While Habit 1 says you have the power to create your own destiny, Habit 2 helps you to write it.
To achieve the life you want, you must start with the end in mind. This means identifying the big picture — the life you want to lead, the character traits you want to embody, the impact you want to have on those around you — and then ensuring each daily action is in line with your ultimate goals.
Think of driving to an appointment: How can you know which streets to take and turns to make if you don’t know where your destination is? Without a destination in mind, you might still make it there eventually, but it’ll be a long and roundabout route to get there. Effectiveness is following a direct route to get to your destination.
It’s easy to get sucked into the fast pace and stress of day-to-day life, working furiously to climb the ladder — but sometimes you reach the top rung only to realize that the ladder was leaned up against the wrong wall. You may accomplish a short-term goal (e.g. a job promotion, an income level, a diet goal), but when you get there you realize that along the way you sacrificed things that were more important in the grand scheme of things. When your ladder is leaning up against the wrong wall, every rung you climb only gets you closer to the wrong destination, and the more furiously you work just gets you to the wrong place faster.
By beginning with the end in mind, you create everything twice: You first envision the result you want and the efforts that must go into achieving it, and then you carry it out. Begin every day by reaffirming your values and your destination, and that will help you carry out every action throughout the day in pursuit of that goal. Taking ownership of developing a vision or goal and then working every day to reach it expands your Circle of Influence.
There are all kinds of pursuits and projects in which creating things twice is standard practice.
As people, our behaviors and experiences are also created twice. If you’re reactive, your conditions and conditioning write the scripts of your first creation, and you then live out that identity; if you’re proactive, you determine your second creation by writing your own scripts.
Leaders are responsible for staying aware of the big picture — the first creation — and ensuring that each action is moving in that direction. Whether you’re leading a team or practicing personal leadership, one of the challenges of being a good leader is resisting the urge to get distracted by small day-to-day matters.
In a business setting, an organization functions like a group of people finding their way through a jungle.
Leaders are responsible for being aware of changing industry and market conditions, and effective leaders can’t have this big-picture view if they allow themselves to get caught up in the underbrush.
Personal leadership follows the same principle: You’re leading your life in a deliberate way toward your goals. Although you have to also be your own manager and machete-swinger, if you don’t keep your attention on the big picture — your first creation — you could end up in the wrong jungle.
As life constantly changes, how do you keep your focus on your values and goals? How do you make sure every small action you make is moving you closer to your destination? You can create a personal mission statement.
A personal mission statement focuses on three main things:
Think of it like the U.S. Constitution: Your personal mission statement is the standard by which everything is measured and directed. Except for a handful of amendments, the Constitution has been virtually unchanged for more than two centuries, despite dramatic environmental, social, cultural, industrial, and political changes. The Constitution is so stable because it’s based on such basic, timeless principles that its essence has been applicable across centuries in very different environments.
If you create a personal mission statement that centers around your values at the core of who you are and who you want to be, it will guide you through the many phases and changes in your life. In fact, crystallizing the changeless core of who you are actually helps you adapt to change, because it reinforces such a secure sense of self that you won’t be threatened by changes around you.
When you sit down to create a personal mission statement, start by looking at the most basic paradigms that dictate how you see the world. As you examine these paradigms, they’ll reveal your innermost values and principles.
Each person’s mission statement will be distinct because everyone is unique and has individual experiences; rather than inventing your mission or emulating someone else’s, try to find your mission through self-examination, reflection, and honest assessment of your unique strengths and values.
The process of writing your mission statement requires deep introspection and careful thought. Allow ample time for this — it may take weeks or months to take an honest and thorough look at your paradigms and driving forces. The process itself is just as important as the final result, because it makes you think through how you want to live your life and what actions reinforce that.
As you develop your mission statement, it helps to identify the many roles you have — spouse, son/daughter, brother/sister, father/mother, friend, professional, individual — and create goals for each role. If you don’t parse out your vision and goals to address each of your roles, it’s easy to focus your mission statement too heavily on one area of your life and neglect others; you may accidentally make a mission statement too centered on work accomplishments and lose the balance in your goals that reflects a balanced life.
Effective goals should focus on the end result you want, your destination, rather than the route to get there. Once you’ve identified your destination, then you can figure out a path to reach it — and your personal mission statement will help you know when you’ve arrived — but you must begin with the end in mind.
Mission statements are also effective for groups — whether families, organizations, or businesses. Group mission statements help everyone in the group remain on the same page about the group’s values and goals, and create a sense of unity and investment in the well-being of the group.
As with personal mission statements, the process of developing, writing, and fine-tuning a mission statement is as important as the finished product, so it’s critical that everyone in the group be involved in creating the mission statement. This process gets all the group members thinking and talking about what matters to them, and what they believe the group’s priorities should be.
If group leaders write a mission statement without input from everyone else, the group members will be much less invested than if they’d contributed to the process; even if they agree with it initially, their commitment is likely to wane with time and in trying situations. On the other hand, if everyone is involved with creating the mission statement, they’re more likely to feel that it reflects their own values and to work harder to uphold it.
Creating your personal mission statement requires a process of deep reflection and self-evaluation as you examine your paradigms and discover the values that guide your decisions and actions.
