I hope you had a great time crafting a life vision last week. If you missed my post, click here to catch up. How does it feel to be able to see the big picture of your life? When I first did this assignment, I suddenly felt newly discovered freedom as I no longer had to be everything to everyone. I had a sense of purpose. On the other hand, I felt confused because I didn’t understand how to get there.
If you are at that place, it’s completely fine. We’re only at step 2 and I promise you that if you stick to the process and do the assignments in this series, you WILL see the results.
But first, let’s move one step further. After you define your “frame” – your vision, you need to define your ‘WHY’. We officially call it MISSION STATEMENT.
Mission statement is “a statement of the purpose of a company, organization or person, its reason for existing” (Wikipedia). Mission statement defines your core purpose and what you stand for as it answers these questions:
- What is your aim or purpose?
- Who are your customers, clients, target market? Who do you help or work with?
- What is your contribution? How do you help your clients, what type or level of service do you provide? Be clear about what makes your service extraordinary.
- What makes you different from others out there? What beliefs or values are behind what you do? Clearly define ‘why’ behind your mission.
Once you answered all the questions, craft your mission statement. It’s important to keep it short and specific. Here’s one more question that might help you create a clear and strong mission statement:
- What do you do exceedingly well every day? What do you want others to know you for?
Here are some of my favorite examples:
- Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.
- Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.
- Amazon’s mission is to be earth’s most customer centric company; to build a place where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online.
Whether you are a business owner, freelance, have a full-time or part-time job, even if you’re unemployed, you can benefit from taking some time to craft both, your vision and mission statements.
Here are three major benefits of having a good vision and mission statement:
- Focus – You can return to them at any time and refocus when you get off track. Plus, having clarity on why you’re doing what you’re doing will keep you motivated when the going gets tough.
- Accountability – When you look back at your statements and realize you went off-track, you may decide to take some time to figure out what went wrong, or you might discover it’s time to refresh your statements to keep them current.
- Simplified decision making – It’s not always super easy, but even in the most difficult decisions your statements will remind you what’s important to you and navigate you in the right direction.
If you already have both statements in writing, I encourage you to revisit them and update them to make sure they are current and still represent you well.
If you never had time to create these statements, don’t put it off. Make it a priority today to think about what it is you want your business, organization, work/department, family, life to be like, why is it important for you and write it down.
Question: What is your mission? Share it in the comments below.
