In a perfect world, this series of posts would have started in December. I like to do my annual review, amendments, and planning in December. Alas, we don’t live in a perfect world. Life happens. And that’s a reason one should want to develop their own personal mission, vision, or creed.
The most effective way I know to begin with the end in mind is to develop a personal mission statement or philosophy or creed. It focuses on what you want to be (character) and to do (contributions and achievements) and on the values or principles upon which being and doing are based.
Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
I first read Covey’s 7 Habits in 2014. It was on the Middle Leader Program reading list. From there I read First Things First, which is a much deeper dive into Habit Three.
Before this, I was a devotee of David Allen’s Getting Things Done. From Allen, I learned to manage projects and tasks. Covey taught there was more to the story. That we should start with personal leadership. Managers do things right. Leaders make sure we are doing the right things for the right reasons.
To this day I use much of what I learned from Allen’s books Getting Things Done and Ready for Anything. This time of the year I also like to listen to GTD Live, a live seminar recorded in 2008. GTD is all about personal management. And for me various iterations or versions of GTD have work well.
But that said, the more urgent, the more critical thing to do is to get our vision, purpose, or mission in life drafted. Once that garden is planted you can weekly and daily tend to the weeds.
Once you have that sense of mission, you have the essence of your own proactivity. You have the vision and the values that direct your life. You have the basic direction from which you set your long- and short-term goals. You have the power of a written constitution based on correct principles, against which every decision concerning the most effective use of your time, your talents, and your energies can be effectively measured.
Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
In deference to Allen’s idea that we should “clear the runway” first, we are going to jump into mission, vision, values, and purpose. This is in part because as I write this I am not drafting mine for the first time. Instead, I am doing my annual review, amending, and recommitting. This is much more effective than New Year’s resolutions. Actually, without this process resolutions are no more than hollow ideas we tend to abandon before the end of February.
But first a little more background to help explain the process. In 2015, I attended Corporate Athlete training presented by the Human Performance Institute. I certified through HPI In 2016 to be a facilitator of that training. HPI’s idea is to establish your “Ultimate Mission” first. Then to align all your energies — physical, mental, and emotional — to this self-transcendent idea.
Yes, this is where psychology returns somewhat to its roots in practical philosophy. Stick with me and we will lay some foundations for your philosophy.
Dr. Jim Loehr is one of the founders of the Human Performance Institute. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention his most recent book Leading With Character and the supplemental workbook The Personal Credo Journal. This book is generally aimed at the corporate world. It is filled with examples of leaders who did not engage their moral compass in their decision-making. I read the book and worked through the journal exercises in the winter of 2022-23. I’ll be showing here how we can operationalize some of that information and the journal exercises.
Because your personal credo represents the clearest, most accurate, self-determined articulation of your core beliefs, core values, mission, and purpose in life, it becomes your ultimate source code for determining right from wrong, for navigating the storms of life.
Jim Loehr, Leading With Character
Once we get this document lined out we will have at least a rough draft of our map of reality (not reality itself, more on that later). We will also have a compass, of sorts, to guide our decision-making on such things as roles, role-based goals, and how we fulfill those goals in service of those roles, in alignment with our self-determined purpose in life.
While still in these philosophical clouds, we should also embrace our finitude. Realize “productivity is a trap.” You can’t and shouldn’t want to do “do it all.”
Becoming more efficient just makes you more rushed, and trying to clear the decks simply makes them fill up again faster. Nobody in the history of humanity has ever achieved “work-life balance,” whatever that might be, and you certainly won’t get there by copying the “six things successful people do before 7:00 am.” The day will never arrive when you finally have everything under control … and when the fully optimized person you’ve become can turn, at long last, to the things life is really supposed to be about.
Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks
In Four Thousand Weeks, Oliver Burkeman poses five questions to better understand the default state of “insecurity and vulnerability of our provisional life.” He also provides ten tools for embracing our finitude. According to Burkeman’s math, I have roughly 1,565 weeks left of my (estimated) four thousand. For some this calculation could result in an existential crisis. I choose philosophy and spiritual practices over hiding in fear from reality. (And maybe the occasional “Jungle Bird” to help the medicine go down.)
