“The best way to influence your future is to create it.” Stephen R Covey

Two key processes allow us to live in keeping with what we consider to be important. The most well-known is the setting of goals, something covered in most personal development literature, including The Three Resolutions.

The less public process is the creation of a personal mission statement, the purpose of which is to state in clear terms how you intend to live your life, and why you want to do it ‘your way’.

Listen (again). It is 8 days to the New Year, a poor but accepted reboot period for most of us. It is always a time when people look at ‘what is’ and promise to do better this coming year. Most of us, and I include myself, fail within a week.

But IF you have a PMS and a set of clearly defined goals that flow from it then you have set a physical marker. If it is clear and exactly as you want it, it is a reference point and reminder to you what you have declared will now come to be. When you plan your week, or need to make a decision, the PMS is the source Constitution for those plans and decisions.

Tony Robbins once described his own ‘PMS moment’ in these terms. “When people ask me what really changed my life (—) I tell them that absolutely the most important things was changing what I demanded of myself. I wrote down all the things I would no longer accept in my life, all the things I would no longer tolerate, and all the things that I aspired to becoming.”

That is what a personal mission statement is supposed to do. It is to design your future behaviour in your own terms and from YOUR perspective – not someone else’s. Discovering what you are ‘for’ leads to discovery of how you will achieve that purpose.

Here’s a thought. Celebrate the ‘destruction’ of your old life this week. Enjoy saying goodbye to largesse and inappropriateness by having that festive blow out. Have a ‘goodbye to the old me’ party. Then you have 12 months before you realise that, next Christmas, you don’t have to do daft things to have fun.

I cannot emphasise enough that you should write a personal mission statement. Do it before the festivities really swing into action. I’m not saying that you should stop enjoying the festivities and start your new life today. That is for next week. Just start drafting your future plan ready to implement it in 8 days’ time.

To have fun, you just have to live entirely in keeping with what you believe.

For further input on this subject, and goal setting, go here, spend $4.75/£3.09, and change your life immediately – or next week!