- Understanding the Personal Mission Statement: A personal mission statement is a concise documentelectronic or physicalcontaining essential personal aspects such as life purpose, values, strengths, zones of genius, and yearly goals.
- Importance of a Personal Mission Statement: The mission statement keeps one principle-centered, i.e., guided by personal principles rather than the influences of the external world, allowing the individual to assert their reality and inner world onto the external world.
- Implementing a Personal Mission Statement: Implementation involves writing the personal mission statement using a provided format and reading it every morning for about five minutes as part of a daily routine. It's crucial even if it seems redundant, as repetition trains the subconscious mind in the direction of the principles set in the mission statement.
- Formulating a Personal Mission Statement: Individuals are encouraged to literally draft their personal mission statement, incorporating values, life purpose, strengths, and goals.
- Habit Building: To help implement reading the personal mission statement into daily life, it's suggested to incorporate it into the morning hygiene routine, recommending a commitment of about 30 days to establish this habit. Despite knowing the mission statement by heart, consistent review plays a crucial role in governing decisions, priorities, interactions, emotions, and thoughts throughout the day.
- Influence of the Personal Mission Statement: A personal mission statement shapes how an individual allocates time, sets priorities, interacts with others, and even how they feel, serving to guide one's thoughts, moods, and emotions. This important practice empowers individuals to regain control, limiting the influence of the world over their lives.
- Commitment to Personal Mission Statement: The key to success here is commitment. After creating the personal mission statement, the effort must not stop. It's recommended to continuously read and tweak the statement, thereby aligning oneself with their principles and values on an ongoing basis. This regular practice, though simple, yields significant benefits.
- The importance of frequently revisiting the Personal Mission Statement:
- - The personal mission statement needs to be read and reviewed daily, not left to collect dust.
- - People are not automatically aligned with their values and goals, they must constantly review them until they have made a full commitment.
- - The mission statement acts as a centering force against external influences that can potentially throw one off course.
- - Achieving discipline, integrity, and fulfillment of one's life purpose requires dedication towards revisiting the mission statement.
- - Please address any concerns or doubts related to the habit of reviewing the mission statement through self-reflection or seeking guidance.
- Choosing a format for the Personal Mission Statement:
- - The format preference varies among individuals - it can be physical or electronic.
- - The electronic format offers flexibility with editing as growth and self-discovery often lead to regular changes in values and goals.
- - It is necessary to constantly polish and adjust the statement copy while reviewing it, which may lead to small tweaks or significant changes.
- - It is advisable to contemplate while reviewing the mission statement, questioning the alignment of values, wording of life purpose, etc.
- The format for the Personal Mission Statement:
- - The statement consists of firstly identifying a general purpose in life, which holds constant over time. This provides grounding against varied circumstances.
- - The second part involves outlining a specific life purpose centered around career and impact on the world.
- General and Specific Life Purpose: Leo Gura explains the notion of having a general and specific life purpose, with the general purpose being constant and grounding. His personal examples include understanding and experiencing life, and creatively contributing towards the world. He suggests that others may have different overarching life purposes, related, for example, to love, thrill-seeking, or divine connection, depending on personal preferences and passions.
- Career-Related Specific Life Purpose: The specific life purpose, according to Leo, is a single sentence phrases encapsulating the individual's career goals and the impact they wish to have on the world. He cites his own life purpose as becoming an authority in personal development and influencing others with his understanding, accomplished through creating videos and writing articles. Depending on one's profession, their specific purpose could relate to healing (for doctors), or creating inspiring content (for writers or actors).
- Ten-Year Mastery: Leo introduces the concept of defining one or two words related to what an individual aims to master over the next decade. This could be related to one's career or personal life, and the individual should commit to this pursuit wholeheartedly, regardless of where it leads. Leo's personal mastery topic is personal development.
- Top Ten Values: Personal values play a significant role in guiding one's actions, feelings, and decisions. Leo recommends writing down one's top ten values in order of importance. He shares his own values, which include understanding, consciousness, creativity, independence, uniqueness, excellence, health, beauty, accomplishment, self-discipline, and self-control.
- Top Five Feelings and Strengths: In addition to values, Leo Gura highlights the importance of identifying the top five feelings representing one's ideal life state and the top five personal strengths. This process aims to help individuals better understand how they want to feel and identify their unique areas of expertise or "zones of genius," respectively.
- Importance of identifying feelings: Leo Gura encourages identifying and writing down five adjectives that describe the feelings you want to experience most in your life. These feelings should contribute to your sense of fulfillment, and be overarching emotions that you want to guide your actions and decisions. For Leo, these feelings include being proud, excited, optimistic, calm, strong, disciplined, and energetic.
- Assessing individual strengths: Leo refers to the website Authentic Happiness, created by psychologist and researcher Martin Seligman, as a useful tool for identifying individual strengths. The site offers an online character strengths assessment that determines your top five human strengths based on your responses to the questionnaire. Leos strengths, as determined by the assessment, are critical thinking and open-mindedness, creativity and originality, compassion, wisdom, and a love of learning.
- Integrating 'Zones of Genius' in life: Leo introduces the concept of 'Zones of Genius,' from Gay Hendricks' book "The Big Leap". These zones represent areas of life in which an individual excels and finds fulfillment. Leo suggests identifying these zones and integrating them into all areas of life, including careers, personal life, relationships, and yearly goals. Leo's zones are big-picture thinking, persuasion, and quality control.
- Setting yearly top goals: Leo recommends ending the personal mission statement with a list of top yearly goals, prioritized in order of importance. These goals act as daily reminders and subtle motivators influencing day-to-day actions. Leo advises that goals may shift or change, and emphasizes the importance of updating the goals list accordingly.
- Encouragement to be principle-centered: Leo underscores the importance of having clear life purposes, top values, feelings, strengths, zones of genius, and top yearly goals. Looking over this each day enables you to operate out of clarity and influences the actions you take. Leo suggests that, regardless of what's happening in the world, constantly realigning to these principles can serve as grounding, energize you, and motivate you to take action.
- Review and reflection of self-authored values: In conclusion, Leo Gura encourages viewers to take time to regularly review, reflect, and possibly adjust their principles according to their experiences. Creating and maintaining the personal mission statement is a continuous process which helps you live out your life purpose, accomplish your top goal, and experience your top feelings.