I should explain what I mean by spiritual practices. These are not the same as the rituals that are intrinsic to religions and churches worldwide. For me, spiritual exercises are like those of Marcus Aurelius in his Meditations. As Pierre Haddot describes in The Inner Citadel:
The goal is to re-actualize, rekindle, and ceaselessly reawaken an inner state which is in constant danger of being numbed or extinguished. The task — ever-renewed — is to bring back to order an inner discourse which becomes dispersed and diluted in the futility of routine.
As he wrote the Meditations, Marcus was thus practicing Stoic spiritual exercises. He was using writing as a technique or procedure in order to influence himself and to transform his inner discourse by meditating on the Stoic dogmas and rules of life. This was an exercise of writing day by day, ever-renewed, always taken up again, since the true philosopher is he who is conscious of not yet having attained wisdom.
Pierre Haddot, The Inner Citadel
I also gleaned a few new practices last year from my reading of From Strength to Strength, by Arthur C. Brooks. We will look at these and a few other practices I’ve used over the years.
Finally, we will look at the daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly levels of planning. Do you need to do all of them? Maybe not. Covey suggests “planning weekly” and “adjusting daily.” David Allen recommends a weekly review of your progress and processing of your system. If you are “capturing everything in a trusted system” then planning is almost moot. You’re getting things done within the context of the moment (this is the biggest gap in Allen’s system but acknowledging the gap you can overcome it easily enough). I used to do bi-weekly reviews at the end of a pay period.
In The One Thing, Gary Keller and Jay Papasan encourage us to take Pareto’s Principle to the extreme. They tell us to plan down to “the one thing [you] can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary.” Brian Moran and Michael Lennington, in 12 Week Year, argue that if you break your year down into four “years” each a set of 12 weeks, then you can get four year’s of work accomplished in one calendar year. Really? Maybe. Maybe not.
This brings me back to Burkeman — you cannot get everything done, nor should you try.
Elucidating Terminology
(aka Eschewing Obfuscation)
Before we jump into some thought experiments or other practices we should get a better understanding of our subject by way of defining terminology.
I’m going to be asking you to consider paradigms, vision, goals, and roles. Further, to draft a credo, mission statement, “Grand Strategy,” or “ultimate purpose.” So you might be wondering are these all the same thing? (No.) If not, how do they differ? And how pray tell do we operationalize all these phrases and terms? I will explain what these mean — at least how I define them.
Do You Have Change for a Paradigm?
According to etymology.com paradigm is from the late Latin paradigma “pattern, example,” from Greek paradeígma “pattern, model, precedent, example.” In the 20th century paradigm began to be used in the more specific philosophical sense of “logical or conceptual structure serving as a form of thought within a given area of experience,” especially in Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Lillian was reminded of the Talmudic words: “We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are.“
Anaïs Nin, Seduction of the Minotaur
Stephen Covey applies the metaphor of a map. We have maps in our heads that he divides into two categories:
- Maps of the “way things are,” our perception of realization.
- Maps of the “way things should be,” that is, our values and beliefs.
But, Covey cautions, “The map is not the territory,” rather it is merely an explanation — our understanding — of our view of the explored parts of the territory. Explored versus unexplored territory is a philosophical and psychological metaphor we will save for a later discussion.
There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective “knowing;” and the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our “concept” of this thing, our “objectivity,” will be.
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals
It is important to understand that if we are using the wrong map — a flawed paradigm — nothing we do, short of changing maps, will save us from being lost.
Our paradigms are how we see the world — the filter or lens through which we perceive, understand, and interpret. Conditioning affects our perceptions and therefore our paradigms. Influences include family, school, church, work environment, friends and associates, current sociopolitical attitudes, and organizational indoctrination.
