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Personal Mission Clarity – The Energy to Achieve

THURSDAY, MARCH 11TH, 2010

A number of coaches that our in my peer group disagree with the value of a personal mission statement. Perhaps more accurately they simply wish to get down to the business of working on the business right away. Perhaps that’s because they were born with the innate recognition of their personal mission. They may have never articulated it, however they move confidently forward, cutting a swath that will ultimately arrive them at their proper destination.  No need to think, just do.  

If you’re one of these people that intuitively knew where you are going from the minute you were born, I’m envious. I bless you and I say go for it! I’m jealous that you’ve got it figured out, and I don’t always, or at least I had to take the time to determine what my personal mission was and is. 

Until about age forty I struggled with what my life was about. Where was I headed? Where did I want to end up? What did I really want my life to be about? I’d worked on a personal mission statement but never came to a conclusion. Some material I’d read by Wayne Dwyer inched me forward, yet it wasn’t until I went through the 5 day intensive training to become an E-Myth coach that I had to come fully to grips with writing something down and crystallizing my personal mission statement.

I’ve personally found it to be the most powerful work I’ve done with respect to my life and other than the work I did with Robert Bloom on my Inside Advantage, it definitely had the most powerful influence on my life.

Why is a personal mission important?  For the reasons discussed in my last blog, Clarity Dissolves Resistance - Switch is provides clarity. More importantly if provides energy. As the authors of Switch note, in order to change you need to direct both the rider and the elephant. If we are going to make change in our lives, if we are going to achieve anything that we want that is worthwhile, we need inspiration. A personal mission statement provides inspiration, and most importantly it provides us with fuel. We live our lives at such a frantic pace that we rarely take the time to reflect on what is most important, what we value most, and rarely keep those priorities in front of us in times that are precious and of crisis. Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz point out in their book, The Power of Full Engagement, most of us spend more time reacting to immediate crises and responding to the expectations of others than we do making considered choices guided by a clear sense of what matters most. So the most compelling reason to discover your passion, your mission statement, is energy. Whatever our path in life, it requires energy to compete, to endure and to persevere. Energy is the fuel that provides us with the natural substance to do anything we enjoy or dislike and get reward from it. Fueled with the proper energy we can accomplish anything. Without the required fuel we will inevitably fail and come up short in our expectations. Your mission statement provides you with either a high or low level of energy depending on the passion and commitment you have for it.  

As we moved from the industrial age to the information age the currency of performance has switched from time to energy. Once again Jim Loehr & Tony Schwartz, The Power of Full Engagement point to this, “Energy, not time, is the fundamental currency of high performance. Performance, health and happiness are grounded in the skillful management of energy.
 
One only needs to watch someone with this level of commitment to realize the enormous power and fuel that knowing your personal mission can provide. Gandhi, Mother Theresa, our country’s forefathers all risked their lives to live their mission and the result has been a significant impact to the people they were committed to.

A personal mission statement is the first and primary step to acknowledging and accepting ourselves. It says this is who I am, and I’m okay being that person. It is not an effort to invent who we are but rather a serious introspection on who we are, what we are capable of being, and with an extension of this realization, who we can become. It is meeting and then exceeding our potential by simply recognizing the talents, skills and abilities that we have been born with and is innate to our being. A personal mission statement represents the highest form of clarity, and ultimately leads to living a life of purpose. 

 

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