A Gutsy Guide to Getting Your Mojo Back

Happy Mojo Monday Pinkies,

So. Mojo. Aliveness. Joie de vivre. You’ve lost it; you’ve found it; you’re looking for it. No matter what your state of Mojo right now, it often helps to have a sense of where you’re headed on this beautiful, twisty, treacherous, breathtaking scenic highway of life.

Once fully tapped into your Pink Spark and are alive and rolling, what are you going to do with all this energy and magic?

A personal mission statement serves as a kind of beacon of what’s most important to you as you walk through life. It’s a reference point – something to help you, say, make a decision in terms of what to do next, or what to do at all. If you’re feeling Mojo-low and can’t do much more than watch TV and snap at your husband, maybe your mission will provide you with a clue on how to get out of the house and start feeling alive again. For those on the higher end of the Mojo scale, you may have far too many appealing options on your plate and are finding yourself overloaded with stuff you want to do. In this case, your mission statement could help you decipher what is in line with the True You, and what you might be able to jettison so that life is more spacious and enjoyable.

“Wait,” you’re saying, “don’t companies, like, hire people to write mission statements for them? How am I supposed to do this all by myself?” Relax, Pinkies. It’s far easier than you think – and a lot more fun than the work of corporate consultants. Sure, we’re digging deep, but what there is to be discovered is worth taking on this project.

Start with an introduction to your authentic self. Who are you? We know, it’s a huge and loaded question, and not one that you can answer in one sentence, one day, or one lifetime. However, there are ways to dig down to the core of you. Ask yourself questions – what would you be doing if nobody were watching? What would you say if there were no consequences? What rules would you break? What would you wear? When all of the expectations and opinions of everyone in the world are stripped away, what is the you that is left?

Your mission versus your goals. “Open my own law firm,” “tour Europe before I die,” and “make amends with my stepmother,” while all amazing, authentic, and life-changing goals, are just that: goals. They may happen, and when they do, they’re behind you. Your life will be changed, but there’s still more life to be lived. What is the essence of you that is driving you to want to do what you do in life? Perhaps one way to start toward crafting your mission is to write out a list of goals, and then next to each goal, name the part of you that is behind it. Is it compassion? A yearning for connection? A need to have fun? Curiosity? Maybe you’ll start to notice a pattern of the feelings that drive you. This is another wonderful way to uncover the person at your core, and how you want to walk through life.

Goals also tend to be so specific that when unexpected setbacks arise, when your focus is on your mission you may feel less disturbed by them. You didn’t get a promotion because you’ve been late to work too many times. But you were late because you’ve actually struck up a relationship with the man who sells newspapers on the street and stop to chat with him every morning. Your kindness is doing untold things for his health, self-esteem, and inspiration, and the connection you’ve made has broadened your view and made you less apt to judge others. Perhaps your goal has been temporarily thwarted, but your mission to be compassionate and make soul-to-soul connections is right on target.

If it feels right, it’s not wrong. As you brainstorm, perhaps you start to discover that all you want to do on this earth is have fun – squeeze every drop out of life. Sky dive, travel, surf, dance ‘til dawn, eat amazing food, walk the neighborhood dogs, lay in the grass and stare up at the sky. That can’t possibly be my essence, you say, because it’s irresponsible, it’s too risky, I won’t earn a living, and my parents will most certainly not be proud. That’s your head talking –the voice that often jumps in first and speaks much more loudly than your intuition. Keep listening. Pay attention to your body. How do these things feel to you? Often that is where the truth lies, and if it is your truth, it can’t be wrong. The only one that can hold you accountable to your mission is you.

Be as general or specific as you need to be. A great mission statement is a marriage between your good intentions for this go-round on the planet, and how you can use your gifts to joyfully live up to them. Being as general as “work toward world peace” may be exactly what you need to begin with, so that you awake to just how many ways there are to bring about peace in the world. After a time, this could become overwhelming and you’ll need to go back and hone your statement so that you become more aware how you will uniquely fulfill your mission for this life: Work toward world peace by being generous with my time and resources. Maybe you need to be even more specific than that: work toward world peace by being generous with my time and resources in the interest of teaching children how to be blind to racial differences … and so forth.

Make it beautiful. Hang it up. Use it to remind you. Get creative with your mission statement. Paint it. Record it. Collage it. It should be something that you can view easily and often, as a reminder of what you’re up to. Goodness knows this doesn’t need to be collated in triplicate and inserted into binders for the board, so go crazy.

Know that your mission is about stops along the way, not the final destination. This may sound counter-intuitive when talking about something that sounds a lot like our life’s work. However, none of us can know where we’re going to “end up.” This is because we don’t know WHO we’re going to end up being. We’re changing constantly – dynamic shifts in our inner worlds and outer circumstances are molding us into new beings every day. Don’t we shed an entire layer of skin every seven years or something? And I don’t know about you Pinkies, but I often feel like I wake up a different person every morning. All of that is fine, but it’s also important to keep in mind when writing your mission statement. Nothing is firm, permanent, or unchanging. Your mission statement is a guiding star to the destination you want to reach on this leg of the journey. It’s highly possible it will be revamped as your awareness about yourself and the world deepens. If your life is a long drive up the coast, maybe your mission statement is San Francisco. Doesn’t mean you’re going to stay there forever. Here’s where my GPS (intuition) is telling me where to go right now.

It’s so easy to get distracted, pulled down a road of good ideas, overwhelmed by well-intentioned endeavors, or lose sleep over the suspicion that you might not be doing something right. Look at your statement again. How does what you’re doing line up? How might you tweak your actions to be more aligned with your highest purpose?

What do you guys think? Do you already have a mission statement? How did you come up with it? How’s it working for you? What are your ideas for creating one?

With gentle nudges toward your true Pink North,

Joy