Develop a mission and a vision for your career and personal life, learn strategies for setting and achieving goals.
Your Mission
You have listed in order of importance your dreams and other plans
you wish to achieve for your personal, and perhaps professional, success and
happiness, and you know your values will be an important part of those
plans.
So how do you make those plans happen?
It all begins with a mission statement.
Here’s a dictionary definition of mission: “Purpose, reason for being;
an inner calling to perform an activity or a service.”
A mission statement is a brief and focused statement of purpose of
the direction you want your goals to take you. Using a roadmap as an
analogy, the mission statement is the highway you choose to take to get you
from where you are to where you want to be, and includes the values with
which you make your journey. Goals are the mile markers along the road to
your destination. The goals and decisions you make both now and in the
future should be based upon your mission statement.
When the mission statement is known, understood, accepted and
communicated, positive things happen, and energy and effort are no longer
wasted. With it, you will always know whether you are headed in the right
direction.
Your personal mission statement will be unlike anyone else’s. It will
be customized to your unique talents and abilities.
There are three important properties your mission statement must
have:
1. Unique - It must be yours and not anybody else’s
2. Stimulating - It must stir you into action
3. Motivating - It must personally inspire you
Here’s the basic structure of a mission statement:
To use my…(skills, talents)
to…(action)
so that….(result).
A mission statement should be no more than one sentence (usually
twenty-five words or less) should be easily understood, and be able to be
recited by memory. If you can write one that is short, clear, and resonates
with your personal values, then you will have an inspiring mission
statement.
Here are some examples. Notice the underlying values, not
necessarily spelled out, in these mission statements:
- A mother’s mission statement might read: To use my talents as a
mother to coach my children through the early years of their lives so
that they can look back on happy, carefree childhoods.
- A writer’s statement might read: To use my talents as a writer to
write moralistic plays that are entertaining or artistically pleasing so
that I’ll reach a large audience with my message.
- To create beautiful paintings so that others are inspired by and can
enjoy them (an artist).
- Our mission is to offer a wide range of home furnishing items of
good design and function, excellent quality and durability, at prices
so low that the majority of people can afford to buy them (IKEA of
Sweden).
- To use my knowledge and experience as a therapist to aid the
regional depression support group so that people with a depression
can be helped (a volunteer).
- To create magnificent buildings for social gatherings so that people
can celebrate in maximum comfort (an architect).
- To support others in their work so that the team gets the best results
(a manager).
- To organize the world’s information and make it universally
accessible and useful (Google).
- I use my talents and skills as a communicator to publish books and
audio with the aim to help people live healthy and happy lives.
Copyright 2008 Raymond Le Blanc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.
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