Developing your personal mission statement

Key Tips

1. Reflect on what activities you most enjoy
2. Write down an initial hypothesis of your mission statement
3. Share what you wrote with people who know you well
4. Reference your mission statement regularly
5. Refine your view as you gain career and life experiences

Navigating your career and life without investing the time to think about your personal mission statement is as unlikely to get you to your desired destination as taking a road trip without using a map.

Over time, I have honed in on my own personal mission of helping others unlock their full potential.?Having this clarity has been particularly helpful as I pursued graduate school and job opportunities.

Beyond the career benefits, investing the time to think about the impact I want to have with my life has provided me with greater confidence in terms of how I allocate my time on a daily basis.

These five steps were particularly helpful in developing my personal mission statement.

1. Reflect on what activities you most enjoy

Look at your calendar and analyze how you have spent your time over the past month.?

What were the activities that left you feeling the most energized??Were there moments where you were so entranced by what you were doing that you lost track of time?

Taking note of such activities when you are living your best life can be a helpful starting point to begin defining your personal mission statement.?

If you are having a difficult time identifying themes as you reflect on how you have spent your time, consider the Reflected Best Self Exercise (details below) to get input on where you thrive through the eyes of others.?

2. Write down an initial hypothesis of your mission statement

After reflection, it will be helpful to put your thoughts down on paper.?

Putting an initial hypothesis of your personal mission statement in writing can help you commit to living with greater intentionality.?It also enables you to revisit your thoughts with a fresh pair of eyes later on down the line.

Over time, reflecting on your past thoughts with this fresh pair of eyes can help you better differentiate between topics that are core to your interests vs. others that may have been top of mind due to some external factor that was influencing your thinking at the point in time when you made an initial draft.?

3. Share what you wrote with people who know you well.

Once you have something in writing, share it with people who know you particularly well.?Invite their feedback.?Understand what surprises them about what you have written.?Those who know you best are well positioned to help hold you accountable to your authentic self.

When I was working on the personal statement for my Harvard Business School application, my mother provided me with the most helpful perspectives.?She neither went to college nor worked within the business world, but she has a deep understanding of who I am as a person.?When she read the initial draft of my personal statement, she mentioned a few areas of my application that caught her off guard.

As I reviewed the portions of my personal statement that surprised her, I realized that these were areas where I was subconsciously altering my voice to reflect what I thought an admissions committee would want to hear as opposed to my true story.??

I continued to edit the personal statement not only until it felt genuine to me, but also to my mother and a handful of others who knew me well.

These perspectives from loved ones provided a window through which I could see myself.

4. Reference your mission statement regularly.?

While there are many benefits to creating a personal mission statement, you will realize its value even more when you regularly revisit what you’ve written.

I keep a printed copy of my personal mission statement next to my bed and bookmarked to my web browser.?Doing so creates an environment where I am constantly reminded of how I want to spend my life.?This greater awareness of the direction I want to head allows me to regularly inch closer toward my path to fulfillment and the type of impact to which I aspire.

Having clarity around the things that I am passionate about has also been tremendously helpful when meeting people for the first time.?Clear conviction regarding what I want to do with my life enables me to more easily find common points of interest with others and can help lay a strong foundation for friendships/partnerships.?

5. Refine your view as you gain career and life experiences.

Developing a personal mission statement is not an exercise that will ever be fully completed.?As you gain more information, revisit your initial thinking and beliefs with a willingness to change your view.

In the years to come, many people will find themselves working in companies, roles, or functions that do not even exist today.?Our career and life journeys will lead us through unfamiliar fields — pun intended!

Although having clarity on the direction in which we want to move is important, we should avoid moving fully into autopilot.?Circumstances around us will inevitably change, sometimes rerouting us from what we previously believed to be our ideal path.

Conclusion?

Although no amount of time spent thinking about our desired destination will enable us to identify a specific address where we want to arrive in life, investing time to create an initial hypothesis of a mission statement and allocating energy to refine it over time will drastically increase our ability to at least arrive in the right zip code.?

Have you taken the time to develop a personal mission statement??If so, how has it helped in your career and life??What were some key steps in your journey towards defining the impact you wanted to have?

Please share your comments and reflections below. They will surely be helpful for other readers navigating their journey towards personal clarity.

Additional Content?

Link | Zoom event recording on this topic of developing your personal mission statement

Link | Article on developing clarity on what you want to achieve in your career and life

Link | Reflected Best Self Exercise from Ross School of Business, University of Michigan

Link | Collection of written articles and recordings of past open-invite Zoom conversations

Link | Full list of upcoming open-invite Zoom conversations