My life's mission is to influence and create beauty.
ROLLBACK... "my life's mission?" A couple of years ago I was working for CompTrain, a HUGE programming and coaching team in the CrossFit world. They're doing cool things, but I am SO thankful
they laid me off and I am also incredibly honored to have ever worked with them in the first place. One of the things I learned from working with the CompTrain team is the idea of developing and evolving a mission statement. At the time we were working on rebranding and changing the mission of the company but it was also brought up that this might be a good idea to do this for our own lives. This idea has been proposed to me in many different ways, "What's your life's purpose?" "What are you doing with your life?" They're all the same question, but the idea of a "mission" hit differently.
I, of course, thought about it in terms of an epic Frodo Baggins type of mission, to obviously live through TONS of life or death situations to deliver a ring in thee most dangerous part of the world (may or may not still be my mission). And then I didn't. Then I thought about what I wanted to bring to the world and how I wanted to impact it. At the time I was thinking about how my mission statement could help me succeed at CompTrain, one that would impress my co-workers and help me manifest success in my position. HA! Turns out that doesn't work. In the time that I've had since being laid off, I have leaned into a creative part of myself that I NEVER honored or even was aware of.
I spent a lot of my life mad (only a little bit :P) at my mom for not giving me her incredible artistic talent. Like, WTF that'd be cool to have! What I didn't realize was that she did share that with me it just looks a little bit different. Unknowingly I have been fostering my ability to create beautiful space since I was big enough to move the furniture around my room. I didn't always make the BEST choices (my bedroom was fire engine red at one point... eek!) but I loved moving things around and redesigning my environment. Since then, I've renovated four homes, one of them a total gut and flip, and another created completely from a blank slate of a barn (my favorite). And, I've opened my own interior design business helping others not only to create beautiful spaces but also to inspire their own beauty.
For a long time, I was trying to live in a box that someone else set up for me. One that was "successful," strong, and worked hard (meaning WAY too much), and only when I looked back at my life and what I was doing when no one else was looking did I start to recognize my life's mission. It's always been there.
My mission in life has come from a desire to show people their own light and what they are capable of. A want to build beauty in the face of some of the ugliest parts of this world, and a desire to create vision from nothing. It was developed out of my skills for interior design, YES, but also my life experiences that have brought me to this moment. Your mission should be SO much bigger than your job and should be influenced by the deepest parts of you. And ya know what... if you find that that life mission does NOT align with what you're currently doing, you have just figured out why you're not feeling fulfilled.
So, here's my advice... Fuck "success," fuck doing what you "should be" doing, find what lights you on fire and do more of that. Don't let your self-improvement efforts be wasted on chasing an image of yourself that wasn't created by YOU.
Life's Mission Journal Prompt:
Pretend just for a moment that this world is filled with ONLY people who support and cherish you, there's no one to judge you, there's no "working", no stress about needing money to eat or live. It's the same world only the absolute best version of itself, what are you doing? Let your imagination run wild, no constraints.
Rooting for you.
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