Your Mission Statement & The 7 R's of Personal Management

This is for your professional lives and pushing toward a better self-branding.

Mission statement - a future-tense description based on your values, the kind of person or corporation that you would ideally like to be in three to five years. Your core values/mission statement become your operating principles for everything you do. You commit ALL of your resources to living consistency with them. It also includes the measure and method aimed at achieving something for others, especially in business.

Example: My mission is to (do what I intend to do to improve the life or work of someone), which I achieve by (what I intend to do achieve that improvement), and I measure success by when I (achieve the measure I will use to determine whether I have completed my mission).

The 7 R's of Personal Management

1)Reevaluate your situation. Am I where I want to be? What is holding me back, and what can I do about it?

2)Reorganize your life. Examine your daily activities and question whether or not something can be done differently for better results. Look for ways to become more efficient and work more effectively. Always increase output relative to input to time and money.

3)Restructure activities. Look at the specific things that contribute the most value to your company and customers. Do you spend 80% of your time chasing 20% of your problems? If so, reverse course and hone in on things that yield the greatest payoff.

4)Re-engineer your career. Look at your entire body of work and its process from start to finish. Can parts (or whole steps) be eliminated without compromising the overall structure? Will changing a few things help you accomplish more in less time?

5)Reinvent yourself regularly. Determine what you love doing and start figuring out how to find or create a job doing more of it.

6)Refocus your energies. This is the key to your future. By refocusing, you now have the ability to concentrate on the few things that you truly enjoy. Find a specialty and stick with it!

7)Rethinking. Take the time to think about who you are and your direction, especially if you're unhappy in your current place. You have time to change and find your happy place. Realize there are more options now than ever; therefore, start planning your next move.

You can rethink and re-plan your entire career within these few steps. Anytime you're discouraged with your working environment, think through these steps. While they only serve as a self-evaluation tool, remember that people are always in your corner; otherwise, reconsider your circles of friends and associates.