Personal mission statements are small statements that tell you exactly what you want to accomplish professionally or personally. Often they are just a few sentences that contain a powerful mission statement. With the help of this statement, it is possible to identify their own life goals and find effective ways to apply interpersonal skills and other important qualities in practice. In addition, it allows you to set clear objectives to achieve the main life mission.

If you are wondering what a personal mission statement is, its main purpose and why it is necessary in general, the advantages of its writing and how to do it correctly, then our article will help you. We have collected a lot of useful information and prepared effective personal mission statement examples to help you write your own.

Table of Contents

What Is a Personal Mission Statement?

Personal mission statements are a special kind of written or oral statement that allows you to express your core values, exactly who you are, and define the success of your personal life, professional path, and social activities. You can write a personal mission statement to achieve a variety of goals:

To identify career paths and future career aspirations;
Help with decision-making;
This kind of written declaration makes it possible to stick to a specific long-term goal in life;
Establishing some boundaries based on which future decision-making will be based should be consistent with the established long-term goals.

A personal mission statement is important for every person who wants to achieve a certain goal in the future. This statement indicates a list of guidelines for how exactly a person achieves the goal set before them. Mission statements depend on what a person plans to do and what he will do to achieve the main goal. A mission statement is used for professional development; this statement often identifies the main areas that need to improve: everyday life, career, ethical principles, interpersonal skills and others.

It is possible to have several personal mission statements simultaneously, and each can be created for a different purpose – career development, personal growth and self-improvement. To achieve a balanced life, each statement must complement the other to form a comprehensive strategy.

Many famous people create their mission statements to determine exactly what they do and their global goals, benchmarks, aspirations, etc. The presented statement has almost every Nobel prize laureate, founder of a multimillion-dollar company, scientist who creates innovations and other extraordinary people striving to achieve something greater and outstanding.

The Purpose of a Personal Mission Statement

A personal mission statement is necessary to define personal goals and values. It also lets you know what to continue working on professionally. A personal mission statement is important when the decision-making process should be simplified to determine whether the decisions made align with the goals and whether they can be implemented in reality.

Own personal mission statement can boast of several positive qualities:

Increased motivation in everyday life to achieve goals. The mental and emotional investment in the task at hand increases motivation. With a personal mission statement, you will be able to understand what it is that you are passionate about and what motivates you.
Setting a clear personal mission goal. The designation of basic benchmarks allows you to understand what you want to achieve in life, your career and to what level you want to move up. Determining whether your capabilities are consistent with the goal is also possible. In some situations, a personal mission statement can indicate that you need to change your career or some aspects of it in everyday life.
Maximum focus on the goal set. Once you’ve found your motivation, you can focus on the major areas of professional growth that need it.
Simplifying decision-making. Mission statements clarify the tasks you want to accomplish and clarify what positive changes need to be made in life. Clear choices reduce choices; you can make the decisions that best fit the goal.
Resilience to obstacles that may appear along the way. Once a goal of interest has been established, you can take advantage of the motivation that has appeared to persevere toward its realization. Wen you achieve personally is most often the result of a thorny path. Mission statements are a reminder of exactly what you want to achieve. Thus, it is possible to concentrate on the goal and more easily deal with obstacles that may appear on the path.

Writing a personal mission is also necessary to understand what you spend your time on, how you perform your direct work duties, and how you communicate with your colleagues. In this situation, the mission statement’s purpose is to decide how exactly you should manage your own time and what exactly it is not worth wasting it on. For example, you have been assigned a task to meet the established goal. In this situation, it should be abandoned. A ready-made personal mission statement allows you to achieve short- and long-term goals.

How to Write an Effective Personal Mission Statement

You do not need to have well-developed writing skills to write this statement. The ready-made personal mission statement examples allow you to simplify the process greatly. But still, in this situation, you need to do some work. In particular, this situation involves introspection of exactly what you want to achieve, how close you are to achieving the goal, and what exactly is required to take action to do this.

An effective personal mission statement should have maximum specificity. Writing a mission statement involves several basic steps:

Identify the values that are important to you.
Understand exactly what you want to achieve and what you want to do in your personal life to bring joy.
Get to know your self-worth, what your strengths, core skills and achievements are.
Present your goals as clearly as possible by writing them on paper.
Write a step-by-step plan with specific actions you need to take to achieve your goal.
Once your personal mission statement is written, review it regularly to see if you are moving in the right direction.

One of the easiest and most effective options is to use a ready-made personal mission statement template. In this situation, you only need to substitute certain variables. You can also write a personal mission without a template by studying examples. Today’s youth increasingly resort to writing their statement, noting the important aspects of their lives, the main reference points and ways to achieve their goals. At the same time, everyone can write a mission statement at any moment in life – it is made by college students and fully mature people who feel they are moving in the wrong direction and need clearer guidelines.

