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CHAPTER ONE The Personal Mission Statement
Those survivors were people who had a sense that some important work was yet to be done. He spoke about it as detecting rather than inventing their meaning. What is life asking of me? What is my responsibility in this situation? What kind of future contribution can I possibly make? By asking and answering these kinds of questions, they were strengthened and emboldened toward those purposes. And it enabled these people to survive. I’ll never forget the language he used: “Our wounds would heal.” This sense of the future somehow triggered the healing mechanisms and immune system inside their minds and bodies. The sense that they could make a better future gave them a deep feeling of hope. He quoted Nietzsche: “He who has a ‘why’ can live with any ‘what.’”
Dr. Frankl hypothesized that we have three parts to our nature: our body, our mind, and our spirit. But his deepest conviction is that most—not all—diseases originate in the spirit. That is, in a sense of meaninglessness, a sense of hollowness, a sense of purposelessness. No mission. No vision. No future. And that this void, this hollowness, translates itself into both the mind and the body.
So as you look at your mission statement, you’ll need to work basically on two things: vision—your sense of the future—and the principles that you want to live by. Your vision is the end, the destination. Principles are the means, like the flight plan. Vision is who you really are and what you could become. Principles are those unalterable truths you feel so strongly about that you are willing to accept them as your own set of values. In the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nothing gives so much direction to a person’s life as a sound set of principles.”
Writing down your mission statement, whether it be words or a picture, is an extremely powerful psychological process that imprints the brain. Visualizing imprints the brain—so does writing. Writing also brings a crystallization of thought and distills learning and insight into words. Words have a powerful impact in our lives, as well as in our relationships with other people. When you write, you have to think through your thoughts carefully. Lord Bacon put it this way: “Reading maketh a full man, but writing maketh an exact man.”
CHAPTER TWO Anatomy of a Mission Statement
First, the mission statement should be timeless. That means you write it as if it will never change. In fact, as you mature and grow, you might change it, but you…
Second, the mission statement should deal with both ends and means, which means our destination and the way that we get to our destination. In practical language that would be the development of a purpose or a vision and then the value system, hopefully one that is principle-based and enables us to accomplish our purpose or fulfill our vision. Third, the…
Fourth, a mission statement should deal with the four dimensions of our nature. What are these four? Well, we have our body, that is, the physical. You could combine it with the economic, because we need money to take care of our body, our physical well-being. The second is our relationships with others. We could call it the social/emotional aspect. Third is our mind, the mental aspect. And fourth, our spirit or the spiritual aspect. The body, the heart, the mind, and the spirit. The essence of these needs is captured in this phrase “to live, to love, to learn, to leave a legacy.” To live encompasses our physical and economic needs and well-being. To love deals with our relationships with others and how we relate together and deal with each other—kindness, respect, dignity, support, and so forth. To learn involves helping each other continually with education, learning from our experiences and identifying, developing, and using our…
Helen Keller observed, “Many persons have the wrong idea about what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification, but…
We all lead three lives: our public life, our private life, and our deep inner life. Our public life takes place in a community setting, where we interact with others. Our private life is away from the public—we may be alone, with a friend, or with family members. But our deep inner life is our most significant life. It is where our heart is. It’s where we have the capacity to explore our own motives, to examine our own thoughts and desires, and to analyze our problems and our needs. We can go into this deep private life—we could call it a secret life—even when we are in a public or a private setting…
Gandhi says, “A person cannot do right in one department of life, whilst attempting to do wrong in another department. Life is one indivisible whole.” So as you decide what your mission statement is about, ask yourself, “Am I prepared to act this way privately and publicly?” That question is a deep and private question.
Viktor Frankl shared a brilliant insight about developing mission statements. He said, “The thing I learned is that you don’t invent your mission, you detect it. You uncover it, as it were.” You see, everyone has special gifts, unique qualities, and characteristics. And they need to work inwardly until they detect those aspects.
The Turn of the Tide
So the man arrives at the beach, walks down from his car, pulls out the first prescription, and reads just two words: Listen carefully. Two words. Listen carefully. What could this possibly mean?
He’s getting deeper into his inner life. In fact, by noon, he is almost loath to take the second prescription because he has been so deeply peaceful and quiet and has enjoyed this first one. But as agreed, he pulls out the second prescription at noon. This prescription contains three words: Try reaching back.
That throws him. What could this mean? Try reaching back. “Maybe I should start thinking about the past,” he thinks. So he starts to get into his memory. “I remember after school what kind of excitement we had when we’d come down to the beach. We’d be yelling, we were exultant, we were so happy. I remember coming down here with my brother.” He becomes especially emotional and nostalgic when he thinks about his brother, because his brother was killed in the war. He is gone now. But he remembers running down to the beach after school with his brother and just screaming like wild people. They just couldn’t get enough of this freedom, this fresh air, this excitement.
