You’re almost ready to write your personal vision statement. You’ve written down your goals and come up with a list of strengths and skills you need to work on. Step 3 in creating your personal vision statement is to decide what your most important values are.
As with steps 1 and 2, this step is going to yield different answers for everyone. There are no wrong answers so don’t get bogged down or stressed over this step. All you’re going to do is decide what’s most important to YOU, not what is important to anyone else or that you think should be important.
Once more, you’ll need your pen and paper. Write “My Values” across the top. What’s the most important thing in the world to you? Your top priority, the thing you work so hard for, the one rule you always follow, the one guideline you use to define everything else in your life.
It’s a hard task, isn’t it? It may require some thought. Or maybe you know right away what it is. If so, you’re one of the lucky ones. The rest of us have to think about it for a while!
The answer, when you come up with it, might be simple or it might be complex. It might be the Golden Rule. It could be taking care of your family. Making money is a top value for some people while making a difference is most important to others. Some write a single word, such as “love” or “caring.”
Again, there are no wrong answers. This is about you and no one else. Your answers are private and should reflect your innermost self, or your vision statement won’t be genuine. Being honest with yourself is the most important part of this process.
Once you have an answer, you’re going to write down your second and third most important values. These might take you a while as well. You might even discover you have two or three on the same level. That’s okay too.
If you want to, you can write down any other values you hold in high importance. Don’t write down too many; you don’t want to dilute the issue. You’re going to want to include your top value in your vision statement. Depending on your personality, you might want to do your second and third most important and maybe a few others as well.
When you finish with step 3, you’ll be ready to write down your personal vision statement. We’ll pull it all together in the next blogpost.