PatrickWhat is a personal mission statement?
A mission statement is a sentence that clearly states your “purpose for being.” It helps you to bring clarity around your path in life and helps you to remain focused on your goals.
Essentially, your mission statement defines your identify that guides your journey of life. It’s also typically about what type of impact you want to make on the world and what the legacy is that you desire to leave on this planet.
In our society we typically think of businesses having mission statements, but we don’t often think about individuals having mission statements. My goal with this article is to start to change that narrative, because honestly, I believe your personal mission statement should be closely matched to any business you are building or working for as well.
Remember that where your focus goes is where your energy flows, so when you define your mission statement, it helps you understand where you want your focus to be. This helps you eliminate distractions in your life, and helps you understand where you should be saying Yes to things and where you should be saying No.
Quite often we struggle with the distractions of the world. It’s easy to get our attention diverted to the last news article, group text message, or viral post on social media; but what isn’t always easy is staying focused on one thing and building the life we truly desire; there is often resistance there. That’s why we need a guiding light for the direction we are heading, hence our personal mission statement.
A mission statement helps you bring consciousness around where you are spending your time, money and energy to create the vision of the life that you desire. Because when you have this guiding statement, you can ask the question “does this action, relationship, or behavior help me towards accomplishing my mission and is it aligned with my purpose?”
Why do you do what you do?
Ultimately a mission statement is to help you define your own purpose and is the reason behind why you do what you do. It is a statement that brings clarity to help you direct your thoughts, your feelings, and your actions (essentially your habits). These things are not easy to change overnight, but bringing awareness towards your current habits helps to identify what needs to shift to get you in alignment with habits that move you forward.
The best way to really understand what should be the guiding force behind our mission statement is to “start with why.” When we start with why, the what and the how we do things becomes easier. And the why connects with the heart and the emotions behind it. It becomes the driving force behind everything that you do.
Once we have the statement defined, we can start to analyze our life and bring awareness towards understanding how we spend our time, what we think about, and what actions we take in our life that are moving us closer or farther away from our goals.
A personal missional statement is one of the best tools available to help you craft a new personality that allows you to create the “personal reality” you are looking for. It will help you incorporate aspects you need around your professional, financial, spiritual and relational aspects of your life.
Your mission statements helps you define your desired values
Mission statements also help you identify your values and your ethics. When you have a clear understanding of the path you want to take in life, you can begin to understand how your values will help you accomplish your goals.
This is because the order of your values controls the order of your decisions.
So if your values are out of alignment with your mission statement, it will become nearly impossible for you to succeed at your goals.
If you look at your mission statement from a 3rd party perspective, what core values go into accomplishing your mission? For example, maybe integrity, trustworthiness, and cheerfulness are important to you because they help you connect with your clients and be seen as a leader.
Your personal mission statement also affects how others see you
The values that help to support your mission statement are going to help you accomplish your goals, but they are also going to dictate how others perceive you and how you interact with the world.
Yes, your mission statement is for you and is your guiding light, but it’s also about defining how others see you and how you show up in the world. It helps people bring awareness towards what you do and offer the world, and especially WHY you do what you do; through your mission people can start to see the reasons behind your actions.
There is a saying that “it takes 10 years to build a reputation, but 5 minutes to lose it.” When we understand this principle, we can then clearly see that our actions matter. But our actions are a result of our beliefs and our values. So when you have clarity on your mission statement, you can begin to reverse engineer who someone has to become to accomplish that mission. That person is YOU!
As a result, building this awareness can help you maintain a healthy work/life balance that increases your personal achievements, allowing you to create a fulfilling life for yourself and make the world a better place at the same time.
While you not often like to admit it, how people perceive us is extremely related to your ability to accomplish your mission and build the life you are looking for. It’s very difficult to achieve great things in this world alone, it’s much easier when you work and collaborate with others.
And honestly, anything we do in business and in life is related to how we interact and serve other humans. So making sure that people perceive you in a positive light is very much related to defining your mission statement.
How do you define your mission statement?
Please understand that it can take a long time to develop your mission statement, and it can take many iterations to really gain the clarity you desire towards understanding what it is. And also remember that there are different chapters of your life and you can refine your mission statement as you evolve into the highest version of yourself.
You get to define your mission statement, you are the creator of your life!
But your experience and journey of life can also help you to define your mission statement. It’s my belief that all souls are born into this life with a purpose, and that it’s up to us as humans to do the work to understand what it was that our soul wanted our mission to be in this lifetime.
So when you can start to see what experiences that have defined and shaped you as an individual, when you can bring awareness towards what brings you joy, when you can see where your true inner wisdom lies, those things are probably related to your purpose.
And once we build this awareness and pull these things into our conscious mind, we can start to build and define our mission statement.
The easiest template to use to define your mission statement is:
I help ___________ do _____________ so that they can _______________ .
So from this statement let’s work backwards and look through your experience of life.
1) I help ______
This statement might be difficult for you define, however, I want you to start by looking into your past. Ask yourself these questions.
- Who have you helped in the past?
- Who have you mentored or coached?
- Who have helped through a difficult situation?
- Who have you taught something new to?
- Who do you like to help that lights you up?
For instance, if you are an elementary school teacher, children ages 5 – 12 might be your “I help young children” statement. Or if you went through a health issue in the past, maybe you like to help other people that are going through a similar situation now.
One of the easiest people to help is a “previous version of yourself.” So think about this for a minute and write down who was the previous version of yourself and what type of help did they need.
List out 10 – 15 demographics of people that you are interested in helping based on this methodology and list them on a piece of paper or your computer. We are going to put the pieces together at the end.
2) Do ____________
What can you help people do? What skills do you have that other people need? What struggles have you been through in your life that other people need help getting through?
List out at least 10 – 15 things that you can help other people with. Be detailed so that you have a list of all the things that you know that others might find valuable.
3) So that they can _______________.
This is the WHY. Why do you help people with these things? What value does it add to their life? What type of life can they have if they overcome this challenge?
When you connect to their heart and when you show them that you are trying to help them so they can better experience life, not just so you can make money, it helps people want to work with you and support your mission.
I hope this article helped you understand what a personal mission statement is and why you should create one for yourself. My goal is to help you to create an empowering and fulfilling life for yourself through giving you tools and resources to raise your awareness around the life you want to build for yourself.
If you want to dive deeper into understanding the gifts living within you which can help you refine your statement, I have an E-book called The Rise. You can check it out here and read through my story of how I built this awareness for myself. At the end of each chapter there are exercises that you can use to give you a clearer picture of who you are today.
Please reach out on Instagram as well if you need more support.