Cornerstone 2 - Driven by a Personal Mission

Mission statements represent your belief system; the priorities, values and principles that measure your decisions. It provides overall direction and clarifies your purpose and meaning. When you clearly know what you want to be and to do in your life, you feel strong in your sense of mission. You are no longer driven by everything that happens to you. Rather, you feel a deep and complete commitment to following your innermost values. And you’re excited by it! People sense your strength and direction – you become a powerful, positive decision maker in your professional and personal lives. (By Dawn Angier: Success Networks.)

The most effective people shape their own future. They mentally plan and then physically create their own positive results. What they have in their minds shape their future.

Some benefits of a personal mission statement:

• Encourages you to think deeply about your life.
• Clarifies what is important to you.
• Provides direction and commitment.
• Provides the first or mental creation of your desired results for your life.

Writing Your Personal Mission Statement

A mission statement is a powerful document that expresses a personal sense of purpose and meaning in life; it acts as a governing constitution by which you evaluate decisions and choose behaviours. A personal mission statement is not something you write overnight. It takes thoughtful introspection, careful analysis, deep soul searching and sometimes several drafts to produce a final sense of purpose.

The process of writing a mission statement involves answering the following questions:

1. What things do I want to have that I feel are important?
2. What am I about? What do I want to do, my contributions and accomplishments?
3. What are the qualities of character I would like to emulate?
4. What legacy do I want to leave?

To begin creating your personal mission statement, plan a time to be totally alone. Get away from phones, family, business and friends. This solitude will help you get in touch with what matters most to you. Without interruptions, you can become introspective and ask yourself the series of questions to help gather information about your values and priorities.

Evaluate Your Mission Statement

Does my mission statement:

• Express timeless, proven principles that produce quality-of-life results?
• Represent the best that is within me?
• Provide direction and purpose for me?
• Challenge and motivate me?
• Inspire me?
• Address all significant roles in my life?
• Integrate all four fundamental needs.
• Physical – Your body.
• Socio-emotional – Your relationship with yourself and others.
• Mental – Your mental/cognitive development.
• Spiritual – Development of your spirit.

Refine Your Mission Statement

For a week or two, carry your draft with you and make notes, additions, and deletions as needed.

Find time to get away from the fast pace of life. Go to a quiet, peaceful place where you can think deeply about your life and purpose.

Ideas to help you revise and refine:

• Look at others’ mission statements. (Yours does not have to look like that of anybody else; simply look for ideas.)
• List the things that are important to you in each of the four needs: physical (your body), mental (your mind), socio-emotional (your relationships, with self and others) and spiritual (your spirit).
• Keep a personal journal to explore the principles that are important to you.
• Keep a running list of positive character traits you would like to develop.
• Staying in touch with your personal mission statement is important; “display” it where you can read it regularly. Periodically test its value.

Building Shared Vision as an Inspirational Leader

A shared vision, especially one that is intrinsic, uplifts people's aspirations. Work becomes part of pursuing a larger purpose embodied in the organisations' products or services - accelerating learning through personal computers, bringing the world into communication through universal telephone service or promoting freedom of movement through the personal automobile. The larger purpose can also be embodied in the style, climate and spirit of the organization. Visions are exhilarating. They create the spark, the excitement that lifts an organisation out of the mundane.

In a corporation, a shared vision changes people's relationship with the company. It is no longer "their company"; it becomes "our company". A shared vision is the first step in allowing people who mistrusted each other to begin to work together. It creates a common identity. In fact, an organisation's shared sense of purpose, vision, and operating values establish the most basic level of commonality.

Shared visions emerge from personal visions. This is how they derive their energy and how they foster commitment. As Bill O'Brien of Hanover Insurance observes, "My vision is not what's important to you. The only vision that motivates you is your vision."

Organisations intent on building shared visions continually encourage members to develop their personal visions. If people do not have their own vision, all they can do is "sign up" for someone else's. The result is compliance, never commitment. On the other hand, people with a strong sense of personal direction can join to create a powerful synergy toward what I/we truly want. Building shared vision must be a central element of the daily work of leaders. It is ongoing and never-ending. Sometimes, managers expect shared visions to emerge from a firm's strategic planning process. But for all the same reasons that most "top-down" visioning processes fail, most strategic planning also fails to nurture genuine vision.

For those in leadership positions, what is most important is to remember that their visions for their teams/organisations are still personal visions. Just because they occupy a position of leadership does not mean that their personal visions are automatically "the organisation's vision". Ultimately, leaders, intent on building shared visions must be willing to continually share their personal visions. They must also be prepared to ask, "Will you follow me?" This can be difficult. For a person who has been setting goals all through his career and simply announcing them, asking for support can make him feel very vulnerable. Despite the excitement that a vision generates, the process of building shared vision is not always glamorous. Managers who are skilled at, building shared visions talk about the process in ordinary terms. 'Talking about our vision' just gets woven into day-to-day life.

It requires extraordinary openness and willingness to entertain a diversity of ideas. This does not imply that we must sacrifice our vision "for the larger cause." Rather, we must allow multiple visions to coexist, listening for the right course of action that transcends and unifies all our individual visions.