How to Create a Mission Statement

Do you sometimes feel like you don’t know where your life is going, or that it’s hard for you to articulate what is most important to you? Do you have goals that you’re not really invested in? If so, you may need to create a mission statement. It can help you bring alignment and clarity to your life – ensuring that when you’re spending your valuable time, you’re spending it on the things that really matter to you!

In this post I’m going to walk you through a process I used and recommend to others who need ideas on how to come up with a mission statement. I’ll show you examples, and I’ll wrap up by sharing mine!

But first…what IS a mission statement?

A mission statement is a very personal statement that defines you and what you’re about. It can have bullets, or just be one long run-on sentence, or be simple and short. It is a personal statement, so forget any ideas you have about how they should be formatted and think most about what is in it.

A mission statement goes under a lot of different names…life philosophy, purpose statement, or even my personal favorite, a North Star. Whatever you call it, it defines the direction of your life and the things that are most important to you.

Mission statements should be broad enough that they encompass the most important things, and not so specific that they have a short lifecycle. This is something that speaks to you deeply and means a lot to you, something that fits you.

That’s not to say your priorities might change over time, or that you may develop new passions that need to be worked into your statement. However, a good mission statement represents who you are and what you want at a deep, enduring level.

Why create one?

When crafted carefully and with intentionality, a mission statement can help you in a few ways:

• Guide you when making tough life choices.
• When creating goals that will move you further along a path that brings you happiness.
• Bring clarity and direction to your life.
• Help ensure you are spending your time on things that matter.

Looking at it that way, if you’re experiencing a lack of clarity or purpose that makes you feel discouraged or like you don’t know which direction your life is taking, a mission statement can help.

OK, so…how?

I think people get hung up on where to start when creating their statement. So what I’m going to do is share is the method I used to create my own mission statement, which I recommend anytime anyone asks me how to get started. I’m hoping it will help you too!

The Process

The process is pretty simple. You’ll need at least a couple hours, but you shouldn’t need to spend too much time on this. Firstly, because you’ll hurt your brain. Secondly, because spending too much time on this can get you into an analysis-paralysis tailspin.

The first step is to brainstorm, and to do it in a timeboxed format, which just means you set yourself a time limit to get everything out. This will help motivate you and to pull out the most important stuff as quickly as possible.

After brainstorming, you’ll group everything into themes and see what falls out. There’s more on what to do with the fallout items in my goals workshop.

Once you have your general themes, you’ll be doing an “and why is that important” exercise to get to the bottom of your themes and why they are critical to your happiness. You’ll use these to look for commonalities and create your statement!

Next Steps

If you want to move on to goals afterwards, you can take your brain dump list and your mission statement and head over to my goals page to learn more how to set goals that support your mission statement (and to drop those that don’t)!

The Monster Brain Dump

I love brain dumping – I mean, I really love it. I’m not sure if you will love it as much as I do, but what I enjoy is being able to write down every single thing that is in my head in a free-form, unstructured way. It allows me to draw connections between things and see relationships that I hadn’t noticed before.

You can use any tool for this exercise. I used GoodNotes for this part of the exercise, but you can use OneNote, Word, or even just good old-fashioned pen and paper.

• Make sure you give yourself enough room for everything you want to get down.
• Give yourself thirty minutes to start. If the “popcorn is still popping” at 30 minutes, you can give yourself some more time, but really try to get the ideas out as quickly as you can.
• If music helps you think, put on a favorite playlist.
• Make sure you set yourself up in a fairly distraction-free environment so you can take this time to focus on you.

What you’re writing down is any project, goal, habit, hobby, or interest that you are working on now, plan to work on in the future, or are beating yourself up for not doing. I found it helpful to put headings on my paper to help me get started, for Projects, Goals, and Interests/Habits/Hobbies.

If you’re stuck, try asking yourself, “What…

• … do I like to do in my free time?
• … projects am I working on?
• … habits am I trying to cultivate?
• … are my hobbies?
• … do I try to make sure I do every day?
• … do I enjoy about my job?
• … personal projects am I working on, or planning to start?

When you’re set up, start your timer, and let’s get to it!

My example

To help get the juices flowing, here’s a few items I had on my list:

• Building a savings
• Start a podcast
• get better at watercolors
• paint rocks
• brush and floss my teeth daily
• journaling
• practice art every day
• team homerooms
• …and more!

OK, got your list? Let’s move on to the next step!