In developing our self-awareness many of us discover ineffective embedded habits that are totally unworthy of us, totally incongruent with the things we value in life.
Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
Jim Loehr reminds us that any or all of these could be “flawed inputs” and lists several worth considering deeply:
- Internal “fake news” and flawed moral reasoning — when our personal beliefs and biases masquerade as factual knowledge.
- Flawed parental inputs — parents are imperfect and have deficiencies, “and just as they hand down to us their character strengths, they also hand down their character flaws, though usually unintentionally.”
- Flawed cultural and religious inputs.
- Flawed mindset inputs — there’s reality and then there’s our perspective or version thereof; my perspective represents reality to me and dictates how I will respond in a given situation.
It is our needs that interpret the world; our drives and their “For and Against.” Every drive is a kind of lust to rule; each one has its perspectives that it would like to compel all other drives to accept as a norm.
Friedrich Nietzsche
- Flawed emotional inputs — emotional hijacking.
- Flawed survival inputs — intense pressure, fear of failure, or humiliation: anything triggering a fight or flight response.
- Flawed fatigue inputs — compromised physical or mental state; low physical or mental energy.
- Flawed need inputs — strong needs for approval, attention, recognition, love, affection, self-esteem, etcetera.
While beliefs are notions we hold to be true, they may or may not have moral ramifications; they represent our interpretation of the world as we have come to experience it.
Jim Loehr, Leading With Character
Our paradigms (the way we perceive our values and beliefs) lead to what we do (our attitudes and behaviors). In turn, what we do leads to the results we get. Things that challenge our paradigms — especially those deeply submerged iceberg beliefs — are perceived to be a threat.
When we act contrary to our paradigms we experience at the least cognitive dissonance and worst moral injury. So if we want to change results we cannot just change our attitudes and behaviors, methods, or techniques. We must change the basic paradigms.
The more aware we are of our basic paradigms, maps, or assumptions, and the extent to which we have been influenced by our experience, the more we can take responsibility for those paradigms, examine them, test them against reality, listen to others, and be open to their perceptions, thereby getting a larger picture and a far more objective view.
Stephen Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
This sounds a great deal like Nietzsche’s perspectivism. It also sounds an awful lot like Boyd’s orienting, and hints at Frankl’s gap between stimulus and response, Stoic ideas of an “inner citadel,” or what James Stockade called “that old roll-top desk where you really keep your stuff.”
Because we have already lived with many scripts that have been handed to us, the process of writing our own scripts is actually more a process of “re-scripting,” or paradigm-shifting — of changing some of the basic paradigms we already have. As we recognize the ineffective scripts, the incorrect or incomplete paradigms within us, we can proactively begin to re-script ourselves.
Stephen Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effectively People
Values or Principles
Principles are fundamental truths that serve as the foundations for behavior that get you what you want in your life. They can be applied again and again in similar situations to help you achieve your goals.
Ray Dalio, Principles of Life and Work
Covey defines principles as time-tested values that have worked through the ages regardless of their social context. He implies that there are universal values and therefore universal principles.
Without implying any universality, Ray Dalio agrees that all principles come from a set of values. Your values lead to your principles. Values are important. They define who you are or who you want to be. However, values are not practical to use when faced with tough decisions.
For example, let’s assume you value living a healthy lifestyle. But what exactly does “being healthy” mean in practice? What are the daily decisions you are going to make to be more health conscious?
Without principles, you would be forced to react to circumstances that come at you without considering what you value most and have to make choices to get what you want. This would prevent you from making the most of your life.
Ray Dalio, Principles: Life and Work
Principles are what allow you to live a life consistent with those values. Principles operationalize your values. Considering the value of “living a healthy lifestyle,” you need to create a set of principles to guide your actions. Such as “I do not eat fast food,” “I exercise three times a week,” or “I go to yoga every Saturday.”
Principles connect your values to your actions; they are beacons that guide your actions, and help you successfully deal with the laws of reality. It is to your principles that you turn to when you face hard choices.
