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A Personal Statement.

1.

Start by working out where you want to end up. This might sound like an obvious point but it is surprising how many times we can start a project without fully knowing the exact goal. Start by making a list of the things you would like to achieve. If you find this difficult, try to visualise yourself at a point in your life when you have already reached your goals and imagine how that feels. This should start to help get your creative juices flowing! If you are still having a problem doing this, imagine yourself as a character in your favourite soap opera or film, but as yourself. “Watch” yourself in your head. How do you dress? What do you drive? What is your job? This should help you on to the next stage which is to imagine yourself having completed your life goals.

Do not rule out anything though, no matter how small or insignificant you think that goal is, write it down – who knows where it will lead to?

2.

Now review your list. Are there any things to add, change or remove? Does the list fully represent the future you? Don’t hold back, you need to be your best critic and as such you need to be brutally honest with yourself. If your wildest pipedream came true, what would it be? The most important part of this part of the exercise is to get all of this down in black and white. It is amazing how writing things down can really help you to focus.

3.

As this is a personal mission statement, you need to ensure it is exactly that, personal. In this instance you have to try to be utterly selfish as you are only dealing with your own desires, not your desires for others. Look at each item on your list and see if your choices are informed by how you think friends, family, loved ones or colleagues would want you want you to be, or are you really listing those items just for yourself?

4.

Once you have written and perhaps, rewritten your list, it is time for reflection. Get yourself comfortable in a nice quiet space without interruptions. Read the list through and think about each and every item on the list. Remember that this is about you and your future you and as such you should emphasise your positive points. Any shortcomings are not to be dwelt upon.

As you think of every point make the image of the future you having achieved that particular goal in as much colour as possible. Really work at imagining that scene. Refine the location, the décor, the other people present, maybe some dialogue. Really try to make the scene as believable as possible. If you are finding this a difficult task to achieve, try imagining it as a still image, as though you are looking at a photograph of you achieving that item on your list.

As you focus more clearly on the various points, you should start to notice some are of more value than others. Is it possible to refine your list further? Can you remove some items that are of lesser importance than at first thought? Have new items appeared because of your improved connectivity with your goals?

5.

Tangibility. By now you should have a fairly concise list of your chosen desires and goals from life. But how do you start to reach for them? What is your best direction and approach? You need to now look at how these goals will affect your person. By that I mean, what ways do you need to change in order to achieve your goals how will those achievements affect you when they have been accomplished?

This calls for your second list of the process. Write down a list of areas that would be affected by you achieving your goals. These could be relationships, hobbies, community activities, charity work, career, your surroundings or how you see yourself. By writing a description of how the goals with affect and improve these areas when achieved you can start to see a process that gives purpose and direction to your life. It is not that there wasn’t anything there before, far from it, but now you are aware of it and therefore empowered to do something about it! Now that you have all of your goals linked to the areas and each is written in a list. Organise this into a rank of importance. After ranking them, discard the least important. Now expand the information in the remaining items. Are they still important? Are they still relevant? Keep refining your list and expanding the information until you have a top three.

6.

Now that you have a list of three items that are the most important things to you with regards to vision and values, you can now draft these up into a mission statement about who you are, where you are going and what you want. This in itself will be another refining process to get an accurate reflection of yourself. Once you have got your mission statement worded so it is perfectly in tune with your lists from the above steps you should be able to define it in terms of an action list. You should aim for a list that gives you steps to achieve in order to achieve your goals in life. It may not matter that you don’t necessarily know how to do something yet – that just adds in another step for you to learn those skills – just make the list of actions that will take you to your final goal. Work through your mission statement and refine you action list until you have a multi-point plan to guide you to achieving your goals and desires.

Congratulations! You are now starting towards that desire with a map on how to get there efficiently. As new challenges and stopping points occur along your new life road, constantly ask yourself, “How does this influence my goals, visions, desires? Will I need to amend my mission statement? Will that mean I need new actions to follow?”

The questions are always very straightforward but the answers often produce smoke and mirrors that can bamboozle you and distract you from your path. It is at these points that you need to pause and reflect upon your responses to these situations and as to what decisions will keep you on track with your mission statement and you ultimate vision. If the issues raised prove to be cloudy, keep in mind what you have learnt about yourself and how the various outcomes of your decisions might affect the directions you need to take to achieve your goals.

As with anything though, practice makes perfect so it might take a few attempts to get it just so. Remember, the more accurate your mission statement the better a reflection of yourself and ultimately, your path to fulfilment.

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