Themes and Bucketing

For those of you that love lists and organizing, here you’re looking at everything you wrote down and finding the themes. As you start to see themes, mark the items in your list in such a way that you can see which themes are represented by each item.

First, some guard rails

You want to have around 2-4 themes, 5 maximum. These represent the highest level of things that are important to you – your “life goals”.

To bucket your items, think through WHY you are doing that thing. What does it do for you? For example, I had several projects for work on my list. These projects have to be done because they are part of my job, but they also give me a chance to teach others. This told me that I value my job (because it makes me money) and I value teaching others.

What you may also see is that you have items in your list that don’t fall into any of your themes easily. As an example, I had an item in my list for “go back to school”, but I couldn’t figure out a way to easily slot it into one of the themes that were emerging. When I interrogated myself about why I wanted to go back to school, I realized that it was something I felt I should be doing: I didn’t have a specific reason for going back to school other than that. So I highlighted it, didn’t bucket it, and kept on.

The bottom line is, items you can’t slot into a theme are most likely things you may be working on that aren’t in alignment with your overall life goals or philosophy. So don’t try to ram them into a theme that doesn’t work, and don’t try to make up a theme just to have those one or two items in it. These types of items are discussed in further detail in the goals workshop.

My Example

As I looked at my list, I could see that my items fell into four themes. One could probably argue that Creative and Teaching/Inspiring Others are two separate themes, and that’s fine. The point is that these are the things that are most important to me, as evidenced in how I’m choosing to spend my time, especially my free time.

• Mental and Physical Health
• Making and Saving More Money
• Being Creative, Teaching, and Inspiring Others
• Home Life/Family/Friends

The “Why” Exercise

Now we want to get down to WHY these things are important. The process I used to get down to this is a pretty common tactic: take the idea, then ask yourself “why is that important to me?” Then, take that answer and ask, “And why is that important to me?” Continue down this line of questioning until you get to the bottom – which is usually “it just is” or something like “because it makes me happy” or “because, love”.

Here’s an example of one of mine:

• Create, Teach, Inspire
• This is important because…
  • …I want to feel like I made the world a better place.
    • …I want to know that something I did will live on and that I made a difference.
      • …it makes me happy.

Knowing the why behind the items in your brain dump is important because digging into your motivation helps solidify and clarify in your own mind not just what is important to you, but why it is important.

There was an interesting thing I noticed as I did this. When considering my “whys” for “Make More Money”, I realized that it is not about the money in and of itself. Instead, it is because of the things it will enable: building a beautiful home for my family and giving them the best life possible.

Crafting Your Statement

Now that you’ve done your “whys”, take your answers and pull out the ones that speak most strongly to you. Use these elements to craft a mission statement that speaks to you!

Frame it up however you want. Have bullets if you want! Doesn’t matter. What matters is that what you end up with is a comprehensive statement that covers all the things that are most important to you. It defines what you’re about.

My example

Here’s what I ended up with, and below I’ve linked some additional examples for you to consider. You’ll notice that mine is just a big run on sentence. It works for me, but maybe you want multiple sentences, or bullets. Or maybe you want fewer words! It doesn’t matter. As I mentioned above, it’s the content, not the format, that matters.

To create a healthy lifestyle and happy home life, and to support my family by doing what I love: creating beautiful and useful things and teaching and inspiring others.

Here’s what my brain dump, themes, and mission statement brainstorming looked like when I was finished:

Other Examples

So what do other mission statements look like? This post has some great examples from companies. It also gives more pointers on mission statements, and the differences between mission and vision statements (though it is company-oriented). I know you’re probably not a company. However, these mission statements vary in composition and theme, and still may inspire you in how you construct your own. Here are a few examples from the link above:

• Honest Tea: To create and promote great-tasting, healthy, organic beverages.
• Universal Health Services, Inc.: To provide superior quality healthcare services that: PATIENTS recommend to family and friends, PHYSICIANS prefer for their patients, PURCHASERS select for their clients, EMPLOYEES are proud of, and INVESTORS seek for long-term returns.
• Invisible Children: To end violence and exploitation facing our world’s most isolated and vulnerable communities.
• InvisionApp: Question Assumptions. Think Deeply. Iterate as a Lifestyle. Details, Details. Design is Everywhere. Integrity.
• TED: Spread ideas.

Wrap Up

How did it go? What did you think of the process? Did it work for you? What would you do differently?

I would love to hear your mission statements, whether you used this method or not! If you’d like to share them, please post in comments!