Just like a Mission, a Vision Statement is not just a lofty bunch of words that make people feel good about you. Your Vision Statement is a direct result of your Mission, and more than that, a Vision Statement is about your driving force.
Today’s episode takes you one step closer to clarity, and I will walk you through a mini-exercise at the end for how you can start to implement this stuff today!
In this episode, we’re covering:
- What I see as the core difference between a Mission and a Vision (and how too many people get them both wrong)
- How I believe you can use both your Mission and Vision to your advantage
- Why I think you should have BOTH a Mission and a Vision (and how to use it when you’re making plans for the future)
Y’all ready? Let’s do this!
The following is an imperfect transcript of the Episode (we’re all human!)
Hey, y’all, Sheila Wilkinson here and welcome back to a new episode. Thank you so much for listening!
So last time we talked about your mission statement and today in Episode 22, we are diving even deeper into starting or changing your business or your career. That could be a thing. So you can understand more deeply what you need to know when you’re planning everything out.
And making sure that the people in the projects and the pay that you’re attracting into your life and career and business, if you have one, are the right people, the right projects, the right pay. And to make sure this is happening. You need to know who you are, right. You know this, you need to know who you are, what you want, why you want it, and you must have that clarity.
And as I said, last time, your mission is more than just a pitch that you tell others, but your vision – that’s where the love lives.
So today I’m going to walk you through why I believe that you should keep your mission and your vision separated and how you can use both of these to your advantage. We are going to talk about what I see as the core difference between a mission and a vision and how people get it wrong. Or at least I believe that they get it wrong. Um, we’re also gonna talk about how I believe you can use both your mission and vision to your advantage, but also why I think you should have both a mission and a vision and how to use it when you’re making plans for the future.
And at the end of the episode, I’m going to leave you with a couple of questions for you to ask yourself, that’s going to help you to start to reflect on these things. And if you get stuck and you need help, I’m here for you. Just reach out. y’all Ready? Big takeaways are coming. As always, I appreciate you and I am so glad you’re here. Let’s do this.
All right. So today we are talking about your vision statement and we’ve been talking about the real reason that I think that businesses do not grow or scale or last past, just a couple of years. It’s something that no one in the mainstream media influencer, celebrity coaches, nothing that they talk about, because if they talked about it, you wouldn’t need to buy their services for years and years and years and rely on them and get co-dependent.
And that’s what they’re hoping for. They want you to be codependent, right? My goal is to help you know, that you don’t need me forever to make your life work the way you want it to. This is like radical thoughts. Y’all like a lawyer who doesn’t want you to continue paying them forever. It’s not to say that I’m not going to continue supporting you, but I’m not going to just keeping, taking your money for no reason, right? I want you to have the foundations that you need to feel confident and courageous, but what you’ll have, which is more important than anything is clarity.
People who hold themselves back and they sabotage themselves and they believe those lies that society told them. The stuff that we talked about last time, the lessons that they learned over the years, that they believe that they’re not good enough or smart enough or savvy enough or quick enough, or they think that no one wants them or wants their services. Most of the time, that is a very, very far from the truth.
And, if you’re trying to convince everyone that, you know, all the answers are you trying to have all the answers to everyone’s questions, you’re going to be attracting the wrong kind of attention. All right. You’re going to be putting yourself in a position where everybody comes to you for the answers, which is different than coming to you for guidance, for services, for doing something for them, and then sending them on their way.
If you’re fixated on finding love or direction and holding on to things and people that are not good for you, then you’re attracting the wrong people, the wrong projects and the wrong pay. And if you’re all go, go, go, go, go, do, do, do, do do. Then you’re putting your head in the sand and you’re avoiding confrontation and the truth that you have to say goodbye to the way you’ve been doing things, the way you’ve been showing up in the world and start doing your life, the way you want to do them, you have to know that you are your own secret sauce.
And if you don’t know how to let go, and you never know when enough is enough, you’re just gonna waste your time and energy, trying to prove yourself to get approval, right? The acceptance and the validation and the love and respect.
