Your personal mission statement

Some clients arrive in goal-by-goal mode without a sense of what the goals are for. They can name three things they want to do this year, but the things don’t add up to a coherent direction. The treatment that targets the goals individually keeps producing partial movement that doesn’t feel like progress. The work needs to step back to the level of purpose before the goals can become meaningful.

This is the worksheet for that step. The client surfaces their values, names the roles they hold (parent, partner, friend, professional, citizen, creator), and distills them into a one-sentence statement of purpose. The distillation is the lever. A client who can write “I want to be a present parent who builds something useful in my work and stays close to people who matter to me” has a frame the goals can be measured against. A client who can’t write the sentence is reporting that the values aren’t yet integrated into a coherent identity, which is itself the conversation in session.

Use it for clients in life transitions (post-divorce, mid-career change, recovery from chronic illness, empty nest, return from leave) where the old structure has fallen away and the new one hasn’t formed. Use it early in treatment for clients who’ll later need behavioural activation or decisional work. Use it as a stabilising document at end of treatment to anchor relapse prevention.

The clinical move at submission review. Look for the gap between the values named and the actions the client describes living. A client who lists “family” as a top value and lives in a way that puts work first 90% of the time is reporting where the work needs to focus. The gap is the lever, not the values articulation itself.

A second pattern: clients who write a beautifully worded mission statement that sounds nothing like them. The statement borrowed from a book or a coach. That kind of statement collapses under stress because it isn’t the client’s own language. Push for plainer wording in the client’s own voice, even if it’s less polished. The point isn’t a literary product. It’s a sentence that survives a hard week.

In my-cbt, the worksheet is one of the bundled system templates. Assign it once early in treatment, save the submission in the case file, and revisit it at end of treatment by re-assigning. The two versions side by side show what’s shifted, often more clearly than any symptom measure.