Articles

Plan Your Mission & Conquer Your Goals

by Valarie Swayze, Senior Editor, INALJ

Plan Your Mission & Conquer Your Goals

Make Success a Habit not a Goal via PinterestSetting goals and accomplishing them is a powerful experience, and one that can motivate you to being better every day. The first step to purposeful goal-setting is writing a personal mission statement. If life is a journey, a mission statement would be a map. Imagine navigating through your personal and professional life with a map vs. without. Applying a mission statement as a filter to your decision-making process will help to ensure that your choices align with your goals and values, and ultimately guarantee that the path you are on is leading to where you want to go. Your mission statement will help goal-setting become a habit and will become part of your personal branding. Choose a challenge to learn something new or do something that you have been putting off for a while. This is a fun way to keep a positive attitude, inspire others, and add new experiences and skills to your resume. The following resources can help you create a plan for professional development and personal growth.

TED: Goal-Setting – Includes a featured goal-setting video playlist and links to a variety of talks. These informative and thought-provoking videos are sure to get you in touch with your goals and will give youideas on how to turn your visions into reality.

Personal Goal Setting – Unsure of your goals or where to start? This terrific resource, sponsored by Mindtools, covers some of the most fundamental concepts and condenses them into an easy to understand format. If you have not had formal training on setting goals, this is a great place to learn.

Setting & Achieving Goals – Entrepreneur.com’s collection of articles and videos on setting and achieving goals. This compilation addresses both common practice and unconventional wisdom for reaching your goals.

Throw Your Old Plan Away: 6 New Ways to Build Leadership Development into Your Job– Thisarticle integratesleadership andsetting goals. The suggestions are simple, and can teach you howto achieve your goals while on the job.This approach benefits you, your colleagues, and your organization.

Lominger Competency List – Companies across a variety of industries use the Lominger Competency Model to build strongerorganizations by focusing on growing key talents of individuals. If you need help identifying goals, this resource may help you zero in on a few that are deemed by many experts to be essential to one’s success.

valarie_swayzePersonal Mission Statements of 5 Famous CEOs (And Why You Should Write One Too)­ –This article introduces tips for writing a personal mission statement and advises that it is a process that typically includes deep introspection to succinctly identify your personal mission. Mission statements and opinions on missions and leadership are shared from five CEOs that may help get you started with writing or revising your personal mission statement.

A Personal Mission Statement – Stephen Covey was a pioneer in identifying that mission statements can have a tremendous impact not only when applied to corporations, but also teams, individuals, and families. The Mission Statement Builder is a tool provided by FranklinCovey.com that can help you construct a personal mission statement by presenting a series of inquires about interests and traits relating to talent, performance, passion, and vision. Sample mission statements are also provided to provide ideas and illustrate how diverse and truly personal the personal mission statement can be.

 

Image credit: Pinterest

 

Naomi House

Naomi House, MLIS, is the founder and publisher of the popular webzine and jobs list INALJ.com (formerly I Need a Library Job) and former CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) of T160K.org, a crowdfunding platform focused on African patrimony, heritage and cultural projects. INALJ was founded in October 2010 with the assistance of her fellow Rutgers classmate, Elizabeth Leonard. Its social media presence has grown to include Facebook (retired in 2016), Twitter and a LinkedIn group, in addition to the interviews, articles and jobs found on INALJ. INALJ has had over 21 Million page hits and helped many, many thousands of librarians find employment! Through grassroots marketing, word of mouth and a real focus on exploring unconventional resources for job leads, INALJ grew from a subscription base of 20 friends to a website with over 500,000 visits in one month. Naomi believes that well-sourced quantity is quality in this narrow job market and INALJ reflects this with many new jobs published daily. She has also written for the 2011, 2012 and 2013 LexisNexis Government Info Pro and many other publications in the past decade. She presents whenever she can, including serving on three panels at the American Library Association's Annual Conference in Las Vegas; as breakout presenter at OCLC EMEA in Cape Town, South Africa; as a keynote speaker at the Virginia Library Association annual meeting; at the National Press Club in Washington DC; McGill University in Montreal, Canada; the University of the Emirates, Dubai, MLIS program and the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Naomi was a Reference, Marketing and Acquisitions Librarian for a contractor at a federal library outside Washington, DC, and has been living and working in Budapest, Hungary and Western New York State. She spent years running her husband’s moving labor website, fixed and sold old houses and assisted her husband cooking delicious Pakistani food. She is preparing to re-enter the workforce and is job hunting. Her husband is now the co-editor of INALJ, a true support!  She has heard of spare time but hasn’t encountered it lately. She pronounces INALJ as eye-na-elle-jay. 

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