When you’re going into business, one of the first things you should nail down is your mission and your vision for your new venture to help guide you. You do it for your business, why not also do it for your career and your life? Mission and vision statements serve as a guide for creating objectives and goals and providing you with a road-map. When you have a clear idea of where you are, what you want to do, and where you want to go, it makes it easier to reverse engineer your way to the life you’ve always wanted. Without defining our goals, we tend to flounder and say yes to opportunities that don’t advance us further or keep up from what we actually want to do.

Creating vision and mission statements for your life are also a good guide for managing your time helping you to determine what tasks to prioritize.

We’ve provided steps below to help you form your own mission and vision statement for your career and your life to guide you to your goals.

Your Mission Statement

Your mission brings together your answers to these questions:

  • WHY do I do what I do?
  • WHAT do I do?
  • WHO am I doing this for?
  • HOW am I doing it?

For businesses, the mission statement help guides what products and services they are going to offer and who their target audience is to sell them. For you, this is going to be a moment of reflection.

What are you doing right now? Is it what you want to be doing? Is it bringing you fulfilment?
Who are you doing it for? Are you letting other people drive how you are living your life? Are you only in your current career because your parents wanted you to do it?

Now put all your answers together in a single sentence. This is also a great exercise for coming up with your answer to the question “so what do you do?”

Your Vision Statement

This is the piece that’s going to help you with that roadmap we mentioned before.

Your vision pulls together these 3 things:

  • It defines the optimal desired future state (the end result) of what you want to achieve over time.
  • It should be something really big that feels almost impossible to achieve but is worth pursuing.
  • It provides the guidance and inspiration to what you are focused on achieving in the years to come.

What does your future look like? What strengths do you have now that you can turn into super-strengths going forward? Really think about it. Write it down. Put everything into a list and highlight the most important things. Your vision should scare you a little bit but also excite you and light a fire within you. If you’re not excited yet, keep digging and try again. Another layer to this is identifying your values and understand how they can transform your career going forward.

Once again, put it all together in a single sentence. You can refer back to this when things get difficult (because they always do). It’s the lighthouse signal to the ship trapped in the storm. The guiding light that reminds you why you are working so hard.

P.S. If you’re really struggling, remember that you can always adjust it. It’s your life, do with it what you will! But taking time to reflect on where you are and what you’re trying to accomplish is a great exercise, one that can be done as often as you’d like, to help keep you on the path to accomplishing your goals and not swaying in another direction because you don’t have a clear idea of where you want to go.

Let us know what your mission and vision statements are in the comments below or tag us @thetecheffect on Instagram or Twitter!