We are curious, have you looked at your personal and work life through the lens of a mission and a vision for your future? We personally like having a mission and a vision to drive our day-to-day. Being reminded of the big picture can help you to work through some of the most difficult things and stay motivated doing the smallest of tasks. Having this foundation can make or break how you respond to almost anything. We are going to walk you through the what, why, and how to create, or update, your mission and vision statements. With millions of opinions, options, and opportunities; your core values will keep you grounded. This should be at the top of your priorities if you have yet to create it or feel like you have any updating to do. Let’s dive into it!

What are they? 

Mission Statement

Mission statements are essentially a formal and shortened description of why you or your business exists. This will talk about how you will get to where you want to go, outlining the main objectives related to your audience’s needs.

Vision statement 

Vision statements can be considered an outline for where you want to be. Speaking about your future, your vision statement should inspire you to do your best. Giving you an understanding for why you are doing the work each day. 

Looking at the differences of each statement, you can begin to see how they could translate to both business and personal life. What is your vision for your personal life, think about what it looks like, how you feel, and what you hope to achieve. Your mission could look like this, ‘to provide high quality education and childcare in a safe, respectful and inclusive environment.’ Your vision statement could be, “I want to provide a creative and prosperous classroom to transform children into impactful leaders of their generation.” A mission statement for Tesla is ‘to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy’ and it can give us a lot of information on their current objectives. They are focused on climate change and sustainability, more specifically they want to make this change sooner rather than later, and their mission suggests this will and should be a global change. The vision statement from Linkedin: Create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce, focuses on the big picture. A ‘global workforce’ and ‘opportunity for every member’ won’t happen overnight but they can continue to be inspired moving towards that vision.   

Why are they important?

1. For many businesses, like ourselves, we utilize the core of our mission and vision statements every day. Through content pillars, we are able to take the key elements of who we are, what we stand for, what our audience needs, and our hopes for the future and put it in our social media content. These categories, or pillars, give endless possibilities for content topics and discussion that are all relevant to our business. 

2. Consider your mission and vision as a compass. Things change, that is fantastic, but utilizing your core statements as a guide back in the right direction will keep your business and personal life true to the objectives and goals. For example, you’ve been presented with a new job opportunity in your personal life and you’re unsure if it is right for you. If you have outlined important key values to you and how you want to live your life you can take the proposed opportunity and compare their values with your own. You consider time off to be with your family a must, but this job requires you to be on-call 5 out of  7 days in a week. That is something directly conflicting and should be thought through. Staying true to who you are and what you want for yourself is extremely important, give yourself to identify these values for yourself! 

3. Social issues and sensitive topics can be difficult to speak on, but for some it’s even harder to know where you stand. By having your business core values outlined, you will be able to clearly see if something aligns. It is also important to look at this topic and ask yourself if this new issue should be a part of your core values if it is not already. When speaking on any topic, it is helpful to provide examples of what you are doing or why. A Day for Truth and Reconciliation is fast approaching on September 30th and you may be asking yourself ‘how I should speak on this’? Research and educate yourself on what this day is and what it stands for. Following that identify key elements that align with your values and speak on them. Or be honest with yourself and consider how this could be an update to your mission and vision statements to move forward.

How to create your mission and vision statements.

Setting aside time to evaluate and contemplate these topics could feel unusual if you’ve never done it before. However, getting personal and doing some soul searching is how you will lay the foundation to your business. Not to mention, it will help you to stay motivated and focused because it is meaningful and personal to you. 

Pull out a notebook or journal and have fun with this. Start with some of these questions to prompt your thinking.

• What do we do?

• How do we do it?

• Who do we do it for?

• What value are we bringing?

• Where do we see this project/business in 5 to 10 years?

• What does it look like when we have one or reached our goal?

Feel free to adjust these prompts accordingly when you go to identify your personal hopes and mission. 

Utilize the definitions of each statement to clearly outline the answers generated from the questions you just completed. Those answers are most likely detailed and lengthy, now we can summarize it!

Once you have taken the time to consider your key objectives and vision for the future in regards to your life and business, a mission and vision statement should come easily. Bounce your ideas off a friend, they can help identify if the language is clear and offer suggestions. These statements and values will be referred back to time and time again. Utilize the topics of your mission and vision to create content that is relevant and timely, find grounding in how to speak on difficult topics, and identify who your audience is. Everyone needs a step-by-step plan to get where they are going,  but they must start with a destination or they could end up working in circles.

For more helpful tips, information, and invites to our monthly events follow us on Instagram.