The highest essence in "Begin with the end in mind" is to create a Mission in life. This is what we were preparing you for in the last few weeks.
 We looked at Crossroads in Life… these are the crossroads that we may face anytime in life, the great discovery to prepare ourselves to draft the Mission Statement which will be very personal to anyone who writes it. But by choice if one is planning to share it with others, that too is fine.The personal mission Statement is like the personal Constitution through which you make all the decisions in life, personal and professional. In the book "7 Habits of Highly effective Families" Stephen Covey talks about the family Mission Statements and how you can develop it. This is an excellent process where he states how we need to identify the real purpose of the family, which ends up in developing the Mission Statements.
Highly effective people have always been able to visualize what they really need to achieve in life, personal and professional. And most importantly they have been able to write it down in a simpler version or even to draw it up and get inspired too. Because they lived by the principle of this Habit which says "In life all things are created twice, first mentally and then physically" just think about this…
This exercise is like a soul searching exercise for one and gives a very clear identity to find out what their deepest passions and motives are. In the workshop that we conduct we get every single participant draft his own Mission Statement and this too will be a process in which they consciously get involved in. What is more important is that Habit No. 3 is Put First things First. A lot of people if they have not done this habit well using Habit one of Being Proactive, will not put first things first as they will not know what their first things are which will come in the form of the Personal Mission statement.
When someone does this exercise of getting into drafting a Personal Mission statement one might face a lot of questions such as: I am too late for this, or I am too early for this, no I don't need this and I want to live by the day, and so on…But in reality you only detect your purpose which is already there in you, like Victor Fankle who says "You do not invent your Mission but you only detect it" In other words the purpose of life is already known to you to some extent and all you are doing is to align it better, which gives you a tremendous amount of self satisfaction.
This is the same process for any organization as well, when the organization needs to develop the Mission statement. It's a whole process when they get the key people involved to put together what they really want to be in the markets they operate and how they do it. This after a lengthy process gets into the final document called the Organizational Mission statement. What every single member in the organization MUST live by is like the constitution which they should not violate. It's so shocking to note that some of the senior executives of large organizations do not even know their Mission Statement, so how can one expect to live by it?
Let's look at more of this next week and till then have a great week. |
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