Mission, Values and Action Planning

[Michele Martin]

Hi Everyone---

I wanted to thank all of you who have taken the time to complete the survey I set up on the career retreat. I'm getting a lot of good, helpful info.

One of the comments I received was particularly instructive, as it fit in with something I'd also been feeling and worrying about. The concern was that we didn't spend a lot of in-depth time on how mission and values fit into career planning or on next steps and action planning.

I agree. Part of this was because we crammed a lot of activities into one day. For the future, this much stuff really should happen over two days. It also happened because we got into a discussion of people's particular career concerns and you guys were on such a roll with the advice, I really didn't want to cut that discussion short.

That said, I have two questions:

1. Would you have liked more time for these two things--mission and values in career planning and working on action planning and next steps?

2. What can we do to help you follow up on these two things? We could do something online where you could post your goals/action steps into your personal blog and we could provide feedback. Or we could set up a forum to keep discussing these issues. Or we could try to do some kind of follow-up in the future--maybe devote one of your future group meetings to one or both of these topics?

I want to make sure that you get the full support that you need, so I'm open to any thoughts/ideas you have on this.

[Danielle Hatchett]

I'll fess up. This was my comment :)

I guess I had my own selfish reasons for wanting more of this - to help Esther and I figure out how to move forward. We wanted some "free" or low cost professional advice!

I just wished we has spent a little more time on making the connections between the collages / written statements we wrote and how to activate those missions in our lives. Also, we both struggle with having so many goals. We're trying to figure out how to prioritize and create balance. I would also have liked to hear your personal mission statement, assuming you have one.

I'm not sure what the best way is to move forward. I think a combination of online resource sharing and in-person meetings would be good.

Here are some resources that helped us come up with our individual mission statements:

http://www.franklincovey.com/missionbuilder/
http://www.timethoughts.com/goalsetting/mission-statements.htm
http://www.quintcareers.com/mission_statements.html
THE PATH: Creating Your Mission Statements for Work and Life by Laurie Beth Jones

[Michele Martin]

Thanks for the confession, Danielle. :-) I actually thought you made an excellent point and it was something I'd thought about in reflecting on the day. I felt like by the end of the day, we sort of rushed some things and so mission statement development, goals, and action planning sort of fell by the wayside.

Some of these things we could probably "discuss" here--like the issue of how to deal with having a lot of goals and figuring out how to prioritize. Other things may require some follow-up through the monthly meetings. Let me do some thinking on this.

Thanks for the mission statement resources, too--these are great!

[Elisa Ortiz]

Hey Michelle,
Sorry for the delayed response on this. I agree about mission and action planning, both because of time and because we were all pretty tired by then.

I'd personally like some more guidance on this. I've been continuing to work on my personal, visual mission statement since the retreat (the 7 hour ride home for Christmas provided some good time), but haven't gotten to writing anything yet. I did set a couple of preliminary goals as well that could be extrapolated into larger, long terms goals, but I'd appreciate some feedback.

I'm happy to participate in whatever form it takes, though I think an in person interaction would be most helpful for me at the beginning. Hopefully we can devote one of our subsequent meetings to this or we can pitch in and actually pay you to come down and facilitate some more :).

Hope things are going well!

Elisa