The Real Power of a Personal Mission Statement
In the past, I dismissed personal mission statements as pseudo-mystical wastes of time but, after drafting my own, it has a real power.
Drafting a mission statement seemed one step removed from attracting goals by the power of positive thinking alone. Write what you want, keep it in mind and an unseen grantor of wishes serves it up.
Beyond the mystical-ness, it looked like a waste of time and paper. I know what I want. I won’t know it any better by writing a couple sentences.
But I was wrong — about the knowing part. The attracting part is still nonsense.
You’ll know more about your life’s mission because writing forces you to think through an idea completely. It goes from a vague wish to a mini roadmap for your dream.
Writing also brings clarity. You’re forced to choose specific wording to express your mission defining its outer edges; marking off what it is and isn’t.
Only being aware of your goal is like saying “I’m going to California.” It’s vague and could refer to any number of places. There’s no specific mental image motivating you and no hint how to accomplish the goal.
Specific and well-written mission statements are more like “I’m driving to Disneyland at 1313 Disneyland Drive, Anaheim California in the fall of next year.” You know exactly where you’re going and what you’ll do to get there. You can figure out directions and plan your route.
Personal mission statements define what you hope to achieve, why and how, just as the Disneyland statement. Their specificity inspires a motivating mental image that suggests the means of accomplishing your goal.
Take a moment to draft your mission statement in four steps:
1. Begin by asking yourself a few questions:
What do you enjoy?
What do you want out of life?
What inspires you?
When do you feel happy? Productive? Alive?
What do you want said about you at your funeral?
2. From your answers, form a basic life goal. Here’s an example:
Make a living as a writer.
3. Identify whom you want to accomplish this for:
Make a living as a writer to support my family.
4. Specify each element. What amount of money is “a living”? What kind of content will be written? What does it mean to support your family? For example:
Make $100K per year by writing personal improvement content online to provide my family a life free of financial concerns.
The specific dollar amount serves as a benchmark keeping me focused on the goal I’ve set and allowing me to measure my progress. Making $60K a year and writing full-time is nice, but I can see there’s still work to do.
Being specific about what I want suggests concrete actions I can take to reach my goal. If I’m writing about personal development, I need to study that relentlessly. If I’m writing online, I need to practice writing for that medium. The actions guiding me are directly pulled from the specifics in my mission statement.
The statement only serves as a guide when you remember it, so keep it with you. Mine lives on the first page of a notebook. It goes everywhere and is always at hand for guidance or motivation. As a bonus there’s an opportunity to review and update the statement with each new notebook.
Mission statements aren’t set in stone. Review yours regularly. Adjust the wording as you refine your ambitions, make terms more specific, keep the statement relevant to your life. Don’t write a statement once and set it aside.
The ability to guide your actions and direct your efforts is the very real power of a mission statement. Regularly working with your statement commits it to memory. Eventually you act by its guide out of habit and work toward your goal without thinking.
Maybe that’s why it seems mystical.