Wrong building of a personal mission statement can lead to certain difficulties and balanced life be violated, so it is worth reading the recommendations on how to do it correctly and what exactly you should pay attention to.

Brainstorm & Reflect on Your Life Goals

Writing your own statement begins with brainstorming and determining what your life goals are. You need to follow the steps below to write mission statements.

Step 1

Make a self-discovery and write down on paper what is important to you. The first step is to think about who you are and who you want to be. Write down on paper what is most important to you and your passions. Think about what or who you value most and how it relates to these things or people.

Step 2

The next step in writing a mission statement is formulating your most important life goals. These can be personal or career goals. During the brainstorming session, you can reflect on the “best” version of your life, with several aspects to consider: work, relationships with other people, and personal achievements. The following questions are worth answering during the brainstorming session:

What qualities would you like to have that are useful? (Identify your self-worth and what exactly you lack)
What would you like to achieve in professional life? (a certain position or similar, what level are you currently at?)
What would you like to achieve in your personal and social life? (relationships with coworkers, significant others, and others)

Step 3

To write an effective mission statement, you need to move on to communicating with the people around you after self-compilation. First, you need to talk to coworkers and mentors, asking them what strengths you have in the eyes of others. It also doesn’t hurt to reflect on how exactly you are different from people with the same skills. Think about how you would like to be seen by others. It would help if you also wrote a few words about how you would like to be characterized by the people around you.

Step 4

To create strong mission statements, you also need to consider what legacy you want to leave behind. Consider what you want to leave behind and how your skill set can help. To understand your personal mission, it is worth answering a few important questions:

How exactly do you want to change the world after you are gone?
What do you want to develop, change, or preserve for years, maybe centuries to come?
What do you want to make the best of with unique skills and abilities?
What is your long-term goal? What is it that motivates you to move forward and achieve your goal?
What unique abilities, skills and abilities do you have that will make a difference in the world?

Define Your Values & Priorities

Creating a personal mission statement is relatively easy. It can even be a fun process. You are dreaming of something greater at this moment, which is exactly what you can achieve in the foreseeable or distant future. You can draw a personal mission – a whole picture of the future, and it can be so powerful that it will make you get up every morning from bed with a burst of energy to conquer the world.

The values and priorities of the future can only do with mission statements. They can take many forms:

saving lives;
positively impact the world or a specific professional field, people’s minds, etc.;
bring education and teach people (children) something new;
inspire children;
educate women;
create stories, write books, develop new technologies and techniques;
use my medical skills to heal people, make their lives easier, and more.

Determining your values and priorities for your mission statement is a separate process. There are a few simple steps to follow in this situation:

Understand for yourself exactly what value you want to create. What exactly can you give to the world? What are your priorities? Choose your biggest dream that will constantly nourish you and keep you moving forward, achieving more.
What your target audience is. Think about who you want to help: women around the world, children, people who have lost faith, or any other option. Choose who your talents will help.
List the skills that will help you achieve your goal. What exactly is your advantage and uniqueness? You can pursue lifelong learning, but there are certain areas in which you are strong right now, which is your calling. You can be creative, be a real professional in a social media platform, have a passion for design, be a born teacher and other various options.
What exactly what you want from yourself? It would help if you did not suppress your own needs. Many job mission statements focus precisely on yourself. Experts consider the best formula for learning and enjoying achieving the goal.
Minimal detail and maximum specificity for goals and steps. Want to travel around the world? Open your Mediterranean restaurant? Want to become a life coach and teach wisdom to others?

After the above steps, you should have a list of goals and priorities and an outline of tasks to accomplish to make your most important goal a reality.

Put Everything Together in a Statement

Personal mission statements are typically relatively small – most often one or a few lines, at most one paragraph. In it, you need to put your most important life purpose. In reality, writing personal mission statements is relatively easy. If you know how to do it properly and read examples and practical tips, this process will require little time and effort.

To combine everything you could determine during the brainstorming and thinking about life goals, the easiest way is to use a personal mission statement template. In this situation, you should combine the following important components:

“I will (here indicate specific actions) for (target audience) through (existing skills and strengths) to (goal/result).”

Personal mission statement examples on this template:

I will design, amend and change the law for vulnerable communities to have the right to life, freedom of action and the pursuit of their happiness.

I will make freshly baked bread daily in my bakery for clients so that everyone can buy and experience the joy of home-baked, fragrant baked goods.

I will use my educational skills for women around the world to build lifelong learning to enhance their self-esteem and make them educated and spiritually rich.