Ray Dalio, Principles: Life and Work
Most of our principles — like our paradigms — come prepackaged from parents, religious institutions, schools, the military, and influential figures without thought. Herein lies the potential risk of inconsistency with your true values and actions.
Those principles that are most valuable come from our own experiences and our reflections on those experiences. Every time we face hard choices, we refine our principles by asking ourselves difficult questions.
Ray Dalio, Principles: Life and Work
I’ve mentioned values several times I guess we should define them. While we are at it let’s also turn over a few stones to find ours.
Values are a set of mental processes that are both cognitive and emotional. They are unique to each of us. They are keystones of our paradigms and beliefs and are actualized through principles. As such they govern our behavior and guide the way we look at the world.
You have values whether you know it or not. Knowing your core values is a way of connecting with your inner self. Not knowing you run the risk of inadvertently going against them. Without understanding and alignment, we are on weak foundations.
Have a look at this list from Brené Brown’s book Dare to Lead. Highlight underline or circle the words that most resonate with you.
Those first ten or twenty or so that you highlighted Brown calls “second-tier values.” Her challenge to us is to narrow this list down to your core two values. And, yes, Brown admits this is universally difficult. I settle for four. Like cardinal points on a compass, they help us to make decisions about which way to go to get to our destination — our purpose.
Full disclosure, I have not read Dare to Lead. Colin Breck’s blog is where I heard of Brown’s exercise. In that blog post, he goes on to describe how many of the second-tier values can be grouped as they relate to one another. Therein we can refine our first list into two (or four) core values.
The second-tier values then support these values. When we are guided by clear values, we can continue to make choices about how to behave from a position of confidence, strength, and dignity rather than from anger, resentment, and insecurity.
Character Strengths
Character is defined as the combination of mental characteristics and behavior that distinguishes a person or group; as moral strength and integrity. As defined by Ralph Emerson, character is “a reserved force that acts by presence and without means.”
Character comes from the Greek kharacter meaning “engraved mark” also “symbol or imprint on the soul.” Following on the etymology is the common metaphor of engraving or carving our character as Michelangelo “revealed” David from the marble other sculptors had rejected. Dr. Loehr writes, “[I]n a sense we chisel our true essence from the bedrock of life.”
Character is destiny.
Heraclitus
Character includes traits that reveal themselves over time in specific — and often uncommon — circumstances. Character strengths are viewed as specific psychological processes that define broader virtues. Character is shaped by beliefs.
With enough effort and motivation, changing one’s perspective and view of the world can lead to a shift in one’s character. What I think Heraclitus is saying is that people make their destiny through their value-based choices, as Loehr says, “one moral decision at a time.”
Building character strength is like building physical strength. When the test comes, if you don’t have it, no cosmetics can disguise the fact that it just isn’t there.
Stephen Covey, First Things First
Character is not static. It can be exercised like a muscle and therefore strengthened and reinforced. But too, it can atrophy if not put to work. You can maintain your character strengths and use those to exercise and improve any weaknesses.
As defined by the positive psychology movement, character strengths are the psychological ingredients — processes or mechanisms — that define virtues. Said another way, they are distinguishable routes to displaying one or another of the virtues (we will talk about virtues soon).
Positive psychology proffers we all have these character strengths to varying degrees, though we may not express them at any one time. So too these strengths may be underutilized and as such “detrained” — unavailable in time of need.
Character strengths can be taught and strengthened through training and repeated use. Research suggests that people who use these strengths every day are three times more likely to report having an excellent quality of life and six times more likely to be engaged at work.
Pro tip: find a job that utilizes your character strengths often.
You can figure out your character strengths via the brief questionnaire here. By knowing your strengths and acknowledging weaknesses, you can go about improving them and benefit from exercising your strengths.
Virtues
In The Power of Full Engagement, Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz state, “A value in action is a virtue.”