Your paradigms determine four essential aspects of your life:
Each of these factors falls on a continuum; it isn’t a matter of whether or not you have them, but where you fall on the spectrum. For instance, you could be highly insecure with a low self-worth and a shaky sense of identity, or you could have high self-esteem and a firm sense of who you are.
These factors are also interdependent, collectively strengthening the others. If you have a strong sense of security and clear guidance, this heightens your wisdom, which helps you access your power.
Your core paradigms reveal your center; you can be centered on your marriage, friendships, family, work, money, possessions, pleasure, or, ideally, principles. Whatever is at your center determines your security, guidance, wisdom, and power.
Here’s a discussion of the most common centers, along with the problems they cause:
Many people have multiple centers; sometimes one takes precedence until it is momentarily satisfied (e.g. if you’re marriage-centered, your relationship with your spouse is in a happy place), and then another focus rises as the primary center for a period of time. For a consistent, reliable source of security, guidance, wisdom, and power, it’s best to have one center; this creates a clear focus of your values and priorities.
All of the centers above seem to have issues. So what’s the ideal center to have? Covey argues it’s a center based around your principles.
Unlike the centers described above, a principle-centered life does not subject your identity, perspective, and power to uncontrollable external forces; principles are timeless and unchanging, superseding people and circumstances. Paradigms that are created around these indisputable principles help you to see the world more accurately, as opposed to money-centered, pleasure-centered, or other paradigms that distort your lens.
Granted, you may have limited awareness and understanding of certain principles until you have a life experience that illustrates that principle; for example, you might not understand the importance of human dignity until you see someone being treated without dignity. As you move through life and gain experiences and knowledge that expand your understanding of fundamental principles, you’ll be better able to incorporate them into your paradigms.
Your center(s) determines the decisions you make and how you navigate life. In a given situation, several different centers might lead to the same outcome; however, your experience will be different based on the paradigm that led you to it. Furthermore, your motivations and experiences have a greater impact on your life than your specific actions.
For example, say you have tickets to see a concert with your wife tonight. A few hours before the show, your boss tells you he needs you to work late tonight to prepare for an important meeting in the morning.
If you’re marriage-centered, family-centered, or pleasure-centered, you may still go to the concert, whether to please your wife or because it just sounds more appealing. If you’re money-centered, work-centered, or possession-centered, you’re more likely to cancel on your wife and work the overtime.
If you’re principle-centered, you’ll weigh your options and decide what best aligns with your principles. Whichever option you choose, your experience will be different in several ways than if it were coming from a different center.
We discussed earlier that a balanced mission statements needs to include goals in every role you have in life. Similarly, a balanced approach to self-improvement requires you to use both sides of your brain.
Each side of the brain is responsible for different functions: The right side of the brain is creative, abstract. The left side of the brain deals with logic and language. You need to be both creative and logical as you take a holistic approach to growth and change.
We all use both sides of our brains, but each person tends to feel more comfortable using one side or the other and use that side more heavily. For example, you may know people who feel very comfortable tackling logic- and pattern-oriented challenges, but who shy away from artistic endeavors, insisting they aren’t creative. Additionally, our society tends to emphasize left-brained skills; schools weigh test scores more heavily than creativity, and many industries value logical, well-spoken people above artists and dreamers.
The right brain is critical for being proactive and creating paradigm shifts because it encompasses the imagination and creativity you need to dream up how you want your life to be, and what you can do to get there. You need your left brain to then crystallize that image and desire into a personal mission statement.
Extreme circumstances — including life-changing challenges and the death of a loved one — may force you to expand your left-brained perspective on life and push you into using your right brain. However, a proactive person can also do this at will through visualization and affirmation.
Visualization entails imagining yourself in a situation that puts life in a larger perspective; maybe you visualize yourself at your own funeral, at your 50th wedding anniversary, or at your retirement party. Imagine what people might say to sum up your life or marriage or career. What would you want them to say? Visualizing these scenarios helps crystallize your principles and values.
If you’re trying to improve a specific skill, habit, or area of your life, visualize a scenario that causes you to have the reaction that you’re trying to change. For example, if you’re trying to improve your interactions with your kids, visualize a situation in which they do something that would normally anger you. Instead of allowing your normal response to kick in — even in this imaginary scenario — visualize yourself practicing the patience and understanding that you want to embody in the future.
Visualization works best if you visualize in great detail — down to the smell of the room, the texture of the clothes you’re wearing, the feeling of that experience. Dedicate a few minutes each day to practicing this visualization. Separate yourself from distractions and allow your mind and body to totally relax while you do this.
High-performing people, from professional athletes to NASA astronauts, use visualization techniques to prepare them for critical moments, whether it’s the fourth quarter in a tie game or the space shuttle launch. Visualizing a situation in vivid detail and imagining yourself navigating it exactly the way you want to makes you more comfortable with that situation when it happens in reality. If everything is created twice, visualization is the first creation.
Similarly, affirmations are written or verbal reminders that you create to help you remember your goals. Just as a mission statement helps you to keep your focus on your goals and values, affirmations work the same way on a smaller scale, applying to one specific behavior or area of your life.
An effective affirmation has five key components:
Visualizations and affirmations are actions you can do daily to reinforce your larger self-improvement goals and efforts in your life.
Habit 2 explains how you can develop a personal mission statement as a first step toward creating your own destiny. Follow these steps to practice some of the techniques discussed in Habit 2.