What’s Your Personal Mission Statement?

“The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.” ― Mark Twain

 A personal mission statement is how you measure yourself against your toughest critic, you. You must be true to yourself before you can be true to another person, a team, an organization. A thought to lead you when you are too busy to think. A handhold when everything else is slipping from under you.

I have lost count of the number of books I have read, mistakes I have made and years I have worked on Leadership, Management, Team Building and the like, but the concepts I learned have stayed with me. The most important thing is to develop a personal mission statement. Not a mission statement for your team, or business, but for you and you alone.

How to build a Personal Mission Statement.

You need three ingredients for a Personal Mission Statement:

1. Core Values
2. A Plan for What You Want
3. The Will to Execute the Plan in the face of Adversity

Core Values

What makes you, you? Your values are what you use to weigh decisions The core values are the criteria we use to make decisions and without them you can be subject to a lot of drifting throughout your career.

A later post will cover these and how I came to them but for now, mine are here;

• Performance - not Excuses
• Everyone receives special treatment
• Bear any burden; Pay any price
• It's not what you know; it's what you do with what you know
• Fix first; blame later

 A Plan for What You Want

Where are you today? Where do you want to go? How will you get There from Here?

Your Core Values highlight the important things for you and then it is up to you to decide what else you want in Career, in Life and in General. Once you know where you start and where you want to finish, the rest is just route planning. My plan is to forge a successful career doing interesting work, make enough money to live a comfortable lifestyle, and make my daughter proud of her old Dad.

 The Will to Execute the Plan in the face of Adversity

Now comes the hard part. Execution. Doing it; No matter what. Walking the Talk. Did you do what you set out to do? Adversity shows up all over the place and can manifest itself in the strangest ways.

Having to be nice to a total jerk, staying a bit later to get the report done. Being outsourced after 12 years. Having your project cut out of the budget on your first day of the assignment. Without the will to “Crack On” you could easily fall into the “BMC* Syndrome.” No one really cares, so don’t waste time.

Use your Personal Mission Statement as your touch point to do what you said you would do. That alone will differentiate you from the vast majority of your peers and competition.

Where to from here?

Keep track of your decision points in a notebook or journal. Once you start to learn how you think, you can learn what is important to you. Once you learn what is important, you can develop your personal mission statement.

 FWIW – Mine is “Make a Difference, Every Day”