By Sarah Newman
“Put your SUPERMOM cape on,” my husband said to me as I had to cancel my entire day and drive my youngest to the doctor this morning. It’s never easy to surrender to a sick child when you are a working mom because the goal list that you want to accomplish for the day is more than a mile long--heck, forget working mom, ANY parent! It’s just never easy to be staring a day in the face at 8:00 AM, knowing you will not get one single second to yourself to complete all the things you had set out for the day. As I drove the 10 minute drive to the doctor’s office, I kept repeating to myself, “This is your purpose for today, this is your purpose for today. My mission is to get him better, so I can do all the things again!”
As I stated before, I consider myself a working mom. I am a highly driven mompreneur with lofty goals for each day, each week, each month, for myself, my family, and my work. I want to make an impact in all three areas ALL THE TIME. Is that something you can resonate with? Well, we are three weeks into the new year, and I’m sure you’ve been bombarded with the 2019 resolution marketing. I sure have. And I find myself perplexed on how I can “resolve” things within each of these areas. Resolution marketing seems to look like this: “What is your new year’s resolution?” “What are you going to improve on this year that you fell short on last year?” “What’s your weight loss goal for the year, or your travel goal or your commitment goal?” And the list goes on and on. To be honest, I hate new year’s resolutions. I tend to ignore the marketing push for new years resolutions because, honestly, they cause me a lot of anxiety. The pressure to living up to a goal that I created while looking at all the things society tells me I should deem shameful in my life, and then creating that new goal to stick with for an entire 365 days seems exhausting! It seems exhausting because I am a mompreneur who, remember, has lofty goals all the time in three different areas of life. If I were to create a new year’s resolution for each of those areas, I’m sure by February I would fall short, and then forget that my “resolution” even once existed.
What I have found to be sustaining, especially over the life of being a mom, is the idea of MISSION. When we have MISSION, we ultimately have a bigger picture of goals to create! If I change my mindset to MISSION, I can then create new goals each day that moves me towards my MISSION, and ultimately towards the change I want to see, whether it be by the end of 2019, or by the end of next week. With the idea of MISSION, we find ourselves asking ourselves on a daily basis, “Will this activity get me closer to my mission?” “Will it serve others the way I want it to?” “Who is the person I want to become thru the completion of this activity?” When ideas are broken down into mission, I can hone in on moving the needle further this year, instead of trying to change one thing that I don’t like about myself and resolve to do better. I can even, in my mission, look at changing something positive, because a small shift even in a positive activity has the potential to bring more positive change. Resolution most of the time (notice I said most of the time) focuses more on something negative or a shortfall. Mission encompasses more shift, while resolution is often times singularly focused.
After much thought, podcast listening, reading and discerning, I realized that the work I do as a mompreneur is very important. It helps me keep my drive, and is part of my identity. It helps me serve my children and my husband, and it even helps me serve my greater community. My mission for each three are intertwined and simple: how can I serve the people in my life each day? Creating my mission has helped create clarity and work towards a greater goal for my kids, my relationship with my husband, and the work I want to do. Having my mission intertwined, we can look back at my opening story to see that the goals I had set before my day for work were going to have to be put on hold for a day or two, so that I could care for my little one who needed his momma 100%. The statement I repeated to myself on the drive to the doctor’s office helped me transition to a new mindset of serving him, instead of what I originally thought my mission for the day was, which was to serve my community through my work. And it affirmed that I can pick up my work the following day, or when he is better.
It seems simple but complex, right? Have you ever taken time to explore your mission? If not, I encourage you to do so. Perhaps all the things in your life seem to be spiraling out of control, or you do not have a good grasp on “all the things.” Perhaps you want one thing in your family life to change, but can’t seem to find how to get there. Perhaps you don’t love your job, but cannot figure out how to make a change? Identifying your talents and thinking about how you can use these talents given to you is a good place to start in creating a mission. Once you have a mission for yourself, take it even further. How can your family come up with a mission together? This can provide clarity for your kids in their day to day actions and decisions. And how can you and your spouse create a mission that will create clarity for your children? Soon you will see that they all work together, and instead of a new year’s resolution you now have a new MISSION that can help you have a new vision for years to come.
Want to go deeper? Check out our Purpose Box, a 9-week experience that invites each member of your family to understand virtues and live them. Our box has everything you need to joyfully learn and live the the virtues of Orderliness, Assertiveness, Purposefulness.
