(This is habit 2 in a series on Stephen Covey’s 7 habits. To learn more, please see the initial post)
The second habit is about focusing on the ends you want to achieve. By knowing where you are heading and your values, you can use this vision and direction to drive all of your actions. This is critical as without an established direction, you may end up putting a lot of energy in the wrong path and then work against what matters the most to you.
This general direction is far more important than figuring out all the specifics, which you can determine along the way. One approach to codify your direction is to write a personal mission statement.
A personal mission statement focuses on:
1) What you want to be.
2) What you want to do.
3) The values and principles which the above is based on.
This statement is not easy to write as it requires a lot of reflection to determine what really matters and how these are prioritized. In order to do so, you need to think about your core values and paradigms through which you interpret the world. One approach is to focus on different roles in your life, such as as a spouse, parent, or in your profession, and define your values and goals in each area.
Our core values involve our sense of identity and self-esteem, our source of direction and perspectives in life, and our ability to do things and make change. These aspects are interdependent and impact all parts of our life. Part of this process is realizing where you are currently centered and try to adjust and center yourself towards the life you want to lead.
Many of us are not in an ideal position. Often we get overly focused on certain aspects of life, such as our spouse, family, money, work, possessions (whether physical or status), pleasure, friends or enemies, church, or ourselves. While this can be quite positive in some aspects, it can make us fragile to setbacks in that area. You likely can identify people you know with these different core focuses. It’s often easier to identify how someone else is centered than how we are, yet we must look inward in order to make progress on our own improvement.
We are a complex mix of values and goals, often overly focused on a few aspects in our lives and potentially varying our focus depending on our life context. Without having a strong core direction and set of values, we fluctuate regularly through our lives and lack a firm foundation to work from. Thus, we need to identify where we are currently centered, as well as the direction we want to go.
After going through this identification process and creating a mission statement, you will want to take corrective action to ensure you live by your mission. One way to correct your behaviors is with affirmations. Affirmations are statements of what you want to do or become, such as “It’s deeply satisfying when I respond with love, firmness, and self-control when my children misbehave”.
To make affirmations more actionable and effective, they should be personal, positive, visual and emotional statements written in the present tense. After creating then, you can then visualize the situation in detail and your desired response. By doing this, it allows us to make our desired response practiced and more likely to occur, instead of giving in to an impulse in the moment.
Through this practice, we can set a positive direction for ourselves and work to improve it. We can even apply these same techniques to analyze and create a mission statement for your family or any organization, though it is critical that all members be involved in the creation process.