GET A PERSONAL MISSION

CRAFTING A PERSONAL MISSION

This afternoon I went to help a friend craft a mission statement for his new business. He did not turn up for the meeting.  It turned out he went to do something else. On a normal day, I would not dream of dealing with an organization without a mission statement. However, today, it began to bother me that I  don't seem to have any trouble dealing with people without a personal mission every day.

No employee I know makes a long-term commitment to an organization without a mission. And I don't know of any lady who makes a commitment to a man without a promise of love (or other value). A mission is a promise of engagement, it is a commitment to achieve a goal.

As I sat there, I realized that it was my fault that my friend skipped the meeting. I had not told him about the importance of a personal mission, before trying to craft a business mission. If his business was indeed his personal mission, he would have been present.  I also realized that without a mission, nothing could be counted as an achievement. At best, it would just be a incidence of fate.

The power of a personal  mission makes you employable, predictable, reliable, loyal and committed to your goals. If you find yourself lacking in these qualities towards anything specific, you lack a personal mission. Surprisingly, I find that only one out of ten employees has a personal mission. And maybe only one in a hundred has it written down.

Your lack of personal achievement in life, thus far, may be due to the fact that you lack the focus of a mission statement to guide you. In the absence of a personal mission, what employees call achievement in life, is in context of the employer's mission. Their life and career is guided by the goals of their employer. When such employees lose their jobs, they flay about in search of a reason to live. And set up a business because everyone is setting up business, and not because they have a mission to accomplish. If you want to achieve something of your own, on your own, and for your family, you should have a personal mission.

 So how do you craft a personal mission? That is the easy part. All you have to do is decide what you want to do and then spend all your time doing it. The moment you do that, you become a man or woman with a mission. And that's it!

If you write down what you want to achieve, you can keep refining it as you go along. It does not have to be a perfect statement pinned up on the wall. Hanging a mission on the wall does not achieve anything. It just uses up space that could be used to put up a pretty picture. A mission is activity not words on a wall.  Consultants, like me, like to complicate things by telling you HOW to go about it. But in reality if you know what you want to achieve, you don't need me to tell you WHAT to do.

Allan Bukusi