Examples of Personal Mission Statements

Writing a personal mission statement is quite difficult the first time, especially if you need to know exactly where to start. To make it much easier for you, we suggest studying ready-made personal mission statement examples from several spheres of life: career, social, and personal. The right examples of personal mission statements make it easy to write your own. Some can already be used as your own if they are fully consistent with your goal, or you can change certain points in them, adapting them to your own.

Professional Goals

Suppose you would like to write a personal mission statement about your career goal that motivates you to continue working and encourages employers to hire you. In that case, it might look something like this.

I will work with women around the world to become more confident, self-sufficient, and independent.

I use my medical skills to save other people’s lives.

I’m writing children’s books so they can become confident and worthy adults.

I want to create a universally accessible way for visually impaired people to interact with the outside world.

I want to develop a free online tool for design.

My main goal is to reach new heights in web development to increase my monthly income and do something I enjoy. I want to become a successful web developer, and for this, I will take an educational course at a local college to gain more useful experience in web development. I spend several hours each day learning the basic rules and new trends in the developing world so that I can constantly work on myself in the professional field. At the end of my studies, I want to learn how to create websites from scratch that I can add to my portfolio to showcase to potential employers and clients. I will be collecting positive feedback from my clients as I go along.

Social Impact

If you want to make an impact on other people, your examples of mission statement is as follows:

I want to make the world a better place than it currently is.

I inspire children to reach greater heights than they think they can.

I teach children and create hardworking, respectful, compassionate adults and productive members of today’s society.

I want to apply ethical principles in real life to a better society.

I do my work to the best of my ability, helping many people.

I want to inspire other people to create something incredible.

I will travel around the world and learn all the life lessons that life has taught me.

I use my public speaking skills to raise the self-esteem of others who listen to my lectures.

After a tragic loss, I help women, men, and children find hope for a happy future.

I create innovative and effective healthcare solutions to make life easier, better and safer for others.

I inspire and encourage all the people I encounter in my life’s journey to do more.

I create new opportunities for today’s college students by giving my students the attention and resources they need to become true professionals.

I maximize my patients’ quality of life by helping them overcome their disease.

I create useful educational materials that my students can interact with from anywhere.

I give people what they need so they can live the life they need.

I am learning something new throughout my life and inspiring those around me to do the same.

Self-Improvement and Growth

Self-improvement and learning opportunities are virtually limitless. A personal mission statement in this situation might look like this.

I will travel around the world and experience new cultures, cuisines, values, and life orientations different from my homeland.

I will absorb as much of the world’s information as I can.

My personal mission is to improve my mental health and achieve happiness. That’s why I want to become a professional photographer. To continue my development as a professional photographer, I will set myself a daily challenge to create certain images. My main goal is to create incredible photos of everything I see, such as landscapes, portraits of passersby and other images, with just one snapshot. When I can build a substantial portfolio and become skilled at it, I want to organize my exhibitions to show others my talent. I also want to involve the people closest to me to feel their support.

Tips for Writing a Powerful Personal Mission Statement

Personal mission statement examples and a template are sometimes needed. Also, it is worth using the following valuable tips in this situation. We have collected some of the most important recommendations to make a good mission statement that can attract the attention of employers or achieve any other goal.

Write in the Present Tense

When writing a personal mission statement, it is best to use the present tense. That way, it’s as if you’re showing you’ve already become the person you’re describing. This mission statement should always be written positively, not negatively. It is a personal mission, a personal goal, and it should encourage you to do something new and meaningful.

Keep It Concise & Specific

The personal mission statement should be as brief as possible. Most of the time, it is limited to a single sentence. The mission statement’s purpose is to give undivided attention to what is important. Use only five words to write a concise and effective personal mission statement. They should describe you and the main goal. Based on the list of 5 words, you need to write down only 2, best describing the personal mission and yourself. After that, you must select just one word and write it on the paper. From this word, you should be guided while writing a personal mission statement as inspiration. That way, you can make it as concise as possible.

Make It Actionable & Measurable

A powerful personal mission statement should always include specifics and the clearest, most measurable goals. It is necessary to stay true to yourself – your personal mission should demonstrate your greatest passion, a passion for life, which you consider the main purpose of your existence. Of course, you can change your personal mission statement in the future as you develop, grow, and learn something new.

Take Time to Review and Revise Your Statement

Once you have developed a personal mission statement, it is worth periodically reviewing, rereading, amending and updating it according to the current guidelines and values. Also, in the personal mission statement, you can add priorities and change personal qualities. In the future, the personal mission should become an ideology, a philosophy you follow, a guide for further action and a reference point in decision-making and interaction with others.

In addition, it does not hurt to share your personal mission statement with other important people in your life. At the end of it, you can get feedback that will give you useful information to improve your personal mission statement.

Date: 9 June 2023