But you are your own secret ingredient. That is why having a mission is so important. And why having a vision is even more important because where the mission is, the what that you do, the vision is the why.
In a mission, you’re telling people who you are, what you want, but the vision tells them why this matters to you. And if you’ve always been afraid of selling your services or of the, uh, you know, quote unquote sales call, that’s because you don’t have clarity and you don’t have a real mission, you don’t have a real vision.
You’re just doing what you think you’re supposed to be doing. Sales is easy. Marketing is easy when you know who you are, when you know what you want, when you know why you want it. And that it’s for the right reason. It’s both the most exhilarating and scariest part to figure all of it out. And chances are, you know, what your mission and vision are, but maybe you’ve never thought about it quite like that.
Tell people the truth about yourself and what you will and will not stand for. And see what happens. And remember, we talked about this last time, a mission is supposed to make people walk away from you. We want people to go away, y’all. A mission is your guiding light and your beacon of, Hey, this is who I am, and this is what I do.
And if you don’t like it, suck it right. Look the other way. Keep walking, keep going. We talked about this last time. It’s what you do, but who and what are only two pieces of the puzzle. The why is the important piece. That’s what gets people to trust you, because they connect with you, understand you, want to be in your circle, in your support network, they want to be your friend. They want to be your cheerleader. They just want to be sitting at your feet going, tell me more, tell me more, your why is arguably more important than your who and what. Your vision is what motivates you. Whereas your mission is how you activate the vision.
And this is scary stuff for a lot of people, especially people who think that they don’t know what they’re doing. They just threw something together one day and got a hair up, got a hair up their butt. And they were like, oh, I’m going to start a business. Or they think that just because they’ve never taken a business class before that somehow that means that they’ll be less successful or wanted or trusted or respected. And that’s not true. It doesn’t have to be true.
And if you’ve ever thought that, or maybe you’re thinking it right now, I want you to know this is all in your head. You know, we have been told our whole lives to keep the peace. Don’t rock the boat, be polite, stay in your lane. The customer’s always right. And what I want you to do is ignore that.
And I want you to forget everything you learned because it’s wrong. We have been socialized to not stand up for ourselves, just to keep the status quo, to give people whatever they want. Right. And just be grateful. So I have to say that you can’t be grateful, but just grateful for any business at all, any job at all, any pay at all.
And that’s like a double ugh for me, because I don’t want you to just have any business, any job, any pay, any clients. I want you to have the right ones . And you’re never going to find that fulfillment at work and your life and your relationships and yourself. And you’re never gonna reach that level of achievement and self-esteem and confidence that you want.
You’re never going to have the courage to really live your life, to really run your career, to really run your business, to really be on the path that you want, unless you scare some people off.
And we talked about this last time, right? And your vision. Friends your vision is how you scare people off. So your mission is one thing, your mission’s like, oh, maybe they’re not right for me.
Maybe they’re not the right person to, provide the service to me. Your vision, however, the vision is where people run away, where they run away screaming when they go, oh, uh, that’s not for me. Or, oh, you’re dreaming kind of big there, huh? Or, uh, I think you have your hopes too high in humanity. You can know that those people are not your people.
And I want you to let them run away from you, but I don’t want you to let them pull you down. Don’t prevent yourself from getting what you want because other people are afraid. Your vision is about your why, what you see for yourself and your career and your impact on the world, in the longterm. Your mission’s purpose is to explain how and what you do, but your vision is the reason why you do it.
And they can guide you to know where you’re going in the future. And that’s going to be really important when we get to the planning piece of our episodes. I don’t know whatever number that is in the future. Y’all remember, I’ve got two years worth of episodes are already mapped out for you.
So y’all know that I have multiple pieces of me, right? Attorney, coach, social worker, educator. My mission is the same across the board: to empower others, to be their best selves each and every day, by helping them tap into and discover clarity and who they are, what they want and why they want it. And for me, that’s easy; for you that might not be your mission and that’s okay. But that’s just who I help and what I do, but my vision is about why I do that.
