I mentioned a few days ago that I went on a personal retreat a few weeks ago. While there, I met with a business/life coach and as we talked about the ways that my career and life are unfolding this year, it struck me that it might be time to make some plans.
When I first started as a freelancer, I wrote a mission statement:
I specialize in encouraging individuals to explore, integrate, and solidify their voices through well-developed workshops and speeches, well-researched articles that offer information, and thoughtful essays that provide truth, generate confidence, inspire hope and motivate action.
Creating a long term vision plan seemed like what I needed to do after talking with the coach, but, first, I felt like I needed to revisit my mission statement for some tweaking. It was helpful a few years, when I was first starting out, to talk about the work that I would do specifically but, now, it feels like I can be more focused on the way that I want to organically be as I work, live, and grow.
I didn’t spend a lot of time tweaking, maybe 10-15 minutes, but here is what I came up with for now:
My mission is to encourage individuals to explore, integrate, and solidify their voices in order to empower them with their own truth, confidence, hope, passion, and action.
With this mission in mind, I want to think about what’s next for me, what my vision is professionally and personally short term and long term. I love the work that Eve Ensler does– taking words and putting them on the stage, empowering people to become possessed by their voices and their truths, making activism out of art. I also love Alice Walker’s quiet but diligent work and Anne Lamott’s. For a few months, I think I will just pay attention to what I read, think, and see and figure out what resonates and go from there. In the meantime, I have these books that I already know that I want to write and essays that are percolating. Begin there, I think. But only after teaching a baby boy that we’re his, how to sleep through the night, and that our love for him is infinite.
