Mission Statements, part three of five. If you are watching this video, you are already ahead of the curve. Most people don’t make it to workable mission statements.
And this is part three of a five-part series where I look at creating clarity to help people build the habits and action steps that are really useful in their lives. In this episode, it’s about mission, the driving force, the active expression of values and vision in the world. That is what a mission statement is at its best.
Mission statements, they are for organizations, schools, and companies. And as individuals, having a clear mission statement also gives you and your actions purpose, your routines, meaning, and your work a sense of grounded contribution. Mission statements matter.
And in this video, we will cover what makes a fantastic mission statement, why those mission statements really matter, the three most common missed opportunities when it comes to mission statements, and the next useful steps. So let’s dive in. What is a mission statement? Values are what is important to you and other people.
A vision is the landscape of where you’re traveling and going, and a mission is the objective you are trying to achieve in the present moment. Mission is the link between clarity and vision and action. It’s where your inner work meets the outer world.
Where vision paints a picture, mission answers the question, how will you show up today to move closer to that future? And it’s about what you’re committed to doing over and over again, especially when things get difficult. So a useful mission statement, it connects three things. What you do, who you do it for, and why it matters.
For example, someone might have a mission statement of, I help emerging leaders develop communication skills. They need to grow healthy, resilient teams. That works.
It’s not just inspiring, it’s functional and informs daily work, decision-making, and boundaries. Anyone in the field of coaching, whether independent or working within a school organization, you gain a strategic advantage from having a strong mission statement for your business or your department. And this clarity, it becomes especially crucial because what coaching offers, it’s invisible.
You can’t see it. And the benefits aren’t immediately tangible, like a physical product, even a book, whose primary value is in ideas that are largely invisible, even a book, it still provides something concrete that you can hold. And so when you are looking at offering transformation or mindset shifts or behavioral changes, us coaches, we have to articulate that purpose with exceptional clarity to help potential clients understand the value that they’re getting, or they’re going to get from working with us.
And if I were to distill the mission of the entire field of coaching into words, it would be something like this. The field of coaching helps individuals and teams clarify what they really want and design sustainable actions and habits to achieve it. It’s largely what I’m trying to lay out here in this five-part series.
In coaching, it excels at this because it allows clients to explore the space, to go into those areas that they don’t really have an opportunity to talk about on a regular basis. And so with you as a client, when you start to explore values, what you really, truly value and enjoy in the minute-to-minute in your daily life, and then you align that with vision, what you’re trying to achieve long-term, and you also look at what your values and what that vision offers to other people, then from there, you can move into mission statements that start to feel like they have traction, that gives you a grounding in the present tense so you can align your actions with that vision, with the mission and objectives that you’re trying to achieve. This is what coaching offers.
This is the value proposition that coaching is offering society. Now, these are the three most common missed opportunities that I see from working as a coach over these last two decades. And the first opportunity is that they’re too broad or vague.
And you’ve seen mission statements that say, you know, my mission is to empower people to their full potential. That’s fine. There’s nothing inherently not that useful about that.
But what does it actually mean? Empower in what way? Or reach what kind of potential? A better version might be, my mission is to support students in building emotional intelligence to be more proactive in their education through coaching and journaling practices. That’s more clear. That mission, it has who it is, what they’re doing, and the outcomes that they’re hoping to achieve.
Another one might be, my mission is to empower leaders with opportunities to process ideas effectively so they can make better decisions and lead their teams with more confidence and skill. That works too. Now, these mission statements, they are specific.
It tells you what the person does, who’s it for, and how they do it. And the more narrow and clearer your mission, the more powerful it becomes. And you don’t just need to have one.
You can have many of these things. They don’t need to be that wordy either. When I first started, my initial mission statement, mission, vision, it’s in that middle area, was to revolutionize education with coaching concepts.
And then it became a little more, let’s say, warmer with not revolution. That’s too strong a word. Maybe renovate.
Maybe not renovate, but maybe innovate, to innovate education. Yeah, I like the idea of innovation and looking at coaching concepts and how they can innovate the way that we’re working with students and really moving education from a knowledge basis of delivering value to an empowerment basis of delivering value through being able to be equipped to ask students questions about that inner landscape and to use a lot of the innovation of coaching that’s happening in the executive and health and wellness worlds to bring that into education. That being the mission statement of academic life coaching and coach training EDU, like part of the mission that we’re trying to do, that just clicks.
And so using these mission statements as ability to align values with vision, with mission, it starts to gain a tangibility that people can start to also see. They say, yeah, education, yeah, let’s innovate. Let’s get to that next step.
What does it look like? What does education look like when knowledge can be found through internet searches within milliseconds? And now you have AI coming into the picture. What does that really mean to education? Coaching has a role and a say in that. And this is part of the mission.
This is part of the vision of what I’m up to. And let’s go to missed opportunity number two, which is confusing a mission with a job description. And your mission, it’s not your resume.
It’s not a list of tasks. It’s a statement of purpose. You know, you think of it like this, your job might change, but your mission, it doesn’t have to.
The mission is the through line. It’s the thread connecting your roles, your actions, your impact. For example, a coach who moves from education to corporate leadership might have the same mission.
And that might be to create space where people feel seen, where they feel heard, empowered, and equipped to grow. Yeah, a mission, it transcends role and it grounds your evolution. And this leads to missed opportunity number three, which is keeping your mission statement private or passive or not sharing it with anyone.
A mission statement that stays locked away in a notebook, that doesn’t serve anybody. And when you say it out loud, when you test it, when you refine it, when you let it guide your choice, it starts to shape your world. And mission, it’s not meant to be perfect.
It’s meant to be active. And you can try it. You can use the mission statement for a week and ask yourself, well, how can I live this out today? Is it working for me? What needs to change? Where can I express this mission statement in my current work? Does it still match? And then what needs to change in my life to make space for this mission? Or how can this mission change so that it matches more of my life? These are living ideas.
And when you make your mission something that you practice, not just something that you declare, it starts to take on a life of its own. It starts to help you and guide you in your decision making. And so that leads to the next steps, which is try it out.
Try a few different mission statements. You can start with clarifying your values. I did a whole video on that.
I’ll drop a link in that below. Then you can go for vision statements. Again, go to part two of five of this.
And then here in part three of five is crafting a mission statement. And you can play with timelines as well as a vision statements where you can make them evergreen, those statements that are out there, a year, two years, or you can make mission statements that you can accomplish in the next week or two. The main idea is to craft something, craft a statement that grounds you in the present moment, but also aligns your actions and decisions with the larger vision and values that you’ve set.
And if you’re serious about taking a deeper dive, I recommend getting a coaching session. You can visit coachtheory.com to request an on-demand coaching session with a trained and certified coach. And you can ask specifically to look at crafting a mission.
Coaches love this stuff. In the field of coaching, it’s perfect for this kind of exploration and creating clarity. The next episode of the series, I’m going to look at how you can translate mission statements into strategies.
And thank you. Thank you for tuning in. Thank you for subscribing and the likes.
I really appreciate it. And I hope to see you soon with some more content on innovation and coaching concepts. Thank you.