When he takes out the third prescription, he discovers it is the tough one, the core prescription. In a sense, the other two were preparation for this one. This third prescription takes him into his deep inner life with enormous force. Three words again: Reexamine your motives. “Examine my motives for three hours? What is my center? What is my life about? What is my core? What is my mission? What is my vision? What is it that I am all about?” This prescription, although difficult, makes him think deeply, and he begins to observe a pattern. He discovers that he has put at the center of his life himself and the fulfillment of his own needs. He is following a selfish pattern. Even his so-called service or selfless activities are selfish in that he wants to be known for them, to be seen, and his service to others is anything but anonymous. He discovers that his private life is different from his public life. He puts on that he is caring, but inwardly he could look and find a selfish motive that he is trying to serve within himself. He starts to become aware that his malaise, his boredom, his disease is of the spirit. The selfishness of his life is that his…
When you live out of your memory, you focus on the past. When you live out of your imagination, you focus on the future. What lies behind us is nothing compared to what lies within us and ahead of us. But it took all this self-analysis, this self-awareness, this self-exploration. It took the first two prescriptions of quieting down his life and his spirit and remembering happy times to prepare him for the period of self-analysis,…
When six o’clock comes, he is, for the first time, able to say within himself, “I know what my life is about. And I know what my sickness is about. I know what I am about. I know the cause of my problem and what I need to do. It’s not yet healed, but I know the direction I want to take.” So at six o’clock, he pulls out the last prescription and it says: Write your troubles in the sand. He thinks, and then he lets the paper blow away. He reaches down, takes a piece of shell, goes to just under the high-water mark, and writes down a few words. Then he turns, walks away, and never looks back. And the last sentence to the story? The tide was coming in. We must give Arthur Gordon, the author of this story, credit. It is called “The Turn of the Tide.” It is a beautiful story and contains a lot of wisdom. It teaches that you don’t start writing a…
When you prepare for your own mission statement, ask the deeper questions. What are your unique gifts? Listen to those who see the potential in you. Listen and sense their affirmation of you. Study the lives of people who’ve inspired you—your heroes and what it is that you admire about them—so you can get a sense of the principles on which you want to build. You want to write a mission statement that is timeless, that will not change. It may in fact change, but you want to…
CHAPTER THREE The Highest and…
Your mission statement serves to summarize the principles you want to live by. I remember hearing Robert Schuller speaking about this interesting concept: If you knew you couldn’t fail, what would you give your life to? If you knew you didn’t have to work for a living, what would you give your life to?
Can you see that the highest and best use is a function of the capacity of that land to be productive and to be used in some way that’s wise and well?” Now what if you take that concept and apply it to you? You can do so many things with your life. Sometimes a person might say to me she always felt she was going to do something with children. Okay, I’d ask, does that mean start an orphanage? Does that mean have biological children? Does that mean adopting some developmentally disabled children? Does that mean that you raise the funds to create a summer program for some inner city kids to get out of the city and out into the country for a week or two at a time? Does it mean a scholarship for enthusiastic and budding musicians so that they can go to the university for a couple of weeks? Because an interest in children can have so many manifestations, you need to select from among them. You have many possible ways to fulfill that desire and that passion in you. However you get started, start. Don’t just think about it. Don’t just find somebody else’s mission statement and say, “Well there’s a couple of good things there,” and just use theirs. Pay the price to dig deep. Talk to people who care about you. Work with this process for a while, because when you’re done, it will provide guidance for the rest of your life.
CHAPTER FOUR Your Highest Ideals
Another issue is that when you do begin to work on writing your mission statement, what you are doing is saying, “Here’s what I want to be like, these are my deepest values, and here’s what life should be about for me.” As a result, then, you’ll know what to do and how to act. Like most people, we feel a gap between our ideals, our deepest values, and what we actually do. And we aren’t especially comfortable dealing with this gap. So we fear that working on a mission statement, writing it down, and seeing it in front of us will only highlight that gap. It’s going to evoke feelings of guilt; it’s going to be uncomfortable. These reasons come up, and we don’t write it.
So Many Millions of Dollars
A mission statement is at its core an expression of your desired center.
one of the things that experience has taught me is that, as you live with your mission statement for a while, you will discover the answer to those questions. You will ask, “Does this lift me? Does this focus me?”
your ability to talk,
What do you hold as your edge in life?
Or, what do you tend to depend upon to influence others?
In considering major defining kinds of decisions, what tends to be the factor that moves you?
What tends to move you in key decisions?
What do you tend to rely on for influence?
What are the sources of your sense of personal identity?
I find tremendous error in shaping a mission statement to be a massive list of lifetime goals. “By the time I’m fifty-two, I want so many millions of dollars,” that sort of thing. This approach is extremely limiting. It doesn’t release potential and freedom within a person. A mission statement should reflect a deeper level. I’ve talked to some who have created a mission statement and say, “Ah, it never really did much.” Almost every time, when I look at their mission statements, it was a list of outside external goals, things to have, or places to travel. Although these things might be nice goals, does your sense of who you are or your happiness depend on them? Probably not. Identity and happiness comes from a deeper place.
Another big error that I find when people say that their mission statement hasn’t really worked for them is that their statements are often selfish, self-focused, inwardly narcissistic lists of what they want. “I want to have this…, I want to be like this…, I want to do this…,”—all “I” statements. The history of the world teaches that the power of joy in people doesn’t come in getting, it always comes in giving, contributing, adding more. The more you give, the more you live. If you’re about something better, live for something higher than self.
All the great people you respect, they’re people who give. They’re people who’ve made a difference in the world, in someone’s life. Most likely they’re not famous. Perhaps you think of a grandparent, or a parent, or an uncle, or somebody who invested in doing something for others in a genuine, real way.
