Preparing to Craft A Personal Mission Statement

Hi everyone! This week we've been looking at crafting a personal mission statement. This post will take you through the process, in the steps that we've broken down, and help you get set up for actually writing your Life Mission, Vision and Values.

STEP 1: Identify the moments in your life that made you feel the most proud and valuable

A Personal Mission statement is one that guides you towards the best possible version of you. By reflecting on your past successes and proudest moments, you will likely see themes emerge that help you identify the course of life that makes you the most happy.

Here are some examples of what makes me feel proud: 

• I feel proudest when I accomplish goals, especially ones that required a lot of extra work or challenged me in new and exciting ways.
• I feel proudest when I contribute to causes/issues that are important to me and that I believe better my world. 
• I feel proudest when I am able to support my children, my spouse and my friends in ways that make them feel empowered, capable, respected and valuable.
• I feel proudest when others recognize that I am always learning, growing and trying to be a better person. This includes acknowledging when I was wrong about something, and making active efforts to rectify these wrongs when and where I can. 
• I feel proudest when I know that I have met all my needs as a human being and that I have achieved a level of balance in my life that makes me feel fulfilled. 
• I feel proudest when I am part of something that is bigger than me, in which my voice is viewed as important and unique, but is also part of a bigger picture that relies on others to be complete. 
• I feel proudest when I present the best possible version of myself to the world, and know that the person I present truly reflects the person that I am inside. 

Emerging Themes:

• I am driven by my love of empowering others. This has steered me into a variety of different directions in my life, including teaching, working with vulnerable populations, advocacy and community awareness. 
• I am driven by the very firm belief that every person brings value to the world and that every life experience is worthy of acknowledgement and respect. 
•  Despite my innate social anxiety, I am often drawn into leadership roles, and am at my most effective when I am working with others towards a common goal.
• I require a sense of accomplishment and/or of completion in order to feel fully fulfilled by an activity. Objectives, for me, are as important (if not more so) than goals. 
• There is nothing I love more than helping others love themselves. 

STEP 2: Identify Your Strengths

Your strengths are the characteristics that are intrinsic to you that allow you to accomplish things in your life. These, combined with your weaknesses and with your cumulative life experience, are what make you a unique individual and allow you to bring your very best to the world around you. 

Here are some examples of my personal strengths:

• I am a very powerful and loving person. 
• I genuinely believe that every person, given the right amount of support and accommodation, is able to achieve extraordinary things. 
• I do not discriminate against others, and actively work at recognizing my own privilege and internal stereotypes.
• I have often been recognized as being a natural leader.
• I am an excellent communicator and am able to convey my thoughts in both written and oral form in such a way that audiences understand what I am saying. My words often add value to discussions, and I am able to concisely deliver large amounts of information in ways that relatable. I am easily able to adapt my communication style to different types of learners, including very young children and those with communication/language differences. I am also a strong body-language/non-verbal communicator. 
• I am always learning, growing, experimenting and questioning the world around me. 
• I am not afraid of failure.
• I am an exceptional strategist, capable of breaking massive projects/goals into smaller ones, and easily able to identify gaps, opportunities, threats and risks. 

STEP 3: Identify Your Personal Values

Personal Mission Statements don't only reflect where you want to go, but they reflect the way in which you want to get there! Identify the internal values that drive you allows to ensure that the direction that you are taking is one that is consistent with who you are as a person, and what you believe to be right, honourable and true to yourself. 

Here are some examples of my personal values:

• I believe in treating others with acceptance, respect and empathy. 
• I believe in doing the thing that is right, fair, equitable and just. 
• I believe in self-care, self-respect, and personal empowerment. 
• I believe that knowledge is power, and that it should be shared with all those who seek it. 
• I believe in living life with exuberance, seizing every single opportunity available to become a fuller, more enlightened human being. 
• The most important thing to me is the happiness of those I love.

All of this can be summed up by the following value statement: 

If you aren't making someone elses's life better, you are living your life wrong.

STEP 3: Identify Your Short Term Goals and (And Longer Term Dreams)

When considering the difference between goals and dreams, there are two important distinctions to be made: 1) Do you have a timeline for it? 2) Are you actively working towards it?

For the most part, dreams are relatively intangible. They exist in the part of you that is able to suspend disbelief and envision what life would look like if you were unconstrained.  

Goals, on the other hand, are more concrete. They have timelines for when they should be accomplished, have objectives that allow progress to be measured and a variety of strategies and tactics in place to make them achievable. 

