How Waking Up To A Single Statement Crystalizes Your Entrepreneurial Path

Entrepreneurial dreams and nightmares hinge on how you attract and filter everyday opportunities after you wake up. However, how will you focus on the right ones if your personal mission statement isn’t clear? If I put you on the spot now and asked you to share your personal mission statement, think to yourself what would come out. For a very long time nothing would come out on my end and I didn’t take it seriously until the pandemic accelerated the world and forced me to evolve and face more uncertainty. 

In the past, the uncertainty has eaten me up inside and brought me to some dark places of insecurity and extreme stress. Entrepreneurship is tough and with the fast-changing world and inevitable barriers you face, you constantly need to pivot and make hard decisions as you face forks in the road. You likely will need to reinvent yourself often and keep reminding your social circles what you’re working on - this can be exhausting. It doesn’t have to be.

If you carve out the time to dissect your seemingly disjointed projects or companies from the past, you can uncover a beautiful personal mission statement that unifies everything and makes the future clearer than ever. Once you have clarity, it becomes infinitely easier to work on the tactics of polishing your personal brand and attracting the right people and opportunities.

The uncertainty of entrepreneurship hasn’t changed but the way I deal with it has as I mobilize a powerful mission statement to shine a light for me. 

It starts with connecting some dots.

Step #1: Uncover Your Purpose:

Through many walks in nature and the help of professional personal brand coaches, I was able to dissect my personal brand to carve out a purpose that now gives me extreme clarity and energy no matter what challenges come my way. Unearthing your purpose is an important first step to figuring out your personal mission statement and is a lot less intimidating to start to solve.

A purpose provides the reason or reasons you exist. 

The pieces are in front of you and one must dig deep into their past business triumphs to think about how their existence has helped others. 

Figuring this out all started when my personal story-telling coach and Tedx Speaker Denise Withers, challenged me to spend uninterrupted time nailing down my purpose in one powerful sentence.

At first, I resisted. I was so busy and there seemed to be many other things I could be doing with my time than spending hours on one sentence. 

Then I recalled one of Steve Jobs’ most memorable quotes which also seemed to piggyback on connecting dots from the past: “Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”

I was outnumbered. Steve and Denise were right. It’s much easier to trust what will unfold in the future when the past makes more sense.

I spent three-hour-long sessions asking myself these questions as I thought about what a common purpose to all the decade of entrepreneurial madness has been:

• Who have I best helped in the past?
• What common problems or needs have these people had?
• How exactly have I helped them?
• What has been the impact of my help?
• How have I felt from my impact on others?
• What parts of my experience have fired me up to double down on helping more people?

After finding patterns across my different businesses, customers, and employees my purpose became really clear and I can’t express how empowering that feeling was. 

Every time I read it I had a jolt of inspiration. To know why I exist and how it has impacted others is a powerful experience.

This discovery process made me feel really clear and confident about how all my different, somewhat unrelated businesses, converge on a common theme.

My Purpose: I help people get out of the grind by connecting them memorably with others and themselves to flow to their highest level of contribution.

Yes. That’s it!

Now what?

I soon learned that my purpose was actually my personal mission statement in disguise.

Best-selling business author, Steven Covey (in his book First Things First) refers to developing a mission statement as "connecting with your own unique purpose and the profound satisfaction that comes from fulfilling it." Without knowing it, I had already developed a mission statement with my coach simply reframing it as my purpose - this was a brilliant subtle move as the word choice of a purpose brings a lot more authentic brainstorming than the overdone mission statements corporations like to boast about.

However, when I put this into practice I realized further finetuning was needed to use this purpose in everyday decisions.  

Step #2: Distill Your Purpose into a Memorable Personal Mission Tagline 

For you to actually remember your purpose and memorably say it out loud to others, it needs to be short and impactful. This can be very difficult but it’s well worth it. 

There is no shortcut to distilling your purpose into a tagline - you really need to talk it out with people. 

Here is the dialogue that cracked the code with my coach while I was walking around Camosun Bog in Vancouver, BC.

“Paul, please repeat your personal mission statement.”

“I help people get out of the grind by connecting them memorably with others and themselves to flow to their highest level of contribution.”

“Love it! Now Paul, let’s see how we can distill it down”

“It’s already pretty succinct Denise…I put my whole career into a sentence! How are we going to reduce it even further? I'm not Nike!

“Just do it!”

“Ha. Ok well, I see myself as a connector of good people. I have very little interest in helping or connecting selfish people. They need to have a good heart. When you connect good people they’ll always find ways to help each other and get out of the grind.”

“Great! Go on.”

“I feel like connecting people memorably, such as through an intimate dinner or wellness retreat is the best way to have people lower their shields and feel inspired to talk about what really matters. 

Now that I think about it, most of my staff who have worked at Tangoo went on to do some pretty extraordinary things together. It’s all about in-the-trenches or great and authentic experiences."

“Well Paul as I heard you say that, the words with the most emotion behind them seemed to be:”

• “Good people”
• “Great connections”
• “Extraordinary things”

“Holy shit. That’s it!”

“I think so too Paul, bring it together.

“I connect good people, in great ways, to do extraordinary things!”

Count it.

I passed this by some close friends and kept repeating it to myself throughout the weeks and it truly stuck. You need to feel inspired every time you say it. 

I noticed quickly that when I said it out loud I shortened it even more to “I connect good people in great ways.” That’s OK! Roll with it and don’t judge the way it starts to flow in the real world.

Now it’s time to use it as your compass and your shield to everyday opportunities and distractions.

Step #3: Use your Personal Mission Tagline as a Life Compass 

When you have no boss and have a million different directions you can go, you ironically can feel trapped by indecision. 

Quoting Steve Jobs again, “People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are.”

A Personal Mission Tagline gives you a constant gut check on whether a new opportunity or decision aligns with your deepest purpose.

Example #1: Saying no to the infinite investment opportunities out there

Someone: “Paul, do you want to invest in this new opportunity?”

My inner voice: “Paul, does it allow you to use your connector superpowers to connect good people in great ways? 

If it doesn’t, I respectfully lean on saying no.

Example #2: Decide how to be thoughtful with appreciating staff

My inner voice: “Paul, what gifts are you going to give your staff for the Holidays? Well, I can give them a nice retail gift or, I can gift them an experience that connects them closer to other teammates. This was when I gave them a Hoame Meditation Studio pass.”

Example #3: Building business relationships

My inner voice: How do I propose new initiatives to potential clients or referral partners? 

I can do a phone pitch or I can propose we connect over a hike to get into their world and understand their bigger picture and needs. Usually, I learn about new opportunities I never imagined before.

Does X life decision align with your newly minted personal mission life compass?

Bottom Line

The uncertainty of entrepreneurship is out of your control but how you handle it is completely in your hands. Corporations are not the only ones who benefit from mission statements and if you can do the soul searching to pull yours out of your past business triumphs, your future becomes a lot less ambiguous. 

The hardest and most consequential parts of being self-employed are making everyday decisions that only you can make. There is no boss to do it for you and it’s easy to say yes to things that further the agenda of others instead of your future self.

Condense your purpose into a single personal mission tagline and see the magic of how much more easily you make everyday decisions so that you have a crystallized entrepreneurial path forward.