Finding the You that You Always Wanted to Be
August 6, 2009 by ursula
Filed under Personal Development
What is Your Mission?
We all have a mission in life: an inner urge to pursue an activity or perform a service. And it’s up to all of us to discover what guides us, inspires us, and motivates us to get out of bed every morning.
Some of us are daunted by the word “mission” and immediately think of Mother Theresa,
Mahatma Gandhi or Nelson Mandela – people who had grand visions for a better world. But does you mission have to change the world? Of course not. It only has to change YOUR world. Your mission statement is your written permission to do what is most important to you, most exciting to you, most YOU.
Finding the You that You Always Wanted to Be
As the popular 1996 film Jerry Maguire opens, the protagonist, played by Tom Cruise, is grappling with a number of issues that make him question the person he has become. These issues offend his set of values. Sports agent Maguire goes so far as to say he hates himself – and then corrects himself to say he hates “his place in the world”.
So, he writes his own mission statement. Among the values he refers to are “simple pleasures,” “protecting clients in health and injury,” “caring,” and being “the me I always wanted to be.” Above all, the mission statement inspires him to say: “I’d started my life”.
Jerry Maguire says that the people in his business, including himself, had forgotten what was important. Writing a personal mission statement offers the opportunity to establish what’s important in our lives – in not just our careers, but our personal lives too. Stephen Covey, in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People,
refers to crafting a mission statement as “connecting with your own unique purpose and the profound satisfaction that comes in fulfilling it.” A mission statement can help you to become the “you you always wanted to be.”
A personal mission statement based on your vision and values becomes a personal constitution, the basis for making both major, life-directing decisions and those daily decisions that need to be made amid the circumstances and emotions that affect our lives.
