Live Your Authentic Life!

You are the creator of your own vision. Writing a mission statement helps you to clearly define your mission, a powerful tool to create meaning and meaning and direction in your life. A personal mission statement answers these questions:

1.   What are you about? What does your ideal life look like?

2.   What are your primary values?

3.   What values do you need to develop and what tools will help you to do that?

4.   What is your daily practice to keep you in touch with your personal values?

5.   What/who are you grateful for? Plan to keep a gratitude journal.

6.   What inspires me to be the best person I can be?

7.   Examine your public, personal and deep inner life to define what values, contributions and roles are most important to you.

8.   Visualize your desired results. Identify the principals and values that will help you to realize your vision.

9.   When you day dream, what do you see yourself doing? What if you had unlimited resources?

After you have answered all of these questions to the best of your abilities, consider what you would like to leave as your legacy. How do you want to be remembered?

At the end of the exercise, revisit your gratitude journal. You will find that you have much more to be grateful for than you thought you did at first glance. Make a plan to enhance your best qualities and live your authentic life!

 

 

What are Your Values?

 

The names you attach to your values aren’t really important. One person may call her value “integrity” and one may call it “honesty”. What is important is that as you define your values, you take time to totally understand them, visualize them, and feel them. That will help you to get a clear picture of what that value means to you.

 

Here are the steps you can take to identify your values and what they mean to you:

 

1.   Draw a table with 3 columns. In the first column, write the answers to the following questions: what people, places and things are most important to me in my life? Write this in as much detail as possible.

2.   In the second column, write down the answer to the question: “what value does this person, place or thing give me?” Focus on the positive aspects of the value you receive from that goal.

3.   Look at the second column in detail. You should have a great many values and some of them may be the same. Like if you value your marriage and it gives you security and you value your job and it also gives you security, circle those that come up more than once.

4.   Write out the most frequent occurring values in the third column. Look at the remaining values and decide which are most important to you. Don’t try to prioritize them yet, but pick the top 10.

5.   Review your list for completeness. Make sure these values meet your intrinsic needs. Think of them as looking outward and forward.

6.   Also, look for any missing values that are vital to you. Next prioritize the values

7.   Take the first value and compare it to all of the others. Make sure you allow your conscious and unconscious mind to answer these questions truthfully for you as you are today.

8.   After you have them prioritized, define precisely what your values mean to you in the way you live your life. You can use mind mapping techniques here if you so choose. If you are a creative person, you may want to create a collage of pictures that define the values to you.

9.   Reflect on the final product and make sure it matches with your goals and mission statement. Then look at how you can bring your life goals into alignment with these values. You are on your way to motivating yourself to incorporate things that give you passion!