Something for Yourself: Personal Mission Statement

In this series of blog posts, which I am calling "Something for Yourself", I am going to explore a number of ways in which you can develop your own personal growth.  I'm going to talk about a few of the ways I have grown and learned about myself in the hopes that it can help someone else do the same.  

In today's post I am going to discuss writing your own personal mission statement.  This is something that I learned from a senior partner at my firm who runs the women's initiative.  She recently talked to our women's group about how she's had her own personal mission statement for twenty years.  One of the most important things she talked about is that it's not just a matter of writing the mission statement, it's also about checking in with yourself each month to see if you're living your life according to your goals.  

Personally, I wish I had written my mission statement a long time ago, but I do believe that the idea was presented to me at a moment in my life where I really needed some direction and guidance.  I had all of these ideas in my head of things I wanted to do and ways in which I wanted to live my life, but I had never taken time to write them down and organize them in a way that would allow me to take steps in the right direction.  

Writing a personal missions statement may seem unnecessary to you, but just ask yourself if you could use a roadmap to follow in order to live the life you've always imagined.  That's what my personal mission statement is to me.  

This may seem too time-consuming or overwhelming, but I have found a tool that helps you write your personal mission statement with your own words.  When I Googled "writing your own personal mission statement" one of the first links that came up was for Franklin Covey.  I always knew about them in terms of planners, but I didn't realize that they had other tools available.  

The Franklin Covey mission statement builder was easy to use and made me think about things that I never would have thought to include in my own mission statement. The final product is something that I have continually gone back to and re-read to help me assess whether or not I'm following the path I've laid out for myself.  Like their website says, I want to "live with purpose" and this tool has allowed me to figure out what that journey will look like.

Once you have written your personal mission statement I think it is important to set short-term and long-term goals for yourself, so my next post will be all about goal setting.   

---

If you have any personal development strategies that you would like to share or discuss, please leave a comment below.