Create Your Professional Mission Statement

Having a professional statement can have a huge difference in terms of actually staying on track and realizing your career vision. So today, I'm going to tell you what a professional mission statement is, why you need one, and then I'm going to give you the exact steps you need to create your own within the next thirty minutes.

What is a Professional Mission Statement?

In case you don't know what a professional mission statement is, essentially, what it is, is it's a statement that defines who you are as a professional and what you hope to. The reason that it is so beneficial to have this created is first of all, it is going to make you more conscious of who you actually want to be and what you're actually trying to cultivate within your career. The other thing is that can be very helpful in terms of helping guide you and make decisions.

So that you have this phrase in mind, even when you don't have your career vision statement or your career success plan right in front of you.

But really, I think that the biggest value and taking the time to craft your professional mission statement is it gives you the opportunity to get crystal clear on who you are, what makes you special and what you really want to accomplish in your career. But I did not make this video to sell you on the value of having a career vision statement. I'm making this video because I want you to make one right now it's going to be super fast.

It's actually way simpler than you think I know a ton of the professionals that I speak to think about having a personal mission statement. But when it actually comes down to it, they don't really know where to start, how to craft on and how to actually make it has meaning so it's something that provides value in their day to day life day to day career. So what I'm actually making this video today is I have a very simple process to help you craft your professional mission statement. Well, it might not be as eloquent of some of the ones that you've actually heard that I'm putting up on the screen right now it is going to be something that actually evolved along with you over the course of your career. Ultimately, the first step to having your ideal professional mission statement is to write a professional mission statement.

So let's get right into it.

What is in a Professional Mission Statement?

At its core, the anatomy of your professional mission statement includes just two things.

First of all, it's going to outline the outcome that you're actually trying to achieve in your career. What are you trying to do what impact you're trying to make. If you haven't already watched my career vision video, where I give you the steps to help discover and define this, I'm going to drop the link in the comments down below and I'll also put it in a card towards the end of this video. But for now just hang out because you can always go back to that step.

The second component is going to be your values. This is something that I really encourage you to take the time to deep dive. If you've already done the groundwork, then you can actually write down the values that you've already defined... like proceed right into the template. But if this is a process that you actually haven't been through, or you're just not really clear on what your professional values actually are, then I really encourage you to take a couple of moments here and I'm going to guide you through a couple of thought provoking years to help you figure out what your values are, that you want to include in your professional mission statement.

Now, I do want to preface this by saying that you have a lot of values, and you have different values in different areas of your life. As much as we're consistent beings, there is a variation to us depending on where we are and how we're actually showing up.

In your professional mission statement, what I want you to do is I want you to think about your values when you show up at work.

There's two components to this that I really think help in terms of getting crystal clarity. The first is think about how you want people to describe you. When you leave the room, what do you want people to say about you? Now, obviously, you don't want to be listing me bad things... Well, hopefully you don't want to be listing any of the bad things. Think about the words that you want people to discover you, when you do leave the room when they're making an introduction, when they're providing a reference interview for you for a potential opportunity that you're exploring is very, very helpful.

The other thing that you may want to take into consideration is how people are already describing you, this is essentially already a part of your personal brand at work. So you can actually ask colleagues that you admire and respect to ask how they would actually describe you if someone asked. I don't generally encourage you to get a lot of external validation into the things that you do. But I find that sometimes just having an understanding of how we're already being perceived helps us understand core elements about ourselves that we weren't consciously aware of.

Professional Mission Statement Examples & Template

Now that you know those two things, all you need to do is actually put the two together, there's a simple template that I generally actually recommend that you use when you're a starter to crafting a career mission statement or a professional mission statement. And that is I want to be known for__(your values)__ so that I can __(your impact/outcome)__.

There's a couple of examples that I actually wanted to give you because I personally find reading other people's professional mission statements to be so helpful. The first example is:

I want to be known for being innovative, collaborative and transparent so that I can be an inspired leader who builds connected teams.

You can see that this one was literally just plugged into the template that I gave you. And I'll also pop that template into the description down below so you can easily copy and paste it.

But you may also, depending on the statement that you're crafting, feel the need to make a couple of adjustments. So in the second example I'm going to give you there has been some slight tweaks in order to actually match and properly encapsulate the vision that this person was trying to convey.

I am organized, inspired, influential, so that I can help my industry colleagues learn and grow.

It gives you an idea that those two elements of values and impact are still there, they're completely personalized to the person that has actually created this vision statement. But you can actually plug it into the template or make slight adjustments, so that it actually makes sense.

Because at the end of the day, this professional mission statement needs to be something that actually resonates with you. If it doesn't resonate with you, if it doesn't feel like you, it's going to be a useless tool that you do once and never look at again.

Ideally, your professional mission statement is something that you're putting somewhere that you will see on a regular basis, put it on the backdrop of your laptop, put it on the wallpaper of your phone, stick it on a note in your bathroom mirror, whatever it is to help integrate what your mission is into your daily life.

Now, because I did want to give you guys examples in terms of professional mission statements, I actually wanted to share my own. Mine has evolved over the years, my values, and my outcomes have actually been generally consistent. But as I have navigated through different facets levels and desires in my career, there have been some things that have actually shifted and changed.

To inspire women to achieve more in their lives, and create a more equal workplace by providing guidance, mentorship, and tactical strategies through collaboration, so that we are all able to have success as our authentic selves.

And that's it, that's all that you need to do in order to actually craft your professional mission statement. So I would love to know, click the like button if you've either written your professional mission statement as you've watched this video, or if you're going to be working through this process.

How to Use Your Professional Mission Statement

There are actually two ways that you really need to integrate your professional mission statement into your life. And why wanted to make sure that you were crystal clear on what those two things are.

First of all, your professional mission statement can play a critical role in your career success plan. If you watch my career success planning video a couple of weeks ago, you did see that I mentioned that it was optional. However, for me personally, and for my clients, I do advocate this as a must have. Again, this is something that is small, it's easy for us to carry around, it's easy for us to rehearsed ourselves in moments of fear, freak out and doubts.

It's something that we really want to keep at the forefront of our minds in planning our career success strategy, as well as our day to day lives. Why is that? Because our values are how we want to be described, of course, and how we want to be described is something that we can actually cultivate through intentional action and selection. Having that professional mission statement, even if you don't show it to anyone is still going to guide people as long as it's guiding you in terms of what you do and how you're showing up for people until you are at work.

The values component of your professional mission statement is particularly helpful in helping you navigate a new opportunity. And why is that, because when you're considering a new opportunity, you're going to want to make sure that there is an alignment on values. So really defining your values is going to help you find your ideal workplace, which if you haven't already subscribed, you're going to want to click the subscribe button. Because in my next video, I'm going to show you how you can find your ideal workplace and value is a piece of it.

Now I would love to know what is your top value? Did you pick one already? Did you how did you come into this video already knowing what it was, I would love to know what it is and why it is in the comments down below.