If you’re a leader, you have to know where you’re going. Imagine jumping on a plane, and the pilot says over the speaker, “We’re going 550 miles per hour at an altitude of 35,000 feet. It’s a great cruising position, and we’re making good time. However, we have no destination. We just love to fly fast and high.” Few things are more useless than directing resources and energy towards nothing. In life, we need to know what we’re doing, where we are going, and why we’re doing it. Those three things are your mission, vision, and purpose statements.
Mission, Vision and Purpose Statements: What’s the difference?
The mission statement answers what we do every day. When we wake up in the morning, our thoughts and actions are guided by our mission.
The vision statement tells us where we’re going. It’s a statement of hope, of a promising future that you want to create.
The purpose statement is your why. Why do you do what you do? It’s an anchor for difficult situations sunk deep into the bedrock of your most significant values and stories.
We created these statements when we started Full Court Leadership. We spent several hours setting our rudder, scouting out our destination, and preparing our anchor for the storms we know lie ahead. Coach Pete Wehry walks an hour every morning. He would meditate on these questions, jot some notes down on his phone, and shoot the rest of the team his thoughts. Then we all reviewed his ideas and pared down the statements so that they were clear and concise.
This is what we created for Full Court Leadership:
- Mission Statement: “Full Court Leadership serves and supports leaders.”
- Vision Statement: “Full Court Leadership will significantly grow the numbers and culture of servant leaders in the world.”
- Purpose Statement: “We serve and support leaders to leave behind a legacy of human flourishing.”
These are short and sweet. But they took time, reflection, and focus, and they served to provide our rudder, destination, and anchor as we began this voyage. With our what, where, and why, we are able to make clear choices about how we invest in our families, coworkers, companies, and communities.
With our what, where, and why, we are able to make clear choices about how we invest in our families, coworkers, companies, and communities.
But these questions and their answers are important not only for your company, but for you personally. Coach Pete Wehry has graciously offered to share his own. These statements are a great example of how personal values should serve as the bedrock for you to build. As a Christian, Pete Wehry grounds his MVPs in his faith.
- Mission Statement: I will love the Lord God with my whole heart and mentor my wife, my family, and others that God brings into my life.
- Vision Statement: I will multiply mentors and servant leaders.
- Purpose Statement: I mentor others to further the kingdom of God.
Now that we’ve defined what mission, vision, and purpose statements are, how do you create them?
The Process: How to Write Your Mission, Vision, and Purpose Statements
Before you start this process, we want to encourage you with two thoughts. First, take your time. Time spent on figuring out your hopes and dreams is not wasted. Block off some time and create space to reflect, meditate and evaluate who you are, who you want to be, what you do, and why.
Second, let us encourage you with this: We don’t have it all figured out either. Don’t get overwhelmed. Nobody has it all figured out. We are all growing and learning. You can reevaluate these statements later, but, just like anything in life, doing something is better than doing nothing. You can edit poorly written statements, but you can’t edit a blank page.
How do you write your Mission, Vision, and Purpose Statements? (Round 1)
We’re going to do this twice. First, we’ll go through these and do some soft thinking, and then we’ll go through and sharpen what we’ve created. Before we start, confession time: We use MVP to help us remember mission, vision, and purpose, but, as Stephen Covey famously said, begin with the end in mind. Your MVPs start with vision. Where do you want to go?
Your Vision Statement
Dream about your future. Block out at least a solid peaceful ten minutes, and imagine what you want your life to look like when you retire 20-50 years from now. Write down what matters most to you. What do you value most? Is it your family, your faith, a just society? This will help guide your vision and prepare you to write your purpose statement. It’s easy to think about beaches and big fruity drinks, but what you want to focus on is your everyday life so you can ask these questions:
- What do I want the world to be like?
- What do I want my community to be like (family, friends, city/town, church, etc)?
- What do you want to be like?
Don’t be afraid to think big, but don’t be afraid to admit what you find joy in. Humanity’s greatest achievements started with big dreams.
Humanity’s greatest achievements started with big dreams.
On the other hand, a small, paid-off house with good family relations is better than your own mortgaged island and a couple of 20-year-olds who can’t wait for you to die so they can have it. Remember, money is a bridge with no view. It gets you where you’re going, but you never want to park there.
Finally, your vision should bring you joy, not stress. If your picture of the future stresses you out, there’s something wrong with your vision.
Now that we know where we’re going, let’s return to the list of values you wrote earlier.
Your Purpose Statement
Why do I do what I do? This is an intensely personal question related to your own views on spirituality, significance, and meaning. When confronted with difficult circumstances and choices, what do you rely on? What are your ultimate values? Take some time and write a preliminary purpose statement. Look back over your vision. Ultimately, this is a fluid process. Don’t be afraid to revise and reevaluate as you go. Now that you’ve considered your where and your why, how do you get there?
When confronted with difficult circumstances and choices, what do you rely on?
Your Mission Statement
Mission gets down to the nitty-gritty of life. Take your vision, ground it in your purpose, and break it down into manageable pieces. Working backwards from your vision. What steps do you need to take every day to get where you want to go? Is there a verb, an action, that encapsulates the majority of those steps? Find an action that can inspire you everyday when you get out of bed and your feet hit the floor. Write that action down, and write it in the present tense. This is what you’re doing today.
How do you write your Mission, Vision, and Purpose Statements? (Round 2)
Now that you’ve done the soft thinking, the time has come to hone your MVPs into something memorable and inspiring.
First, take a break between round one and two so that you can see your MVPs with fresh eyes. If you even have to stretch it out into 10-30 minute chunks over a course of a couple of months, that’s not only okay, it could be really good. Everyone works differently.
Read through your MVPs again. Reevaluate them in light of each other. Revise them as you need to. Then work through these steps with each statement -
Make it concise and memorable.
Your statement should be easy to remember and easy to state.
Get wise counsel and feedback.
Run your MVPs past family and friends. They know you. They know your heart and your passions, and they can share their thoughts, suggestions, and opinions.
Stay true to your own vision.
In the end, nobody else is responsible for your MVPs. These are your statements made for you. Take the feedback. Ask yourself, “Is this me or what I want to be?” Then use what’s good and discard the rest.
Repeat until satisfied.
Enjoy this process. Enjoy your mission, vision, and purpose. Don’t be afraid to put it down and come back to it. Your MVPs are there to serve you not hamper you.
How to use your Mission, Vision, and Purpose Statements?
Finally, after you’ve written these down, how do you use your MVPs? The full explanation is a topic for another blog. However, the single most common reason people don’t like MVPs is because they write them and never look at them again.
The goal of your MVPs is to rehearse them enough that they become second nature, so that as you begin to evaluate your day-to-day situations and processes, you will find yourself making wiser and clearer decisions.
That’s the end goal, an examined life that makes a difference to you and everyone around you.