Mission Statement: Shall We Consider Periodic Revision? (BeFirst Course 154)

Right off the bat, I'm Dr. David King, husband, flower. All right, everybody, thanks for coming back. This is the last section before the very final review lecture lesson that we'll talk about. We're going to go through this. I'll share my personal belief statement, my vision statement that I crafted some time ago, talk about some of the revisions I've been through really quickly, and then we'll do a review in the next lecture, which I think will be fun. Some of the pictures you see there on the left, I think will be fun for you to review too. Consider periodic review of your personal belief or mission statement. Having established a purpose statement should give you a sense of accomplishment and purpose in itself, but don't be overly concerned about avoiding periodic adjustments and amendments to your statement of purpose. Individual understanding changes over time. Lived experience improves clarity and personal choice, accountability, and the refining fire of those all too often mistakes, whether of our own or those of others, who can assist us in our perception of our personal individual purpose in life. All these things combine to give us a unique perspective and adjust, refine, and clarify our purpose. As experience and understanding improves, it is helpful to evaluate and correct that personal mission or purpose statement so that it can accurately reflect your unique paradigm and any appropriate worldview, especially those worldviews that you are shedding and the understanding that you're coming to as you gain wisdom, knowledge, and experience. Now it should be noted, and this may be as good a time as any to say, that we may want to consider having multiple purpose statements that support one another or support one overarching purpose statement. A personal purpose statement that encompasses an individual drive and direction with supporting statements for the various facets of your life. These statements can be combined into a document or kept separate and referenced in the appropriate compartment of one's individual life, like the one I showed you. For my dental office submission statement that we have here, there's actually an expanded version that talks about each of these blue letters, blue words, that breaks it out a little more specifically. And then I have my personal one, which I'll show you here in just a moment. Additionally, there should not be a need to constantly and repeatedly alter your or adjust your purpose statement. Adjustment should be undertaken with caution and in the most circumspect way. There's that word again. Endeavoring to avoid any type of fleeting phase or craze or haze that you might be experiencing at that time. Consider establishing an appropriate waiting period for new concepts and ideas as you evaluate any new ideas you'd like to consider adding to your purpose statement. Without getting too far off the path, this waiting period could be comparable to a sandbox or testing environment that a programmer might use when testing a new line of code. Not that I have ever done that. I've never programmed. If adjustments are made too rapidly without time to improve and challenge the validity and functionality of the adjustments or additions, cataclysmic crashes can happen. Test and consider and challenge and evaluate prior to accepting any new core principle or value in your life. So that brings up a thought that I had, a memory of being told by someone who works at a large IT group that's attached to a big multinational company. One of the IT team who was in charge of digital signing of identities had gone through and written, used AI to write a very simple code that was supposed to go through and eliminate users that were inactive for a certain period of time. Well, this individual didn't proof the code. He didn't prove and challenge the code or the validity and functionality in a testing space. And instead of just inactivating the 8 to 12 or 80 to 100 that it was supposed to be, I don't recall the number, the code that he plugged in and made active inactivated every user in the company, thousands of users. I'm not sure if he still has his job or not, but certainly using a resource to write a code for you and then not validating it before rolling it out company-wide and causing thousands of users to immediately be locked out of their accounts and losing tens of thousands of man hours of work. Yeah, what a mess, right? What a mess. So test and consider and challenge and evaluate prior to accepting any new core principle or value in your life. One of my favorite comments that was made in a podcast and also a book, and probably he said this many times by Jordan Peterson, is if you're seeking counseling and you want input and feedback, one of the main roles of that counselor is to challenge your beliefs, to help you understand what you actually believe and why you believe them, as opposed to just, okay, I agree. You know, counselors in most cases should be helping us dissect what we have going on in here so that we have a better picture. Not only they have a better picture and can help guide us, but that we have a better picture of why we believe what we believe so that we can then in turn adopt or reject this particular belief, especially those beliefs that come in waves and based on social media and other things that tend to have non-lasting effects. So that's it, everybody. Consider periodical review of your purpose statement. And so