Outstanding Club

note: Although this post is in response to the Personal Mission Statement Group Writing Project presented in the April Outstanding Club newsletter, rest assured that I consider my entry invalid to win either of the prizes - it is meant purely as an example of what we’re looking for in the entries (though please, take a completely different approach as you please - we like and encourage innovation).

The criteria mentioned as guidance for determining a person’s mission statement included a few key points:

• What should I embrace?
• What should I avoid?
• What words define me so well that anything vying for my time, money, emotion, or other resources could pass through them as a filter and obviously fall into one of those first two buckets (embrace/avoid)?

This reminded me of a similar exercise I did about a month ago, which I wrote about at another blog of mine called Hacking Your Passions. During a walk in the forest with friends, I was challenged to come up with the one word that best described who I was. With a personal mission statement you at least get a few words, maybe even a sentence or two, but one word? I spent a week afterwards rolling that around in my head, seeing if there was one word that I would be comfortable having anyone think of me as above all others. If there was room on my gravestone for one word, what would it be? Is this one word something that describes me today, or my ideal self, the person I aspire to be? Quickly, this turned into a far more complicated issue than the person asking the question had, I think, originally intended. Eventually, though, a word I came to  satisfied all the questions, criteria, and what-ifs I could throw at it.

Inspiring.

When working through the exercise for determining my personal mission statement, I began to wonder if I could leave it at that one word. Did I need to encumber or complicate things with a sentence, when a word might just do it all? What is the best test I can give this word to see if I need to expand beyond it?

Another thing that is mentioned in the April Outstanding Club newsletter is David Bach’s value circle exercise. This is an exercise I spent a lot of emotional effort on several years ago when I first came upon it, and the results have served me extremely well. I found that when it came down to the core of me I could put everything I value most into five “buckets”, if you will, each defined by a word or a few words; faith, wife, family & friends, health, and work (with an implied “my” in front of each of them). It would stand to reason, then, that if I applied any of those five things to my one-word mission statement of “inspiring”, it would be as good a test as any other I could come up with.

The Results

My faith: It stands to reason that I am inspired constantly by my faith. It is a set of guiding principles that I don’t use so much as instinctively follow. Whether any human actions can be inspiring to God, in the sense we think of inspiration, is difficult to know with certainty… but I believe it is worthwhile to do my best to try to live my life in a way that would inspire any parent, even if it happens to be the Divine Creator I believe in. And I can’t think of anything I could be doing with my life that holds more value.

My wife: It was on a walk along a nearby canal with my wife that the word “inspiring” first occurred to me as having the potential to be the word I’d most want to have describe me. I want to inspire us in all areas of our marriage to keep growing, keep aware, keep nurturing the things that make us successful as a couple. I want to be an inspiration to my wife so that we stay healthy in all ways - physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. If I keep an attitude of wanting to continuously inspire my marriage in these ways, it stands a wonderful chance of continuing to be an inspiration to me.

My family and friends: I learned some time ago that the people you attract into your life are partially due to circumstance, partially due to the person you are, and partially due to the person you hope to become. Judging by the quality of my relationships today, and the amazing individuals that comprise them, I believe I am both incredibly fortunate and on the right path to being the optimal me. I learn how to better myself by the example of the people closest to me, and I consider it my chief responsibility to those people that I conduct myself in a way that will do nothing but help them to grow into who they aspire to be.

My health: Again, I speak to the mind, body, and spirit when I refer to health. I need a healthy relationship with myself to achieve what I hope to with my life, and that means above all else inspiring myself to keep pushing forward on all aspects of my health. Personal trainers can keep you moving at the gym, counsellors can give you tools to figure things out emotionally, but it all begins with initiative, focus, and internal motivation that no one can provide you besides yourself.

My work: The things that fill the bucket I call “my work” include the more traditional definition (otherwise known as “the day job”) and other efforts outside of that, such as the website you’re reading this on. My work is also vacuuming, doing yard work, and maintaining the pool. It is going into the community and supporting the causes I believe in with my time and energy. Frankly, in all aspect of my work today, while there is always room for improvement, I am absolutely thrilled with the way things are going. I like the people I work with. I am doing the sorts of things I want to do that play well to my strengths and passions. I feel like I can charge forth, be myself (if not better), and have nothing but opportunity to inspire others through my words and actions. I could, at this point, simply go to work, collect a paycheck, do what’s expected and nothing more, come home, and watch seven hours of television before it’s time for bed. No one would say there is anything wrong with that. But no one, including myself, would be inspired by it, and it is simply not a version of me I could live with.

My Personal Mission Statement

After the careful, thought-through analysis above, I have to conclude that one word is not quite enough. It’s close, but if someone stopped me on the street and asked what my personal mission statement was, I would have to respond with two words.

Be inspiring.

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