My vision is that when every single person I help has that clarity, then they can be happy and they can go out and they can make the world a better place. You know, I sign off with my mission and my vision every single episode, but I’ve never said it to you like that.
Because you being happy matters to me because life is too short to be living someone else’s version of ourselves. So many people are walking around disconnected from who they are intellectually and emotionally. And I want to change that. And I know that by helping people get clarity that I can actually change the world.
That’s my vision, a world where people are connected and cared for and happy and joyful. So it doesn’t matter if I’m acting as an attorney, acting as a coach, acting as a social worker, acting as a, an educator, my mission and vision matter. And I bring that to the table in every single thing that I do, with every single person I meet.
And so for you, you need to determine what that looks like for you and everybody does this part, wrong. They draft up some fancy language and then they post it on their website and then they never look at it again, they get sucked up into the doing inside of their careers, their businesses, their lives, that they forget why they went on to that path in the first place.
Your mission and vision are what you do, who you are, why you do it.
So if you help struggling creative entrepreneurs build businesses that work for them in the way that they want their life and their quality of life to be like me, because you believe that life is short, we should live it to the fullest every day, like me, that’s a mission and a vision. And lots of people think that a mission has to be something aspirational. Like we want to create change in the community and bring awareness to whatever, fill in the blank. You know, what a very generic, boring mission looks like. It can be aspirational in that way, but what you need to know is how you’re going to achieve it.
And you need to have a place where you can say, am I achieving this and is this opportunity in front of me going to help me get to the thing that I say that I want and for the right reason that I want it. So when we say mission, what we mean is your purpose. But we also mean more than that. We mean who you are, what you bring to the table, why you do what you do and what you do, knowing who you are and your right reasons for that.
So what you do every day is your mission. Vision is about the impact that you want to have. And maybe you don’t know what your mission and vision is yet, and that’s okay. Right? You don’t have, it’s not like we were born with this stuff. I mean, this takes time. You have to sit down and figure this stuff out. So if the mission is to help struggling creative entrepreneurs build a business that works, that’s a mission, but the vision attached to it, so that they can have the quality of life that they want so that they can truly enjoy their time on earth and to live the life that they feel is best for them. The key there, the key piece that winds up going missing is why does that matter to you? You’ve got that so that they can, but why does it matter?
And so really your vision is about your impact. And we’re going to talk about values next time. But what I can tell you is that out of all of the businesses that I have helped, all of the businesses I have built, including the multi-million dollar ones, it’s all about showing up as you, showing up as who you are and being authentic.
Being transparent and saying what your line in the sand is, what you will and will not put up with and saying, this is why I do what I do. This is what I do. And this is who I do it for. And if you don’t like it, go the other way. Showing up in your business and your career and your life as yourself with your mission and your vision, whether that’s personal, professional, business, whatever is what’s going to make people want to be around you, to work with you, to partner with you.
And this is where your mission and your vision and your values come in, because unless you’re clear about who you help, why and that it’s the right why, and you know what you want your impact to be on others and what you want them to take away from working with you and being around you. And then you attach all of those things to the values of what you’re willing and not willing to put up with and where your lines in the sand are, which we’re going to talk about next time; you can have the people and the projects and the pay that you want. That’s the truth of it. That’s a universal truth, but not if you’re not clear. Your mission and your vision helps you get clarity.
When I’m working with clients, we’re actually creating this together, even though they don’t realize it. I don’t call it that if I did, that would be boring and I don’t want to be boring. Right. I am not boring. And I don’t want people to work with me with preconceived notions of what they’re going to do.
If I said to you, all right, today, we’re going to do your mission and vision. You’re gonna be like, oh, and you’re gonna put on your corporate hat and you’re going to get real stuffy. And then you’re not going to be able to answer a question truthfully, creatively, authentically. Right? I know how to get the answers that my clients need without asking them the question directly, because if I asked you directly what your mission is or what your vision is, I mean, you might put that corporate hat on. Right. But most of y’all would probably just shrug your shoulders and immediately say, I don’t, I don’t know Sheila, but you do know -somewhere inside of you, you do know.
