Goals: Purpose - The connection between vision and mission and your life purpose
The Power of understanding the need to explore, create and act on your vision and mission to achieve your life purpose
A key goal in leading a happy and flourishing life is to use your mindfulness tools of intention, attention and attitude to connect with and live your life’s purpose. To do so, one needs to understand what is meant by life’s purpose.
What is a “life’s purpose”? What is your “life’s purpose” and how do you discover it? Recognize it or not, everyone has a life’s purpose, that is unique, and no one else can fulfill such life’s purpose. What is meant to know and live the purposes of your life? A life’s purpose often consists, not just of one purpose but of many purposes. People are often mistaken that there is one ultimate purpose to an individual’s life. Yet, we are multifaceted human beings with many purposes, each of which take precedence at different times in our lives, and some of which may overlap such as care-giver, social change agent, mother, daughter, professional and much more.
Certain social constructs, such as competition often stand as impediments to achievement, a misperception of lack preventing fulfillment of goals. However, once you learn to recognize that social constructs such as competition are just that false constructs, then you realize that competition, whether in school, occupation, stature, accumulation of wealth, or otherwise, can never prevent you from achieving your goals. Too many incorrectly espouse that competition is the impetus behind drive and success. Underlying the notion of competition as impetus for change and success, is the misplaced assumptions that there is a limitation on how many people can succeed in a given space, and that there is scarcity on achievement in general. Quite the opposite, success is unlimited, wealth is unlimited, happiness is unlimited and all are achieved through collaboration, a network of support fostering growth and success. Competition and its connected notion of lack is fictitious, and more often than not, it can inhibit you from seeing yourself in your full glory, in everything you offer this world, those around you, and in your circle of influence and beyond. Nothing great has ever been accomplished by anyone alone. Belief in oneself, and support by others to help you bring that purpose into reality – to manifest it, that is what lies at the core of manifesting your life’s purpose.
At the core of achieving, one’s life’s purpose is the recognition that it takes partnership, a network, a support team, family and friends to manifest your life’s purpose, which in turn helps manifest another’s life’s purpose which is entwined with yours. It is this interconnectivity, this connectedness, that makes things possible, to bring to fruition the dreams and goals that emanate from within you. It is only through collaboration, only through relationships that one can ever succeed in attaining any goal. No single man or woman can accomplish anything alone.
Now that the concepts of lack, limitation, scarcity and competition have been broken down, the next steps are exploring and defining your life vision and mission. In the corporate arena, in companies, whether profit or nonprofit, we spend a significant amount of time crafting and honing our entity’s vision and mission statements. Some companies take weeks of discussions and workshops to determine what is the vision that defines their company and how does that vision translate into the mission of the entity. You can see direct correlations between measurements of success and a company’s vision and mission statements. So, we spend a significant time at companies honing, defining, living and working by our company’s vision and mission statements.
If you google “company’s vision statement”, I know we all like to google for information, the top result is this: “A vision statement describes where the company aspires to be upon achieving its mission. This statement reveals the “where” of a business – but not just where the company seeks to be. Rather, a vision statement describes where the company wants a community, or the world, to be as a result of the company’s services” – 17 Truly Inspiring Company Mission Statement Examples written by Lindsay Kolowich. She goes on to say “A mission statement is, in some ways, an action-oriented vision statement, declaring the purpose an organization serves to its audience. That often includes a general description of the organization, its function, and its objectives. Ultimately, a mission statement is intended to clarify the "what," the "who," and the "why" of a company. It's the roadmap for the company's vision statement. As a company grows, its objectives and goals may be reached, and in turn they'll change. Therefore, mission and vision statements should be revised as needed to reflect the business's new culture as previous goals are met. Both mission and vision statements are often combined into one comprehensive "mission statement" to define the organization's reason for existing and its outlook for internal and external audiences -- like employees, partners, board members, consumers, and shareholders.”
Vision and mission statements are foundational and guide a company’s direction and actions. As companies evolve, they often re-evaluate their vision and mission statements, and based on how they have evolved through the years, utilizing these guiding principles which are set up as a touchpoint to evaluate if they are on point, they may discover a time in the company’s evolution where it is needed to redefine or refocus as the company evolves and grows. Just as visions and mission and their evolution are critical to the success and growth of a company, they are even more so for individual success and growth. Then ask yourself, why do we not do the same for ourselves individually? Why are we not taught to develop, evaluate and hone and readjust our visions and missions for our own lives? How can we ensure that our vision and mission for our life is aligned with our actions to achieve our life purposes and goals, if we haven’t spent time focusing, exploring and defining what might be our vision and mission statement?
We ask children – what do you want to be when you grow up. We push our children to succeed in school, and through the years we ask them at earlier and earlier ages to determine what they want to do in their lives, and to build a resume and profile of a vision of who they are – athlete, actor, singer, doctor, lawyer, businessperson, artist, designer, etc., we tell them to do what they must excel in school or on the court or stage, but we barely provide them with the time and tools to explore, discover and create the vision and mission of their lives. This vision and mission, is it the same in HS as it is in the college years and beyond? How many times in your life are you at a crossroad, deciding what your vision and mission of life is, but it appears that you do not have the time or the tools to do the work and evaluation to figure out the vision or mission, to see if it is the same or has deviated? Just as it is important to learn to walk before you can run, to learn addition before multiplication, to learn words before sentences – there are sequences in life. In this part of the journey, we are empowered by the insights and understandings of the meaning and need for vision and mission on our path to a flourishing and fulfilling purposeful life, allowing us to discover all the possibilities. With the most empowering understanding based in knowing that this process and life is fluid and evolves, it does not stay stagnant, careers change and evolve, families grow, life is fluid, paths wind and diverge, and working on our visions and missions on those paths provide insights into the direction of our actions.
