Time

A Personal Mission Statement (PMS) is not cast in stone.
In fact, it's quite normal that your personal mission and/or the things you value most will change during your life time. As a result, you may need to review and update your PMS every 5-10 years or so.

To get some sense of such changes during your lifetime, have a look at Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Even if in reality people don't work necessarily one by one through each of his levels, there are certain maturity stages involved in the journey we all make while we grow older.
An updated PMS is the perfect instrument to make you aware of these stages.

PS: Make sure you keep your previous versions of your PMS in a safe place. It will be fun and interesting to re-read them after several decades.

Sreejith M
Business Consultant, Netherlands

How to Prepare Yourself for Personal Growth and Change in Life

Let's further explore some guiding principles of defining personal goals, preparing for change as well as setting-up for a transformation. More concisely, we attempt to answer: How to take charge of change even as a beginner?
With countless articles and blogs preaching about time management, growth hacking, social skills, personal development etc., prototypical aspirants are mostly caught stuck in the noise. They are unable to make an honest evaluation of where they are at, where they want to be in some defined timeline and then lose the battle without a value-based roadmap to get there. There is so much information, but it's mostly diffuse.

So what makes the winner stand out from the rest of us mere mortals?
Below I explore a few effective approaches on how you can get out of the hamster-wheel of trial and error in crystallizing a solid strategy for personal growth as well as financial freedom.

Personal Vision and Values Statement

First you need to define to some detail what are our vision and values that you are passionate about and which keep you awake each night. Covey's PMS is an excellent tool for this. Once that has been done, you proceed to strategize an approach that can infuse a trend and following for your cause.

Decision-Sensing

We all will agree that our existential status-quo is the sum total of all the decisions we made so far in our journey of life. But I strongly believe that there is a sensing of maturity in time before a decision is made. Here, I would like to introduce a concept what I call 'decision-sensing'. Almost all successful individuals seem to intuitively use it in their pursuit of goals.
Here is what you need to know first about decision-sensing :
"There are moments in life where the positioning of your act of change is maximized for results. Capitalize on it ! There also many instances where you don't have that advantage. Stay calm and persevere here without hastily making half-baked decisions".
Decision sensing is mostly founded upon continuous self-assessment of your 'influence-tribe' and 'change-intention' at a given period of time. It's dynamic. Change-intention defines what you want to change in the triadic ecosystem of people-process-culture, so that your vision is championed by the influence-tribe. When the assessment of maturity level of these two paradigms is seen as low or mediocre, you have to wait and play smart to allow the two critical success factors to further mature.

The Process

There are 5 fundamental principles on building an influence-tribe which can champion your unique voice and vision and to be able to brand your self as an agent of change in the society. These are as follows-
1. Know thyself and know your ties thereon: Define your own values and value proposition to as much gritty details as possible. You make your bargain/proposal based on the values you bring to the table. So be authentic about them.
2. Find the right platforms for introducing your presence and get noticed: You should try to make yourself available at the platforms where the influencers in your field of interest frequent the most.
3. Have fine-grained knowledge of the scope of the scenario/problem that defines your intentions as well as the dynamics of prevailing environment with which it interacts.
4. Define calibrated levels of progression : Your pathway to influential leadership is not instantaneous, its a journey guided by planning and structure.
5. Sustain the growth and upscale the knowledge aiming for greater impact: You have to always monitor your growth against the milestones and deliverables.

Change-Intention Management

When you bring a unique depth of clarity around the smokescreen of crisis and conflict, people who were persistently averse to participation in your scheme, are morphed almost instantly into devout followers of your anthem of change. They make it their own slogan thereafter! First, loosen up your adamant inertia to face rejection and loss. Second, embrace disruption as the frontrunner of change manifestation.

To summarize: Trust the process, and allow it bloom in full vitality. Do not focus too hard on the short-term highs and lows, however do learn from them and make the sensible tweaks in your approach.