And that is the work that I love doing with clients. Helping them tap in and listen and pay attention and see patterns and connect the dots. And if you just say, oh, I just help people make logos and brand themselves. That’s a service. That’s not a mission. It’s not even a vision. And it has absolutely nothing to do with values, which we’re going to talk about next time. So the pieces of the puzzle that we’ve been talking about, the who and the what and the where, and the why, and the when and the how, asking those questions will help you get to the bottom of that.
And that’s what I’m here to help you do; to help you figure out and tap into who you are and what you want. And the direction you’re going in is the right direction for you. To help you stay the course, despite what everyone tells you, you could do or should do. Your mission, your vision. And next time, when we talk about them, your values, this is your life, your goals, your path.
And remember that you are the person doing the work inside of your life and your career and your business if you have one. The first step is to slow down, remember, and to figure out all these pieces before you jump in.
Because what I don’t want to happen is that you build something that creates stress for you in the long run. We don’t build complicated lives that run us into the ground. And then when it’s something that you’ve built yourself, it’s that much harder to extricate yourself from it and to be able to separate yourself from it.
If that’s the case, I’m your girl to rein it back in, right? If you’re not clear about who you are and what you want and why you want it, and you did not have that clarity, you will never get what you want. And I want you to get what you want and deserve and dream about.
That is why your vision is your why and why your mission is the who and the what; together those two things together, help people to understand who you are, what you want, why you want it and why it matters to you. And then in exchange that they understand that you are the person for them, because your why and their whys are aligned, right?
This is where your mission and your vision comes in your why must permeate everything you do in your personal life, your professional business, career, everything. And your mission is your guide to every single decision you make going forward. You will always come back to your mission. You have to. Always to re-center yourself, to make sure that what you’re doing is what you set out to do.
And you’re only going to make decisions that are aligned with your mission. You’re going to be able to say no much more easily, much more confidently, much more courageously because you know, on the other side of that no, is actually a yes, just waiting- a hell yes waiting for you. But your vision, your vision is all about your future.
What you want to see happen. And that’s where the strategy can start to play a part in your planning, which is a conversation for another episode. So before you start up or change your business or change your career, start looking inward, your why, who you are, what you want, why you want it. When you start to look inward, you can start to know your why, which will bring you to your mission and your vision.
And it might take a while to sort through it all. All right. And relearn how to live your life, listening to yourself and no one else, but that’s what I’m here for. And if you want a coach or a lawyer, an educator who will tell you what’s real, and what’s not, I’m your girl because who you are matters to me, what you want matters to me, why you want it matters to me; because when you are at your most happy, your most joyful, most fulfilled, most successful, most clear, most competent, most courageous. You make your world, our world a better place. Helping you find yourself helps me, cement myself, even deeper into who I am. And we talked about this last time, right? If everyone is doing what everyone else is doing, no one’s doing what they want to do.
And that’s where your mission lies. Inside of that gap between who you think you are and who you want to be and who you actually are and the impact that you want to have on the world. So remember to listen for the messages that you’re getting; sort through the ones that matter to you, ask yourself why they matter to you and then determine where did you come up with this idea? Is it yours or is it someone else? What kind of people and projects and pay do you want to receive? How could they be the most aligned to who you are and why you do what you do and with your values, which we’ll talk about next time, you all of the pieces of you. So yes, clarity in your mission is imperative, but it takes time.
Once you take the time to know it, to actually listen to it, to ask for it, your mission becomes clear. Your vision will reveal itself. The chances are, you already know what your mission and vision are. You just aren’t listening your purpose, your values, your goals. They will show themselves clear as day, slowing down, can get you that clarity that you want.
So my mission is to help you reconnect who you are, to what you want to help you reconnect your intellectual self to your emotional self. To help you get the clarity you don’t even realize that you need so that you can have the confidence and the courage to live your life the way you want to, to run your business the way you want to, to have the career you want.