Alignment occurs when we transform our values into virtues. Simply identifying our primary values is not sufficient. The next step is to define more precisely in our daily lives — regardless of external pressures.
Jim Loehr & Tony Schwartz, The Power of Full Engagement
The ancient Greek philosophers recognized four cardinal virtues: wisdom, courage, justice, and temperance. The positive psychology movement adds “humanity” and “transcendence.” They argue “These six virtues are universal, perhaps explained by evolutionary biological process … as a means of solving the important tasks necessary for survival.”
Martin Seligman — founder of the positive psychology movement — provides brief definitions in his book Flourish. Further information and definitions can be found in Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification (by Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman).
Wisdom is “knowledge hard fought for, and then used for good. …a form of noble intelligence — in the presence of which no one is resentful and everyone is appreciative.” Peterson and Seligman quote Kramer, “Wisdom involves exceptional breadth and depth of knowledge about the conditions of life and human affairs and the reflective judgment about the application of this knowledge.” They also quote the Berlin Max Plank Institute researchers: “Good judgment and advice about important but uncertain matters of life.”
Courage, writes Seligman, “Reflects the open-eyed exercise of will toward uncertain worthy ends in the face of strong adversity.” Peterson and Seligman follow Putnam’s “inclusive account of courage,” which includes three characterizations of courage:
Physical courage is the type involved in overcoming fear of physical injury or death in order to save others or oneself. Moral courage entails maintaining ethical integrity or authenticity at the risk of losing friends, employment, privacy, or prestige. Psychological courage involves that sort required to confront a debilitating illness or destructive habit or situation; it is the bravery inherent in facing one’s inner demons.
Daniel Putnam, Psychological Courage
Humanity includes strengths “displayed in positive social interaction with other people: friends, acquaintances, family members, and strangers.” The positive psychology movement separates the virtues of “Humanity” and “Justice.”
Justice they write, “generally refers to that which makes life fair.” “Intuitively perhaps,” they continue, “that means the equality of everyone.” The strengths of justice are in civic activities.
Following the Stoic idea of Oikeiôsis and “Hierocles’ Circles”, I put the two back together. Equal justice for all proceeds from an understanding, acceptance, and love of our common humanity. Perhaps love is a transcendence of both.
Temperance, according to Seligman, “refers to the appropriate and moderate expression of your appetites and wants. The temperate person does not suppress motives, but waits for opportunities to satisfy them so that harm is not done to self or others.”
Peterson and Seligman define Transcendence “as the connection to something higher — the belief that there is meaning or purpose larger than ourselves.” This is essentially the opposite of nihilism. They go on to quote Viktor Frankl:
Being human always points, and is directed, to something, or someone other than oneself — be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter. The more one forgets himself — by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love — the more human he is and the more he actualizing himself.
Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
Purpose & “Ultimate Mission”
People who labor all their lives but have no purpose to direct every thought and impulse toward are wasting their time — even when hard at work.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
To be clear, Peterson and Seligman are not saying religiosity or spirituality makes one virtuous. They do concede however that both are an example of transcendence. You need not be religious — implying a connection to formal institutions. Nor do you need to be “spiritual” to experience “self-transcendence.” I will follow Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz’s more “simple and elemental” definition of spiritual: “the connection to a deeply held set of values and to a purpose beyond our self-interest.” It is this “purpose” I want to talk about.
Can human beings find real fulfillment and well-being without knowing the “why,” or purpose, behind what they are chasing?
Can we find sustained happiness when our reason for chasing is maximizing our own pleasure and minimizing our own pain? That is, can a hedonistic life ever truly be a fulfilling life?
Is life more likely to be fulfilling when the purpose of our chasing is more about others than ourselves? To wit, how important is it to shift from a self-enhancing purpose to a self-transcending one?
Jim Loehr, Leading With Character
The scientific evidence indicates Aristotle, Seligman, Emmons, Frankl, Deci, Ryan, Gardener, and others are right. Eudaemonia or Flourishing comes from a positive, self-determined, self-transcending purpose.
