Defining Your Life Missions
“Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life; everyone must carry out a concrete assignment that demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated, thus, everyone’s task is unique as his specific opportunity to implement it.”— Viktor E. Frankl
As we explore building future alignment, we begin with your Long Future. We will then explore your Short Future.
There are three documents that every person should write if they want to find more flow in their lives. We do this in organizations, communities, and nations as standard practice, yet for some reason, these important documents are a rarity amongst individuals—not you.
By getting this far in the Flow Series you have demonstrated a high level of commitment to finding more flow in your life and to maximize your performance and effectiveness. So, to lay the groundwork, I am going to introduce to you these three essential documents and give you the chance to build them each week over the next month. If you have built any one or more of these documents already, this will be a good time to review them and spend some time refining them. You will be glad you did.
These documents are not complex and do not need to be long—but rich and full of meaning. So what are these documents? Three words sum them up: Mission(s), Vision, and Legacy.
Each of these documents play a unique role to help you find more flow in any Meaningful Life Arena (MLA) that’s important to you.
Your Mission(s) Statement will help you look to the future and identify your big abstract and compelling objectives. Some call these “Big Hairy Audacious Goals” or “BHAGs” because that’s what they are. The primary intent and focus of this document is to look towards the future—like a broad brush strokes on a canvas. When we get to Short Future, we’ll talk about goals in a more narrow sense—taking our life canvas and breaking them into bite-sized pieces. But for the moment, let’s focus on the big picture.
After declaring your future Mission(s), your Vision Statement will be written in the present and tell the broader story of your mission(s) as if they are already happening. This document will help you expand your self-image and create a richer personal story that will stretch your capacities to a new level. In future Flow Series articles, we discuss the power of visualization to internalize your vision as a daily practice.
Third, your Legacy Statement will take on the role of looking backward from your Long Future. In this document, you will reflect on a life well lived and described all of the outcomes that you have achieved. Part of this document will be to take on the role of those closest to you as they describe the goals you achieved, the difference you made, and the type of person you became.
Does this excite you? It should, because once you complete these three documents, how you approach any MLA will dramatically change. So let’s get started…
Our work today is simple. We are going to start with large and abstract objectives that are the most important to you. These are the MLAs where you seek to find more flow within.
While most organizations often have a more focused mission (think Coke beating Pepsi), people tend to have multiple missions because they engage in multiple and diverse life arenas. As such, your homework this week is going to be simple.
Please take just 10-15 minutes and fill out the attached “Defining Your Life Missions” exercise and start identifying your thematic goals. Identify the big things you want to achieve in each category (use bullet points, sentences, phrases, or whatever gets you thinking), then create a few categories of your own. Don’t worry about getting too specific. This is a time to think broadly and passionately. To help you think about this exercise, I’ll attach a sample for your review.
That is all for today. Have fun with this exercise and we’ll pick it up again in the next article where we will expand these missions into your personal vision.