It has been important to me to have a personal mission statement that keeps on reminding me why I am who I am and why I choose what I choose. Now, I don’t post my personal mission statement at home on my wall. It lingers in my journals, ready for me to look at it, and remind me at times where I forget it.
One of the pieces of advice I always come back to when it comes to my client’s work is that I want them to “speak in manifestos”. When you work with complex messages, it is always beneficial to be able to go back to “oh that’s what we mean” or “oh yeah that’s why we’re doing this”. Especially when you work in teams and across management levels. That’s why I always work with different cores and different manifestos with my clients: it simplifies messages and get’s everybody on the same level.
Steps to writing a personal mission statement
Who inspires you and why?
The people who inspire you can change your perception of things.
I have always been amazed at how much influence the blogs I subscribe to have on my life. There are some of them I have been following for more than ten years and some of them are new. Some of them, I have subscribed to for some time, unsubscribed, and then resubscribed again after some time. If you want to change parts of you, you have to change your input.
I am aware that what I read isn’t only links that are shared by my friends on Twitter or by the blogs I follow, but it’s also defined by the books and magazines I read. Without going into details, it’s just important that you know what the different “outlets” are giving you.
Who do you want to be?
I am still at a place where I am happy just to breathe. I am happy that my health is going in the right direction. But I think someway along the way, I don’t want to let my illness define me. I want to be a writer. I AM a writer. And I want to write more. I want to create more. I want to feel good. To me, it’s more important to ask who you want to be today, than who you want to be 30 years down the line. That’s also an important question to ask, but the world is sometimes a bit too goal-oriented to me.
When you have answered those questions, you’re well on your way to being able to draft a personal mission statement. It’s not an easy process, but if you map down all the important words that keep popping up in your head, you can quickly write something together that looks like a personal mission statement.
My Personal Mission Statement
Here’s my personal mission statement:
“My mission is to change me for the better and share my process. I will do this by being a true, creative, unique, and inspiring person.“
I know it’s a bit “airy” but it has to be if my work, my health, and everything else in my life has to fit in there. I do create mission statements around ever “sub-area” such as “health” as well.
ps. My mission statement used to have a different tone to it. It used to be:
“My mission is to change the world for the better and share my process. I will do this by being a true, creative, unique, and inspiring person.”
But believing that I change the world by changing myself, I changed it a while back. It became closer to the heart of me.
Get creating rockers!