We are teleological and purpose-driven. Our most potent, vigorous, and sustaining sense of purpose occurs when we transcend self-interest. We are nourished when the “why” behind what we do is intrinsic and other-centered.
Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life … Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated. Thus, everyone’s talk is as unique as is his specific opportunity to implement it.
Viktor Frankl
“Ultimate Mission” is the term the Human Performance Institute uses. To help one determine their ultimate mission or purpose, they ask you to answer seven questions:
- What legacy do you want to leave behind? Or, how do you want to be remembered
- How do you want people to describe you?
- Who do you want to be?
- Who/what matters most to you?
- What are your deepest values?
- How would you define success in life?
- What makes your life worth living?
Here are a few more:
- How would you like to hear people eulogize you at your funeral?
- What is worth denying for?
- What one-sentence inscription would you like to see on your tombstone?
In answering these questions we can, as Viktor Frankl said, detect true missions, rather than invent false ones.
Credo/Grand Strategy
Here we are back where we started.
We must not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we began and to know the place for the first time.
T. S. Elliot
With that in mind let’s review the quote from Covey’s book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: “The most effective way I know to begin with the end in mind is to develop a personal mission statement or philosophy or creed.”
Covey likens the personal mission statement to the U.S. Constitution — fundamentally changeless, but amendable, the standard by every law (decision) is evaluated, based on correct principles.
“Grand Strategy” is my preferred term. I like grand strategy more than an “immutable unchanging constitution” because strategy constantly evolves in response to changing reality including other people implementing their own, possibly con-travailing strategies. I’m borrowing of course from political science in which grand strategy is a methodology used by policymakers and practitioners to solve problems. For me, this is a progression from HPI’s “Ultimate Mission.”
Scholars broadly agree that grand strategy refers to something that has the characteristics of being long-term in scope, related to the state’s highest priorities, and concerned with all spheres of statecraft. The formulation and implementation of a grand strategy require the identification of a national goal, a thorough assessment of the state’s resources in a highly organized manner to achieve that goal.
Nina Silove, Beyond the Buzzword: The Three Meanings of ‘Grand Strategy’
“National goal?” That’s the “ultimate mission” or purpose you need to identify. “State resources?” These are your physical, mental, and emotional energies. You make an honest and thorough assessment of your energy levels and what’s needed to optimize them. Lastly, is the “marshaling of those resources [energies] in a highly organized manner to achieve that goal.”
An empowering grand strategy represents the deepest and best within you. It is the fulfillment of your unique gifts. Further, it deals with vision, your ultimate mission, principle-based values, character, and competence. Your grand strategy should address all the significant roles in life. Most importantly it should be written to inspire you, not impress someone else.
Because your personal credo represents the clearest, most accurate, self-determined articulation of your core beliefs, core values, mission, and purpose in life, it becomes your ultimate source code for determining right from wrong, for navigating the moral storms of life.
Jim Loehr, Leading With Character
By “grand” I am not encouraging grandiosity. Ambitious maybe, but not grandiose. Instead “grand” implies the over-arcing vision or strategy that encapsulates all lesser strategies and guides the alignment of means and ends.
By “lesser strategies” I mean those that guide your “training missions.” Those personal missions are aimed at improving character strengths or optimizing your physical, mental, and emotional energies much more on that in future posts.
Where to next?
Next (future posts) we will go through some exercises and thought experiments scientifically proven to help you discover your values, character strengths, paradigms, and principles. I’ve mentioned a few already, and we will revisit those.
From there we will drill down on a first draft of your ultimate mission, and your roles or identities. Once your roles are recognized you can decide on role-based goals and commitments. Importantly, we will discuss the “energy paradigm” and how you should optimize and renew yours regularly.
With that high-level thinking done, or at least a working draft in place, we can drop down a few levels at a time. The annual, quarterly, monthly, weekly, and daily planning and doing. This is where “personal leadership” downshifts (back) to “personal management.”
