I Believe In...

One of the assignments I completed this week for my Quality Management and Customer Service class was to form a personal vision statement.  This was a fantastic exercise as was coming up with a mission statement last week.  Although they can be intertwined together, my mission and vision statements are quite a bit different.  Today I wanted to share my vision statement because it's short, sweet, and for me personally it's pretty encouraging and inspiring.

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To me, the goal of creating a vision statement is to think about where you want to be in the future.  After I looked around the internet a bit before starting to create mine I found that most that I looked at seemed to be very specific and set to one specific career goal in mind.

For me, as I've mentioned on this blog before, I don't know exactly what I want to do in the hospitality industry.  There are ideas still flying around in my head, and that's completely fine because I still have at least a year and a half of school left.  I tried to make a vision statement for a hypothetical situation but my gut was telling me I needed to scrap it and just go with my heart.  Which is exactly what I did.  I focused on my values, something that I hadn't really focused on before.

I aim to keep my values of passion, excellence, empowerment, innovation and responsible citizenship at the forefront of my mind in daily work and life as well as in making decisions for my future.

• Passion - …to be passionate about the things I do from school to work,  down to the things I do in my spare time.

• Excellence -…to not only want to do well but to make choices to help me succeed in the future.

• Empowerment -…to do what is right instead of easy and to encourage others around me to do the same.

• Innovation -…acknowledging when change is needed to continue being productive but to keep a hold of the things I believe in.

• Responsible Citizenship -…to adhere to laws and uphold strong ethics that I believe in both my personal life as well as my professional life.

I'm not going to lie, this was a hard assignment especially when I decided that I wanted to take it very seriously.  On the flip side, when I crossed the finish line and submitted my homework I felt empowered and very happy.

Originally I decided to pick five words to use as my values and then sort of describe them to help hold myself accountable and to remind myself in weeks to come what I was thinking when I chose them.  Each of these five I believe strongly in, though before this assignment I had never said "I believe in this and this".  But these values are still things that I need to work on and to make stronger.  I did a lot of thinking about this last night.

I thought a lot about how I need to learn how to keep myself accountable, that I can't always rely on someone else to be there and be the nagging voice in my head that I need.  I thought about the potential I have to do so well in school but yet I find myself still slacking off even though I'm no where near where I was a year ago.  I thought about how I take the easy way out instead of sticking to what needs to be done and doing it right the first time.

I thought about a lot last night.

The great thing about creating your own personal mission and/or vision statements is that you are free to change and adapt them as you grow.  Maybe in a few months I'll add a new word to this list that I find myself believing strongly in.  Or maybe I'll take one of these away for some reason.  Each person is different.