Email
danielle@teachingwell.life
danielle@teachingwell.life
Hopefully you are having a wonderful start to 2020. Honestly, it’s been a little rocky in our little part of the world with both my grandmother passing away and my husband re-injuring his hand and needing surgery next week. Despite these very real life events, I’m confident that there is joy in the journey and I know we will come out the other side stronger and wiser than before.
Because “life stuff” always happens…you know life happens when you’re busy making other plans”….I am able to feel a lot more grounded when I make some general goals/areas of focus for myself each year. I’m not necessarily a resolution person, but I do like to look back and reflect and reorient myself so that I can move in the direction of what I really want.
That’s what last week was all about. Check it out here if you missed it.
For the rest of the month, we’re going to be doing something that I’ve found to be a real game changer. Now that we’ve looked back and discovered what we want more and less of in 2019 (using last week’s prompts), we can move forward.
The best way I’ve found to move forward is to create an actual plan for how I can get more of what I want and less of what I don’t want in the year ahead. There are lots of ways to do this, but one that I’ve found particularly inspiring is from Story Brand. They primarily work with businesses, but their formula for creating a Life Plan is really powerful for businesses, individuals, and even families.
So each week in January, we’re going to slowly build our own Mission Possible Life Plan. You can follow along with the written instructions each week, or check out this download to print, fill in, and hang somewhere you will see frequently throughout your day.
This process begins by creating a legitimate mission statement. I decided it would be neat to do this for our family, and Jordan and I went through the exact process that we will go through together. Interestingly, I think it’s helpful to take some time with this because we wrote ours and we’re already tweaking it a bit as the days go by.
These mission statements may change, shift, or be completely redone if there are things that happen and lend themselves to revisiting the statements. So feel free to think of this as your mission for the rest of the school year, this quarter, or for this calendar year.
So the way Story Brand teaches a mission statement is that it consists of three separate parts.
There’s a problem
This happens
This is the result
What I love about the Story Brand mission statement process is that it is all about telling your own personal story through your mission statement.
So let me go into a little more depth.
There’s a problem
Think about a larger problem in the world that you believe to be an injustice. For your personal mission statement, you want to think about yourself (or your family) as the hero who is going to go on this mission. What is the injustice or challenge that you will be going against to truly feel like you are accomplishing your mission? You could also think about it as something you witness in the world that is really unfair.
For example, when Jordan and I wrote our family mission statement, we started talking about our family mission being about living simply and with greater purpose.
The injustice that we often witness is that many people believe that if they achieve a certain level of success or have the right things they will be happy but are often left feeling disappointed and unfulfilled.
This happens
So if that is the injustice that we witness, what is the mission of our family to counter-attack that injustice?
For our family it’s committing to a life long pursuit of simplicity and purposefulness, This pursuit is the antidote to the emptiness that we often see and hear from people who are consistently on the treadmill of more, more, more. They often remark that the things and items they thought would bring them joy only cause stress.
So what is the mission you are on to combat the injustice you see in the world?
This is the result
Finally, what happens as a result of you’re going on this mission? How are you and others impacted?
For our family mission statement, the result of living with simplicity and purposefulness is so that we can be stewards of the earth, inspire contemplation, parent with purpose, and live right-sized. All of those items listed are things that bring us great happiness. It’s possible that we will inspire others, but the goal for us to just live these principles and if others want to hear more, we are always available for a conversation.
So what is the result of you living your mission? Is it going to give you time for your own personal development? Is it going to allow you some freedom from your to do list? Is it going to give you space to breathe and be more present in all your affairs?
What’s your mission possible?
Put it all together and this is what you get…
{Problem} that you’re counter attacking against that you see as an injustice in the world.
+
{This Happens}/Methodology for solving the problem.
+
{Result} people experience because you’ve done it.
=
Mission Statement
So it’s a little wordy, but here’s our family mission possible statement.
Because many people believe that if they achieve a certain level of success or have the right things they will be happy but are often left feeling disappointed and unfulfilled, our family is committed to a life-long pursuit of happiness through choosing simplicity and purposefulness so that we can be stewards of the earth, inspire contemplation, parent with purpose and live right-sized.
So what’s your mission possible statement?
ACTION OF THE WEEK
Write your own personal/professional/family Mission Possible statement
What I loved about this process of writing the family mission possible statement, is that it felt like our family had a direction and purpose. We started to feel like our role as a family is more important than just being individual’s living under one roof.
As we go through this rest of the Mission Possible Life Plan process in the next few weeks, I have no doubt you will become inspired about the steps you are going to take to make this mission possible and put this life plan into place.
We are going to spend some real time creating this mission possible statement so that we are clear with our goals and intentions for the year.
You can access the exact template I used to do my own calendar audit AND mission possible statement/life plan here. For this week, just focus on the first quadrant. We will fill in the other boxes throughout the next few weeks.
If you’re feeling inspired and want to share, please jump over to the We are Teaching Well Facebook Group to share from last week or your personal mission possible statement.