here's my purpose statement. I labeled it a statement of belief, a belief statement, statement of vision, whatever you want to call it. I wrote this maybe eight years ago initially, and it's gone through several iterations. I'll read it for you. This is my personal belief statement. Please feel free to copy some of the concepts. I would encourage you not to copy everything because these are statements and ideas that have come from me personally based on my experience and my identity and who I feel and believe that I am. Excuse me. So I have the capacity to touch and impact the lives of all I come in contact with for good. Therefore, I will do all that I can to help others in my sphere of influence. So as you'll notice here, I've got it formulated so that there is a core belief coupled with action. I develop authentic concern for each person and provide the highest quality and most efficient service possible. Therefore, I am highly motivated to serve each in the unique way that they need to be served, not necessarily the way they want to be served. And that's a topic for another discussion. I understand personalized service requires a unique understanding of each one that I serve. Therefore, I endeavor to understand each person through deep personal connection. I bless the lives of others with the resources I have been blessed with, with the innate talents I have, and with the unique skills that I have developed through training and practice. Therefore, I instill a desire to impact others' lives in those I serve. I provide service in a way that empowers individual responsibility, individual growth, and individual development to as many individuals as reasonably possible. And that's one of the reasons why I have spent all these hours and all this time creating this seminar, creating this class, because I want to create an impact in a positive, meaningful, and enduring way. I expand my capacity for service with continual growth, development, and selflessness. Therefore, I have a greater capacity, desire, and ability to impact and bless and to serve. So that's my belief statement. Now, this is my identity as a whole. This is me, absent responsibilities at home as a husband and father, at church, and whatever responsibility I'm given, and at work. I could certainly delineate beneath each of these key points, home, church, work, or homework, church, whatever order I would want to put that in, and flesh those out with specific thoughts and statements along the lines of each one of these statements. However, I've chosen to leave it this way in this format because this is my personal belief statement, basically, that helps me to remember who I am. So I'd encourage you to go through the principles and concepts that we've talked about, and we're going to review them here briefly in the next video. But as we've talked about in this last section of chapter one, section five, the purpose statement can create a very powerful tool for us to refer to. If we can do our very best to create one that's meaningful and carries import and helps to reinvigorate and inspire us each day, then it will provide us with opportunities to basically reconnect with our divine, with our personal divinity, with our higher power. And there's a lot of power there. Now that's not to say we won't have a bad day here or there. We won't have a difficult day. Some of us, myself included, have struggled with mental health challenges for a very long time. And so each of us may have challenges along those lines repeatedly. And I'm not saying that writing a purpose statement or going through all of these principles and topics will solve all of those issues, whether it's stress, mental health challenges, other issues, but it will help to keep you grounded and more firmly focused on who you are amidst the turmoil that's happening around you or within you. If we can establish appropriate principles and foundations on those things that are unyielding and unchanging, connecting with our identity as a divine son or daughter of God, then that will yield very, very strong underpinnings and welds to the foundation of who we are, which when those storms come and blow and attack and hail and wind and lightning and all this stuff comes and, you know, rails against us, if you will, for lack of a better term, we'll still have the foundation fully attached to where it should be. And as opposed to being swayed by the mores and changing values of whatever's happening in the world that's popular, we'll be able to hold firm and stand firm in the face of challenges that might otherwise sway us. So just as a closing to this particular video, I believe each of us is innately good. We may make mistakes. We might have done bad things. We might fall short of who we can be from time to time. But each of us is good. And as such, we have the propensity, we have the potentiality, we have the ability to become a better version of ourselves incrementally, step by step, moving forward. And as we work on establishing our own individual purpose statement, our mission statement that guides us, whether it's at work or home, church or family or bowling league, whatever it is. If you feel value in establishing a clarifying mission statement, it will bring you a lot of power. So thanks again for watching. This basically wraps up the last lecture of Chapter 1, Section 5. In the next lecture, I'm going to review Chapter 1, and we'll talk about what's coming down the road in Chapter 2. Thank you so much for joining me on this adventure.