We tend to assume that dreams are unachievable, whereas goals can be achieved. This is sometimes true. I mean, I dream of being an internationally recognized singer...and the chances are pretty strong that I never will be. However, it isn't innately true. In many cases, dreams can easily convert into goals if you feel enough motivation to pursue them in such a way as to make them achievable. 

This is why the idea that dreams are somehow inferior to goals is flawed. Dreams are often what drive our goals. They are our idyllic sense of self, and can give us great insight into who we are and what we want from our experience here on earth. 

Here are a few examples of my personal dreams:

• I dream of a world that accepts all people, regardless of their biological, mental, emotional, and psychological differences and ability levels.
• I dream of a future in which I am completely financially secure, never having to ask myself if I will be able to support my family, even in a state of emergency. 
• I dream of a career that brings me truly fulfilling joy and a sense of daily pride, in which I genuinely believe that I am serving the world to the very best of my capacity.  
• I dream of one day writing one of the dozens of books that I have in the back of my mind. 
• I dream of seeing the world; of sitting where Plato sat, drinking where Shakespeare drank, and exploring the very earliest signs of man. 
• I dream of being remembered as someone important, not just to those around me, but to the world as a whole. 
• I dream of feeling as well in my own skin as humanly possible, of being stronger, faster, and more agile than I ever thought possible. I dream of learning how to be beautiful from the inside out. 
• I dream of taking all.of.the.things. in school. Really. I just want to go to school forever, all the time. 

As you can see, my dreams echo many of the earlier themes that evolved during our strengths and values brainstorming steps. In looking at my answers, it is clear that I want to serve others. I want to make the world a better, more loving and understanding place. I want to learn constantly, and seek out new adventures.

These dreams are the benchmarks of my personal vision and mission for myself. They the truest, most unconstrained version of myself. And they lead me directly into my goals.

As mentioned, goals are more concrete. I usually suggest keeping goal timelines within a 3 year time frame- or roughly 1000 days, but you may need more time than that depending on the goal (a university degree may take four years, for example.)

Most business professionals will tell you that goals should be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Timely), and I would be inclined to agree with them. But I would add three more words to this common acronym: IES. (SMARTIES...get it?)

Inspiring: Working towards your goal should make you feel elevated, fulfilled and inspired. If a goal is not inspiring, it is seldom motivating enough to be worth pushing through when barriers hit.  

Evolving: When taking on a goal, it is important to remember that you, as a human being, are in a constant state of evolution. As such, your hopes, dreams and- yes- even your goals are going to undergo some evolution as well. Seeing a goal as evolving is recognizing the need to remain adaptable, flexible, and open to new ideas, information and directions.  

Synergetic: Goals don't exist in a vacuum. People usually have multiple goals that they are working towards. Synergy is the process in which the "whole" becomes greater than each individual "part". Recognizing that each individual goal, while important, is simply a part of the greater vision of what you are trying to accomplish allows you to prioritize different objectives, and ensure that all your goals are actually cohesive and complementary.

In crafting my own personal goals, I try to focus on the 'synergy' aspect, reaching for as wholistic an array of goals as possible including some from every aspect of my life. In this example, I will outline one from each of the major groupings: Mind (referring to education, career, and life long learning), Body (referring to the physical state of my body), and Soul (encompassing all of the different things that feel my soul/spirit including my human relationships, my relationship with my self, my relationship with any higher powers/religion/spirituality, as it may apply).**

NOTE: Goals are broken down into objectives (which we will look at more in our section on goal setting), but for our current purposes, it is completely appropriate to keep your goals very broad and less time-focused.

**Mental Health can fall into any of the three categories, depending on which you feel is most appropriate for you. In my personal goal setting, I tend to include it with the body, as I believe that mental health is a critical component of physical health. However, at times I have also included it under "Soul" and "Mind", depending on the circumstances. 

Here are some examples of my current goals, stated loosely and without specifications:

Mind: To return to school and complete a program that brings me intellectual fulfillment, as well as presenting me with new challenges and career opportunities in the field of Health and Wellness by 2017.

Body: To continue working towards exploring my body's capacity in terms of strength, speed and agility by increasing my current goals markers (I have preexisting fitness goals with specific objectives surrounding body fat percentage, physical lifting/pressing capacity and timed events such as specific races. My Body Goals will be continuations of these already evolving goals.)

Soul: To continue building the community of Shame Free Wellness by sharing stories, ideas, and feedback that are focused on body positivity, self-love, self-care, and self-acceptance so that it is a thriving and welcoming environment for those who are new to the journey of wellness. 

And there you have it. The foundations for crafting the actual personal mission statement, as well as accompanying vision and value statements. From there, we will refine our goals using the SMARTIES model and begin to identify the strategies, tactics and objectives needed to achieve them!