How Having a Personal Mission Statement can Improve Your Life

As you start to get your life on track, it helps to first set your vision of where you want to go. Then, you can create a personal mission statement that encapsulates your vision. This can help you to focus on your ideals in life, and shows you where you want your goals to lead.

A personal mission statement is a statement that you make about your values and who you are. It tells you what is most important to you in your life, and gives you direction when you are feeling stuck between too many choices. It also helps you to set boundaries, and say not to things that aren't in alignment with your values.

Many businesses have a mission statement with regard to the services they provide, and how they provide them. Having one on an individual level is powerful too, since it is a statement about who you are, and how you go through life.

According to Mind Tools, these are some steps that you can use in creating your personal mission statement:

1. Identify what you do best – Your unique strengths will likely point to what you would like to do most with your life and career. Our Bite-Sized Training session Finding Your Unique Strengths will help you discover your strengths.

2. Think about what success means to you – If you get stuck, make a list of past accomplishments that really made you feel as if you did something worthwhile. Your aim is to create a short list of measurements to help you track your progress.

3. Identify your personal goals – Take the time to explore what you might want to do with your life and career, and then narrow down to the goals you most want to pursue, across the full range of life areas. Our article on Goal Setting will help you do this.

4. Combine the first three steps – Look at your goals, your unique strengths and your idea of success, and then identify the one goal that you most want to achieve. Make sure that the goal is expressed in SMART format, and that it's expressed in as powerful and motivating a way as possible.

5. Keep refining – Edit and perfect the words until you have a clear, concise statement that identifies your ideas, and how you'll measure the results.

When you are creating your mission statement, you can consider all of these aspects of what you want your life to look like. What is your focus? Is it career, family, personal development, spirituality, or something else?

Where you want to focus your energy in life is what you want to use in creating your mission statement. By creating a clear statement with your life's mission, it is easy to be sure that your goals and your decisions align to your purpose in life. If a choice is clearly out of alignment, then you will know that it is an opportunity that you need to decline.

Example:

My personal values are:

• Trust

• Family

• Stability

• Kindness (compassion)

• Growth

My mission statement is: “I trust myself and my partner to make compassionate decisions that allow us to create a stable home environment for our family, which enables us to grow.”

Before settling on this statement, I went through several iterations of writing my mission statement over and over. It does take practice and careful thought to refine your mission statement. Also, you can revisit it at a later time if your priorities and goals change.

Another example of a personal vision and mission statement from Liquid Planner:

“My vision is to be an honest, empathetic and impactful project leader and to be recognized internationally within my industry. I am committed to growing as a leader and delivering value-added projects to the end users. My mission is to create and lead a dream team where everyone is playing to their strengths.”

As you can see, your mission statement can take different types of focused. Mine is focused on my family and home life, while this one is focused for business. There is no right or wrong way to do a mission statement, it is based on what works for you, and where you are currently placing the most importance in your life.

After you have your mission statement in place, you can begin to focus on writing out your goals for your life. This way, you can be sure that all of your goals are aligned to your vision and mission for your life.

This will help you to be sure that you are going the direction that you want to go in your life in an intentional way.

Do you need help setting your own mission statement? Or writing goals that align to your personal values? If so, spiritual life coaching could be right for you! Contact me to find out about my Life Coaching Programs and get your FREE 1:1 Consultation.