After I wrote an article on a personal mission statement, some readers asked me how to write a mission statement. A mission statement is a brief statement about what matters most to you, reflecting your values and vision. In this article, I will show you how to find your values, to clarify your vision, and to create a personal mission statement, and why your effectiveness as a parent will be boosted by taking those steps.
A powerful personal mission statement will be a major game changer of your life and will boost your well-being and effectiveness. Indeed, I helped some of my close friends to create their personal mission statement, all of them say that mission statements helped them a lot especially when they had to juggle with difficult tasks.
I. Identifying Your Values
What values have you been carrying? What values do you want to pass on to your children?
Values are your beliefs that are desirable for you, and acts as a moral or ethical standard by which you make decisions and act. We obtain values through our family, cultural context, and life experiences. Many values are acquired in childhood consciously or unconsciously.
Clarifying your values helps you to shape the life you want to live in and the parent that you want to be.
Why finding my core values help me to become the person or parent I want to be
A few years ago, I conducted the value finding exercise that I will mention below, and finding my core values boosted my well-being and my effectiveness as a parent, because:
It made me see what is important to me, what my priorities are, and what I want to teach to my children. After conducting the value finding exercise, I found my core values from over 100 concepts. I picked my important values, while crossing out what was not important to me. For example, honesty, compassion, creativity, and health were some of my important values. At the same time, I deleted many concepts such as pride, contentment, popularity, and wealth, realizing that those are not my core values. Then, I was able to focus on what matters to me most, while putting less priority on what is not important to me.
Once I identified my important values, I was able to make use of daily interaction with my children to implement my values. Teaching values does not mean you have to bring children to church, a mosque, or temples, nor do you have to show videos or books that talk about morals. Rather, parents can most effectively teach value through daily interaction. For example, compassion is one of my core values. I implemented this value by respecting my young children’s emotions, because knowing and understanding other’s emotions is the first step to becoming a compassionate person.
Young children actually go through various emotions – happiness, joy, frustration, anger etc., while modern children’s culture (characterized in children with big smiles in media or ads) often overemphasize positive emotions and disrespect negative or complicated emotions. Children will learn to be compassionate if their emotion is acknowledged rather than denied.
Being a role model for my children became easier (or attainable) once I identified my most important values that I wanted to pass on to my children. Children copy their parents, and the “do what I say, not what I do” approach never works.
For example, how can we teach children the value of honesty through daily interactions? For me, keeping every small promise with my young children was not easy because like many mothers, I was often busy and had to deal with the unexpected. One day I promised my son to spend an afternoon doing craft activities only with him, but I got busy and could not, which saddened and upset my 5 years old. But keeping in mind that honesty is a core value of mine helps me to fulfill my promises, or not to make a commitment unless I am sure I can deliver it.
Even if something prevented me from fulfilling my promise, I can sincerely try to explain, strive to fix it, and be honest about it. Now I can be a role model by implementing honesty myself or by showing my children that I strive to be honest.
Value Finding Exercise
Here is the method of finding your values. First, ask these questions to yourself:
What values do you want to pass on to your children?
What are the values you gained from your experiences, your family, your community, or your culture?
What are the most important values you wish to hand over to your children?
Then, you can find your core values through the following process:
a) Take a look at List of Values consisting of over 100 values, and find your most important values by shortlisting 20-25 values.
b) Then, narrow them down to 5.
Those 5 values are your core values.
II. Clarifying Your Vision
Vision is seeing a future state with the mind’s eyes. You can envision your potential and your future through imagination, no matter how implausible it seems right now.
You can you see a vision through your imagination. Also, you can see your vision by beginning today with the image of yourself later in life, in line with Start from End Approach by Covey (1990 and 2007). Ask the following questions about your 80th birthday party, where your family, friends, and colleagues get together to celebrate and give honor to you.
What kind of relationship have you developed with them?
What memories have you shared together with them?
What are the tribute statements your family would deliver to you?
What are the tribute statements your friends would deliver to you?
What are the tribute statements your colleagues (from your work or a community you belonged to such as a local book club or philanthropic organization) would deliver to you?
Using your answer, create several statements that portray the vision for your life. Also, think of the parent you want be.
For me, visualizing my own 80th birthday was a very strong experience, because I could vividly imagine the kind of person that I want to be at that age. Keeping that picture in mind helps me to strive to do what really matters to me, and like values, it helps me to interact with my children more effectively.
Also, having a clear vision for my life helps me to focus on the big picture. Parents tend to focus on the day-to-day issues, or the "small picture". Examples of small picture focus include when your child reaches developmental milestone (such as walking by 18 months or speaking in sentences by 3 years of age), whether your child can hold pencils properly, or how well your child do in a math test.
For example, I want to be a parent who can help my children to have good self-esteem, and the best way to do so is through daily interaction. Building self-esteem in my children is a big picture that I have as a parent. By keeping that big picture in my mind, I can work towards my big picture. If I am completely lost in a daily chore, I might take a risk of behaving toward them in a way that undermines their self-esteem.
III. Creating A Personal Mission statement
After taking those steps, you’ll probably be ready to write your own personal mission statement.
Your roles
Your mission statement will be more balanced if you break it down into the roles you are taking. In which areas can you make a difference to the world you are living in? What kind of roles are you assuming in order to influence others? You might be a parent, the daughter or son of your own parents, a neighbor, a friend, staff at your company, and/or a service provider to your own clients.
Clarify specific areas of your life – personal, community, professional, and family roles. For each role, think about what you want to accomplish in the short-, medium-, and long-term, which will give structure and direction to your mission.
Be short but succinct
Also, your personal mission statement will be stronger if it is short but succinctly reflects your values and vision. I once created a lengthy and ambitious mission statement, but I forgot about it soon after. Once I had a short but powerful mission statement, I was able to remind myself of my mission from time to time, which brought a significantly positive impact on my daily life.
In the next article, I will discuss frequently asked questions about values, vision, and mission statements, including “What is the difference between your goal statement and your mission statement?” and “Why is it better for parents to focus on process rather than on results when they implement their values and missions?”.
References:
Steven Covey (1990), “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People”
Steven Covey (2007), “The Eighth Habit”
Psychology Today (2018), “6 Ways to Discover and Chose Your Core Values” by Meg Selig
Laura Davis and Janis Keyser (1997), “Becoming The Parent You Want To Be”
Note: The Start from End approach in Steven Covey’s book (“Seven Habits of Highly Effective People”) suggested that you start today by thinking of your own funeral three years from now, while the approach in another book by Covey (“The Eighth Habit”) suggested starting today by thinking of your 80th birthday. In this article, I used the 2007 approach.