Our mission is to build unrivaled partnerships
with and value for our clients, through the
knowledge, creativity, and dedication of our people,
leading to superior results for our shareholders.

Lehman Brothers stock now trades for a WHOPPING $0.045 per share on the pink sheets.

OOPS!

I wonder how many of those on the Lehman Brothers management team were aware of their company’s mission statement?

I thought with this post, I’d share my own personal mission statement and the way I went about creating it.

The first step to developing a personal mission statement is to ask yourself a series of probing quesitons, which might include the following:

• Why am I here?
• What do I want to accomplish in life?
• What or who is important to me (also known as “values”)?
• What are my priorities?

Before I wrote my mission statement I read Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Although I don’t agree with everything Mr. Covey writes, I do agree with most of this book. I highly recommend it for everyone to read! In order to effectively write a personal mission statement, one must know what is important to them. What’s important to me is:

• My relationship with God
• My wife
• My kids
• My job
• Charity
• Myself

Once a person knows what is important to them, they then need to know what their different roles are in life. My roles are:

• Follower of Christ
• Husband
• Father
• Financial Planner
• PF Blogger
• Den Leader

Of course these aren’t all the roles I play in life. I listed just those that are most common to me. Once a person knows what’s important to them and their roles, they can begin composing their mission statement. Here’s my mission statement (altered a bit for privacy purposes):

My mission in life is to first and foremost live for Christ. A man must decide whom he is going to follow. I will follow Christ and seek God’s will in all that I do. I will do this by studying the Bible and by praying on a daily basis and by walking in His ways.

Secondly, I will be a loving husband to my wife. I will strive to love her like Christ loved the church. I will practice selfless love, striving to put her needs before my own.

As a father, I will strive to be loving and accepting. I realize that my kids are different, each possessing different talents and abilities given to them by God, and I will strive to treat them accordingly. I will discipline them with love. I will strive to be a good role model for them.

As both a financial planner and personal finance blogger, I will always strive to do what’s best for my clients, even it if might not be what’s best for me. I will study and keep up on what is happening within the financial planning field. My goal is to help my clients achieve their goals and dreams. With proper planning and God’s blessing, it can be done.

As a successful financial planner and blogger, I will give back to my community. I will eventually teach classes on financial planning and will dedicate myself to worthy causes. I will share my blogging successes with others by focusing on ways to bring personal finance bloggers together. I will also strive to be the best Cub Scouts Den Leader that I can be.

Finally, in order to live out this mission, I must be healthy. Therefore, I will eat a proper diet and exercise daily.

I will read this every day!

That’s my mission. That’s what I’m about. Now, that’s not saying that I ALWAYS act in a way that is congruent with my mission. After all, I am human. But, by having my personal mission statement, I can refer back to it daily and it brings me back to where I need to be.

I have another blog that I started back in 2005 called Man on a Mission, which is a blog dedicated to mission statements. I came up with this idea because I thought it would be cool to have ONE PLACE where people could read mission statements from all different companies. Yeah, it is boring, but it really serves a purpose if you are a business student or someone in management. The blog doesn’t normally get a lot of traffic so I always notice when a new college semester begins.

I have noticed that my other blog, Man on a Mission, has really seen an increase in traffic lately. All of the traffic is coming from search results. I also noticed that a lot of the traffic is coming from “.edu” websites or servers. I’m guessing that a lot of college students are using the site for research. Anyway, I’m glad to see that people are getting some good use from the website.

NOTE: If you are a blogger linked to AllThingsFinancial, please update your link and target it to my new URL (http://AllThingsFinancialBlog.com). Thanks!