There’s More For You [Mission Statement Workshop]

It’s time we in academia have a talk about ambition and wanting more. Because friends, there is more for you in your career! As womxn, we have often been socialized not to be seen as “ambitious”. We’re not going to give that idea more time that it is worth. What I want to emphasize to you is: you are allowed to want it all! You are allowed to want a great career, to be influential and impactful in your field, and to do it without feeling burdened and burned out.

“You are allowed to want all of [it].” -Cathy Mazak

So, once you know what you want, how do you get there? In this episode I’m sharing a segment of the Map Your Career workshop that we offered exclusively to our email subscribers. It’s all about the academic mission statement; how to craft and revise one, and how to use it as a dynamic tool for career growth. I firmly believe that creating and using your academic mission statement is the foundational first step on the path that leads you to more. 

Mapping Your Career with an Academic Mission Statement

In our Map Your Career workshop, we took 3 hours to help participants craft (or refine) a mission statement, get clear on their values and vision, and use it all to map their careers. These academics were ready to take advantage of support and guidance to accomplish high-level visioning and strategizing for their career advancement. 

For a template and some tips to help you create your own academic mission statement, check out this blog post. 

Desired Outcomes of Creating an Academic Mission Statement

An academic mission statement is your tool for taking action toward more in your career. Here’s how. 

1. It Helps Bring You To An Ah-Ha Moment

We use a research-focused mission statement to help you frame what you do, how you do it, and what impact you want it to have in the world. Thinking deeply about these concepts helps you hone in on your trajectory and see how the activities you do apply (or don’t). It elevates your writing to be the main driver of your activities. This gives you a deeper understanding of how what you do relates to your path to promotion.

Seeing all these moving pieces through the cohesive lens of your mission statement can be so clarifying! Maybe you’ll discover that you can’t get writing done because research is the only part of your activities that lines up with your mission. Or you might discover an overfull pipeline that is based on a fear of saying no rather than driven by your mission. 

Whatever it is you discover, reflecting on your mission, crafting your statement, and using it as a guide will be illuminating.

2. It Will Work As A Culling Tool

If you use your mission statement as a tool to measure potential opportunities with, you’ll find that you naturally create a focused pipeline, containing fewer projects that are clearly supportive of what you are trying to accomplish with your writing. 

You’ll have a ready-made framework to help you justify saying no to projects and opportunities that don’t serve you. Rather than operating out of scarcity, you’ll have a tool for evaluating each new activity or project, as well as a way to cull current activities that don’t fit with your mission. 

3. It Will Help You Create A Bigger Vision For Your Career

It can be easy to get caught up in the weeds in our careers, fighting our way through the day-to-day and putting out fires. But having an academic mission statement helps us to keep a bigger vision in mind, pick our heads up and look toward the horizon. Envisioning that future, putting words to the impact you want to have, makes all the difference in staying focused on the bigger picture. 

“Envisioning it is the first step toward getting it.” -Cathy Mazak

The academic mission statement is the core of our Navigate: Your Writing Roadmap program. Check out episode 98 for a sneak peek overview of the program, and don’t forget to grab your free module Freeing Time, to help you free time to write right now. For a short time, I’m giving this module away for free, including all the lessons and worksheets that will help you free up an estimated 2-4 hours of time from your schedule to help you get a jumpstart on writing and publishing more. It’s only available for free until November 23, 2021 at midnight EST, so click here to get it now: https://scholarsvoice.org/sneakpeek.

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