La Misión Personal
Discover Your Personal Mission.
Most people intuit that there must be some higher or main purpose to be alive, however, many of us haven’t found out what is it. This primary purpose could be considered as a our personal mission.
Knowing and understanding our personal mission is essential for having a well-targeted, ordered and consistent life. Our personal mission is the maximum guidance that we will follow throughout our lives, and it will allow us to focus on the truly important things, it will assist us in making right decisions and maintaining a unwavering support for ourselves. A good goal for this year would be to know, understand and follow your personal mission.
The good news is that there are some practical methods to discover your personal mission:
Steve Pavlina in his article How to discover your life purpose in 20 minutes suggests the following:
If you want to discover your true purpose in life, you must first put your mind blank and eliminate all the false purposes you’ve been taught (including the idea that there is no purpose in life)
Then you must perform the following activities:
- Take a sheet of paper or open a new document in your word processor (preferably the latter because it is faster)
- Write on the top, “What is my true purpose in life?”
- Write an answer (any) that comes into your head. It doesn’t need to be a complete sentence. A short sentence will be fine.
- Repeat step 3 until you write “an answer that makes you cry”. That is your purpose.
Continue reading after doing the exercise …
Now I will mention my own results:
I performed the exercise with easy-going, as I am a regular reader of Steve Pavlina’s blog, and because his articles are very interesting and useful. I started writing several phrases such as: “Shaping a healthy family and with high values”, “to base my life on correct principles and values”, “help and serve others”, “provide what is needed for my home”, “maintaining a good relationship with my wife”, etc.
However, despite that I wrote an important list of good intentions, I could not find in the 20 minutes he suggests, that purpose that would make me cry, perhaps the atmosphere was not the most conducive, or perhaps I needed a little more time to find it. However, this method certainly works for many people.
Another interesting method that worked best for me is the one proposed by Stephen Covey in his book “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” (a very recurrent book in this blog).
Stephen Covey applied the following exercise with college students:
Stephen asked his students to:
- Preferably do this exercise alone
- Imagine that you are about to die, maybe you have left only a week (it is important to focus on this and really feel that you are on the brink of death before continuing)
- Now think about the things you want to do before you leave this world
- List activities in the order they reach your mind
Continue reading after you have finished this exercise …
Now I will show you my results with this exercise.
For me, as for many others, thinking about dying is something that affects my nerves, so for some time is an uncomfortable situation, but otherwise it immediately changed my channel and perspective; it made me forget the small details I considered important at that time.
When I started writing the list of activities, the first thing that came to mind was my little son who will be 1 year and 4 months old, tomorrow (Jan 3, 2007), I thought about his weakness as a baby, and about his own situation after my death (knock on wood, though I am not a very superstitious guy) and that he would have to face a life without a father, and other implications. Just thinking about it made me cry and I couldn’t avoid to remember Steve Pavlina’s exercise, where he says that thinking about your life purpose will make you cry.
I immediately felt the need to write a letter to my little son (which I’ll write and perhaps post it here, ahead) where I would tell him what he means to me and how much I love him, and for sharing some of the most important experiences, ideas and thoughts that I have obtained throughout my life in order to help him to grow and to be a good person. Then I thought about my wife and her personal situation, as before I just thought about what I wanted to say and also considered the idea of writing something to her. A subsequent activity would be to find a way to ensure a good living for my wife and my son, perhaps by regulating (at least checking) my life insurance data, to make sure that my part of my business revenue will come to them and talking with my family and closest friends and ask for their support.
I had some other ideas like, what would be my contribution to the world, my family, friends, etc.. As would be remembered by people who knew me. I really thought very little about the work and business, much less in worldly pleasures.
Finally I thought about how to write a personal mission statement and although it continually change and adapts, it would be something like:
To live based on the right principles, trying to reach my full potential; being a very positive influence on people around me and for people within my sphere of influence. Educate myself and help to educate as many people as possible to create a better world.
I hope you have gotten such good results as I did with these two exercises. I would love you to share your results here.