And not the one you think you’re supposed to have, just because you’re on a path now. Because who you are matters to me, what you want matters to me, why you want what you want matters to me. And I want it to matter to you. When it comes to your business and your career and your life, you are the one who has to decide. You. Do. You.
So here are your questions to ask yourself, to help you to start developing your own vision. I’m here if you need anything or want to work together to hone this in and get you on your path, the right path, the aligned path.
- Number one, ask yourself, what is my mission now, ideally, you did this at the end of episode, 21, but if you need to go back and listen to episode 21, go ahead. Yeah, just pause this here. Go listen to episode 21. Once you’ve got that right. Number two, once you’ve identified your mission. Okay. Which also BTW, by the way, you can change your mission anytime for any reason, it’s yours. And you can change it based on who you’re working with. Right. Generally speaking, your mission stays the same, but how you help or who you help can change. And that’s okay.
- I want you to ask yourself, this is your number two question. I want you to ask yourself, why do I do what I do? Why do I help who I help. And don’t forget those four types of expectations, right? Those four types of expectations are going to give you a very clear indication of whether the thing that you’re doing is because someone else told you, you should.
- Number three, ask yourself, how does my mission help make my vision a reality? Can it? Does it? Do I need to change the way I do what I do, who I help. So that’s number three. So go back and listen to this episode later, before you sit down and do this, and if you haven’t already, the expectations episodes will really be helpful for you. And those are episodes three through six.
Remember you are human. You don’t know at all, nor are you expected to know at all, life is about navigating the depths of humanity together. Expectations, control, health, wellness, your power team, the right power tools and your goals and your intentions, giving yourself permission to be yourself.
And if there’s trouble on your horizon, overcoming it is often a matter of reframing it. So let’s round out this episode again. As always you’re a human being. You are going to have thoughts and feelings about your business, your clients, your work-life integration, your time, schedule pricing, contracts, responsibilities, everything.
That’s perfectly normal. How you react as one thing, how you respond is quite another. And so what I hope you got out of this episode is that your mission and your vision are more than just words on a website. They are meant to help you get where you want to go. And it is worth it to take the time to really, truly tap into yourself to really take that moment. It’s going to save you a whirlwind of trouble later on. Trust me when I tell you that. They’re meant to help you get where you want to go and to communicate with others, whether they should come along for the ride or if they should get on another car. And this is my job as a coach and as a lawyer to help you build your life and your career and your business, the way it will work best for you, not the way other people tell you how to do you, right?
When you are clear about who you are and what you want and why you want it, the right people, the right projects, and the right pay will come. And if you need help with that, I’m your girl. So I’d love to know what resonated in today’s show. Share it with me, send me an email, DM me, leave a review, whatever, I am here.
You know how to find me. If you liked what we did today on this episode. And then I think you’ll love working with me first step though, is to take one single solitary baby step towards what you want hop on over to whatwouldSheilasay.com. Click on info and resources and sign up. Follow me on Instagram at @sheilamwilkinson. Please share this episode with someone who needs a bit of tough and love today and listen twice. If that’s you. And with that, I’m going to let you get back to your day.
Listen for my mission and vision y’all it’s coming.
Enjoy yourself. Do something nice for yourself and remember every empowered superpower, creative moment that you built for yourself is an opportunity to make the world a better place. And I want you to go out and do that. See you next time.
Show Notes
Thanks for listening to this episode. I hope it was illuminating! My mission is to help service-based professionals figure out exactly what they want, realize it’s 100% within reach, and create a simple, actionable plan that will get them there (without having to burn everything to the ground and start from scratch!), and I’d love to support you.
Here are some ways you can start creating your rich, happy life today:
- Start getting real clarity in your contracts with this FREE Contracts Guide!
- Get to the bottom of your top 3 most frustrating situations and people TODAY in this Managing Expectations Mini-Course! ($19)
- Get Boundaries *and* Balance in this On-Demand Workshop ($29)
- Apply for our next round of group coaching (Building Blocks) to start getting the clarity you didn’t know you needed!
- Build a healthier lifestyle and add more joy in your life in this FREE On-Demand Masterclass!
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