After revisiting my personal core values, it’s now time to revisit my personal mission statement. Even though I feel this term “personal mission statement” is rather overused and overhyped, the concept of defining a single sentence for your main purpose in life is still a powerful exercise.
So to start this exercise, let’s first check my current definition:
I, Lodewijk van den Broek, love life and have a lot of love to give. I enjoy authentic growth and I help others to grow. I’m here to have lots of fun and enjoy my freedom in comfort and vitality.
I recognize all my five values in them, even after revisiting them like I did (that’s a good thing!). But I do feel that it needs to be fine-tuned.
New insights
What I learned about myself is that I want to make people learn and make them laugh. This is rooted in my values of Growth and Fun. These values are very much focused not only on myself, but also on what I want to do in this world.
The values of Love, Authenticity and Freedom, are mostly values that are focused on myself; they are at this moment in time anyway. The lesson I learned at the Bløf concert is a clear example of this.
Growth and Fun are outward focused, and the other three are inward focused. This needs to be reflected in my mission statement better than it is now.
New personal mission statement
I, Lodewijk van den Broek, love life and have a lot of love to give. I radiate positive energy and inspire others to learn and laugh. I thrive on growing my freedom and authenticity.
Or as a mantra:
Learning Life Laughing
Parts of it haven’t changed, love is still in the first place in pretty much the same way it has been for a long time. The outward focus of Fun and Growth is better represented.
I dropped the comfort and vitality bits, because they don’t need to be mentioned specificallyand their meaning and importance have changed over time. They represent only different aspects of freedom (vitality) and fun (comfort).
High impact and design
There are two aspects that are important to me, but are not reflected in my mission statement. These aspects are impact and design. They’re not reflected in my mission statement, because I feel they’re more nuances than core elements.
Impact and design are important, because they describe the “how” I want to work with my mission statement, and specifically with the outward focused values of Fun and Growth.
I want to make a high impact in the work I do. High impact in the meaning that I want to reach a lot of people, but time synchronous as time asynchronous. Working one on one, although valuable at times, is therefore not my focus.
Design is another aspect of how I want to do my work. I like visually pleasing things, and aim to create visually pleasing things. This blog is an example of that design at work. But the design mentality permeates in different aspects of life too. I’m not a “design for the design” kind of guy, because in my opinion design needs to be functional.
So whenever I create something I want it to create impact, I want it to be visually pleasing, and I want to inspire people to learn and laugh.
Next step: Guidelines and goals
I’ve already taken a sneak peek towards guidelines and goals in this article. I’m going to elaborate on those in the next post, pretty much along similar lines as last time.
Not exactly the same of course, because I learned some lessons about setting goals in the meantime:
- Not too many goals at the same time
- Watch out for colliding deadlines
- Make sure to quantify enough
- And watch out for moving targets
It’ll be interesting to see how these lessons relate to the three different goals I’m going to set myself. One based on effort, one focused on result and one pure for fun.
PS: I realize that this is turning out a series of posts that’s focused on me, and how I’m working my way through this proces. There’s a lot of “me” in there, and I leave the translation to you … entirely up to you. I can assure you that’s not going to stay that way. But this is the process I’m going through right now, and it’s certainly a good way to get back into the writing rhythm again.
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi I have a thought for you and this is not meant as a criticism just a reaction take from it what you will. Looking at your mission statement it seems more like a description of who you are to day rather then a tool to propel you forward. There is no language of achievement in it just current action.
Hi Quinn,
You’re right about that, and that’s also what I want to achieve with it. It’s a statement about who I am (and who I want to be). It’s meant as “my true north” on which I can tune in whenever I need to take decisions. Like a compass shows us where North is, my mission statement will show me where I am and how to proceed in accordance with who I am (and want to be).
What propels me forward is working on living fully aligned with this mission statement. Setting goals is a tool to break that down into smaller attainable steps.
Awesome I don,t think there is anything more important then having a solid idea of were you are headed in life. Knowing were north is can save a a lot of headaches and simplify our decition making prosess
That’s a great revision! One note about the English: you can’t “thrill on”. I know what you mean and I’m sure you know, too. You could use “thrive” (a great mission statement word, I think) or you could rewrite it as “Growing my freedom and authenticity thrill me.” I hope this is somehow helpful…please ignore the idea if it’s in any way annoying. Thanks for blogging!
Thanks Nathan! Both for the compliment and the revision suggestion. I changed it to “thrive”.
No. By all means, continue the “me” exploration. I always learn a great deal by being able to follow someone else’s journey. I consider it a privilege. Thank you!