How to Write a Personal Mission Statement

There are many different ways to write a personal mission statement. Despite this there are also some commonalities and good guidelines you can follow when writing your own. Writing your own personal mission statement will give you a clear view of your goals, values, and relationships. Grab a pen and paper and let's get started.

1. Understand the benefits of writing your personal mission statement. Writing a personal mission statement can help you in many ways such as learning more about yourself, expressing your goals clearly, and becoming the person you want to be.

• Learn more about yourself. When you sit down to create your own mission statement it will force you to examine yourself in more detail than usual. You will need to learn just what you want to achieve and why you want to achieve it.
• Express and understand your goals clearly. You might have a broad understanding of what you want to achieve in life, but it may be difficult to put that understanding into precise words. Examining your goals will allow you to focus them into clear and concise statements.
• Knowing your goals will help you to achieve them more easily.
• Relate your goals and how to achieve them to your values and beliefs.
• Make your statement a way of life. Creating a personal mission statement will allow you to start living your goals and values. After clarifying and focusing your ideals and life direction you will be able to work your mission statement into everything you do.
• Don't just settle for writing your statement on paper.
• Always strive to live in accordance with your values and beliefs.

2. Imagine who you want to be. The first main step in writing your personal mission statement will be to imagine exactly who you want to become. Examine the qualities you want to obtain, the relationships you want to have, and the way of life that you want to live.

• Find a person you admire. Examine that person that you most admire. Discover the qualities in them that you find so admirable. List those qualities and think about how you could best bring them into your own life.
• Try to make this list as detailed as you can.
• Start practicing these qualities from you list in your daily life.
• Imagine who you want to be. Try to picture exactly who it is you want to become. Envision the details of your accomplishments, your personality, or any future you may want to find yourself living in.
• For now, forget about how you will achieve this.
• Focus only on what you want to achieve.
• Think of the roles you play. Examine your relationships to friends, family, career, hobbies, or other areas of your life. Think about how you would want to be describe in these relationships.
• Understand your roles and what you want from them.

3. Start discovering yourself. Writing your personal mission statement isn't directly about laying out a path to your future. The main function of your statement will be to help you better know yourself. 

• The personal mission statement is focused on self discovery, rather than creation.
• Your mission statement should be written only to inspire you, not to impress another person.
• Knowing yourself will help you to relate to and engage with the world at large.

 culled from wikihow.com

How to Set Goals

Whether you have small dreams or lofty expectations, setting goals allows you to plan how you want to move through life. Some achievements can take a lifetime to attain, while others can be completed in the course of a day. Whether you're setting broad overarching goals or planning specific manageable goals, you'll feel a sense of accomplishment and self-worth. Getting started can seem daunting, but you can build up to even the loftiest dream.

1. Determine your life goals. Ask yourself some important questions about what you want for your life. What do you want to achieve: today, in a year, in your lifetime? The answers to this question can be as general as "I want to be happy," or "I want to help people." Consider what you hope to attain 10, 15, or 20 years from now.

• A career life goal might be to open your own business. A fitness goal might be to become fit. A personal goal might be to have a family one day. These goals can be incredibly broad.

 

2. Break the big picture down into smaller and more specific goals. Consider areas of your life that you either want to change or that you feel you would like to develop with time. Areas might include: career, finances, family, education, or health. Begin to ask yourself questions about what you'd like to achieve in each area and how you would like to approach it within a five year time frame.

• For the life goal “I want to be fit,” you might make the smaller goals “I want to eat more healthily” and “I want to run a marathon.”
• For the life goal “I want to open my own business,” the smaller goals may be “I want to learn to manage a business effectively” and “I want to open an independent book store.”

3. Write goals for the short term. Now that you know roughly what you want to accomplish within a few years, make concrete goals for you to begin working on now. Give yourself a deadline within a reasonable time frame (no more than a year for short-term goals).

• Writing your goals will make them harder to ignore, consequently making you accountable for them.
• To become fit, your first goals may be to eat more vegetables and to run a 5k.
• To open your own business, your first goals may be to take a bookkeeping class and to find the perfect location for your bookstore.

4. Make your goals smaller steps that move you towards larger life goals. Basically, you need to decide why you're setting this goal for yourself and what it will accomplish. Some good questions to ask yourself when figuring this out are: does it seem worthwhile? Is now the right time for this? Does this match my needs?

• For example, while a short-term fitness goal might be to take up a new sport within six months, ask yourself if that will help you reach your bigger goal of running a marathon. If not, consider changing the short term goal to something that will be a step towards meeting the life goal.

5. Adjust your goals periodically. You may find yourself set in your ways concerning broad life goals, but take the time to re-evaluate your smaller goals. Are you accomplishing them according to your time frame? Are they still necessary to keep you on track towards your larger life goals? Allow yourself the flexibility to adjust your goals.

• To become fit, you may have mastered running 5K races. Perhaps after you have run a few and worked on improving your personal best times, you should adjust your goal from “run a 5K” to “run a 10K.” Eventually you can move to “run a half marathon,” then “run a marathon.”
• To open your own business, after completing the first goals of taking a bookkeeping class and finding a location, you may set new goals to obtain a business loan to purchase a space and to apply for the proper business licensing through your local government. Afterwards, you can move towards buying (or leasing) the space, then obtaining the books you need, hiring staff, and opening your doors to business. Eventually you may even work towards opening a second location!

 Culled from Wikihow.com

Introduction to Goal Setting

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"Don’t be encumbered by history – go off and do something wonderful."
(Robert Noyce, Co-founder of Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel)
If you want to do something wonderful, the first step is to decide what that something will be. Goal setting is probably the most significant factor in improving performance in nearly every area of life. Goals are not only great motivators; they provide a focus for your efforts and help you make decisions along the way.
This article deals with the practical side of goal setting and planning. When we set a goal we are actually stating how we would like to improve the world – specifically some aspect of it that we can control. So we can express the goal as a description of the improved situation. How would you like to change your world?
Start with the long-term view: what do you really want to achieve in your lifetime? Many people find this difficult: after all, it could be a long time, with many possibilities and opportunities. So put it another way: what would you really regret not having done or achieved in your lifetime?
Think about what you could aim for in different areas of your life:

• Family
• Career
• Education and personal development
• Hobbies and personal interests (art, music, intellectual pursuits, community, sports and fitness, etc)
• Peer group: career, social and neighborhood

Whatever goals you can think of in each area, write them down – or put them straight into Goalscape!
Once you have collected all the goals you can think of, review them, narrow down your list and start to set priorities. Consider what you have already achieved and how you did it; and where you have failed and why. What does this tell you about your strengths? Where might you need to develop and learn new skills? Answering these questions will provide clues as to which goals are within your reach.

Powerful Speech

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