8. How to Create a Personal Mission, Vision, and Values That Guide Your Life (Not Just Your Business) | Personal Goals

You’ve built systems for your business… but have you built them for your life?

In this deeply personal episode, Ginny shares how she and her husband Joe created a personal mission, vision, and values after realizing they were feeling slightly disconnected during a season of canceled trips, family health struggles, and full calendars.

Sparked by a book club assignment from Focal Point by Brian Tracy, this episode walks through:

• How small personal misalignments turn into tension
• What it looks like to define your life before your business defines it for you
• The exact ChatGPT prompts you can use to create your own personal mission, vision, and values

Whether you’re married, partnered, or building your life solo, this episode will help you create a personal compass that protects what matters most.

Here are the prompts for your own Mission, Vision and Values:

Prompt 1: Personal Mission

“I want to create a personal mission statement to guide my life decisions, not a business mission. Please walk me through this step-by-step by asking reflective questions in these areas:
 Health (brain, body, beliefs)
 Life (cash, clutter, calendar)
 Wellness (relaxation, recreation, relationships)
 Work (only at a high level, as a support to life, not the focus).
 Ask one question at a time and wait for my response before continuing.”

Prompt 2: Ideal Future Self

“Help me imagine my life 10–15 years from now if my systems are working and my life feels spacious. Ask me reflective questions about time, work, relationships, financial and time security, and what I’m most proud of protecting.”

Prompt 3: The Boundary

“Now help me define the life I intentionally do NOT want. Ask questions about stress I’m rejecting, patterns I’ve left behind, warning signs of drift, and what I never want people I love to say about my life.”

Prompt 4: Synthesis

“Please synthesize everything I’ve shared into core themes, name a clear ‘North Star,’ and write five personal mission statement options I can refine.”

Prompt 5: Vision and Values

“Using my finalized mission statement, help me identify potential core values that align with it. Generate many options, then guide me to narrow them down to 3–5 values with clear definitions and a personal vision statement.”

Remember to share your results on our social post for this episode.  I'm so excited to see what you come up with!

Books mentioned in this episode:

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Your outcome isn't a wish. It's a decision.

Transcript

How We Created a Personal Mission, Vision, and Values as a Business-Owning Couple

We're really good at building systems for our businesses. But this weekend, Joe and I realized we hadn't given the same level of intention to the life those systems were supposed to support.

Welcome to the Outcome Academy Podcast. I am Ginny Seeley. I'm a business strategist and longtime process improvement expert. I also co-own an appliance service business and a coworking space with my husband, Joe. So I understand what it looks like to juggle growth, leadership, family, and big dreams all at once.

If you're a service-based entrepreneur or executive who wants to stop putting out fires and work on your business and build momentum with systems, smart marketing, and practical tech, you are in exactly the right place.

I want to begin this episode by being very open and honest about what led us here, because it wasn't really a strategic planning thing on our calendar. It was just life. Over the last few months, Joe and I had canceled two trips that we were really looking forward to—not because of work, but because of family health struggles, the kind that rearranged priorities quickly and quietly.

The first one was right before PSA. We were supposed to take a whole entire week just for ourselves to celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary, and that one got canceled. Really quickly, we had to redesign everything and we made it to PSA, but we didn't do that restorative time together. And then recently, we had to cancel our trip to the ASTI conference that we were really looking forward to.

Not just to spend time together as a couple, but because we really, really love seeing all the people there and the friends we've made over the years. On the outside, we're still functioning just fine. Work is moving, businesses are running, systems are doing what systems are supposed to do. We talked about that last time in the episode about whether we own a business or a job.

So thank God all of that stuff is going pretty great. But underneath all that, we were starting to feel kind of disconnected as a couple. Not in a dramatic way—like, super bad or anything like that. Not like something seriously wrong—but kind of more like we've been handling a lot and we haven't really slowed down enough to really talk.

So this past weekend, we drove north to visit my dad in the hospital because now another parent is struggling with some health issues. So, six hours each way in the car, we spent diving into something really personal and really restorative for us. Somewhere between the miles, the quiet, the weight of everything we've been carrying, we decided to use part of that time intentionally—not to plan work, not to solve problems—but to really, really talk.

About life. About what this season has kind of been asking of us. We're in that sandwich generation, I guess officially now. We have young adult children, and we have parents who are aging. Even though they're kind of young—they had us young—but they're still facing their own challenges, and we absolutely want to make sure that we can show up for them and support them, just like they've supported us throughout our life.

So we talked. Why? Well, the funny thing that motivated this actual conversation was our Thursday morning book club and the assignment that I gave to everybody else in that room. It's a Zoom room. We meet with friends all across the country every Thursday morning at seven o'clock Eastern time, and we talk about whatever book we're working on and how it works in our life and our businesses, and we've become quite close with this group of people.

So this one is called Focal Point by Brian Tracy. And so we're in chapter seven right now, which has a big focus on values, and I asked the group to do this exercise really seriously, not casually. The exercise is going really deep on your mission, vision, and values for yourself—not for your business. So I looked at Joe, and I was like, “Well, I said it out loud. I assigned it to everybody else. So guess what? We're gonna do this ourselves.”

We've had conversations like this in the past, but we have not really sat down and actually fleshed out a mission, vision, and values for ourselves—not to this level anyway.

When you're entrenched in your businesses, when your life is getting kind of crazy and hectic, responsibilities kind of start stacking up over time, and it's really easy to forget that you absolutely need a personal mission, vision, and values to guide your life, not just your work.

What we realized was kind of subtle, but really important. Nothing was really wrong. Nothing was broken. Business, life, marriage, responsibility—it can all kind of start to blur in just a way that feels slightly off. Busy, but not really intentional. Productive, but not really grounded. And that's the drift that I want to normalize today as we have this conversation together.

It's normal to feel kind of scattered personally when you're in your business and you're trying to raise a family and you're trying to be a good spouse or a good significant other and a good child to your parents and all the things—good friends to your friends—and you're just trying to show up everywhere, but you don't have something that really grounds you.

So here's something I know is true: Growing your business adds pressure before it really adds clarity. All the decisions of running your business start to multiply. Your energy gets scattered, and the margin that you used to have for your personal life and for your marriage and your family and all the things you enjoy starts to quietly disappear.

And those small misalignments, they don't stay small for very long. They start to show up as low-grade tension, decision fatigue, resenting your calendar, starting to feel like little things feel really heavy when they really shouldn't feel that heavy.

And so I want to reframe this for you. Most growing businesses don't really have a strategy problem. We've talked about that a lot. They have an alignment problem. And the alignment isn't just your org chart or KPIs or your systems. It really starts to show up in how you are aligned personally.

It's especially true if you're building a business with a spouse, partner, or family member, but it applies even if you're doing this solo.

So if you don't define what matters to you personally, your business and every other pressure in your life is going to decide that for you.

So just like everything else that I talked to you about, I have a process for this, too. When we first started our very first cohort of the Summit Club, which used to be called our Collaborate Mastermind, I developed a process for designing a business mission, vision, and values.

And then a few years ago, when ChatGPT arrived, I built an even easier process using custom GPTs for our Summit Club members. So I had a decent handle of how this would go when Joe and I decided to sit down and make our personal mission, vision, and values.

And many years ago—I think it's been at least three years—I came upon a blog post that somebody else wrote about how to use Gino Wickman's EOS concept of a Vision Traction Organizer for their family. And I kind of took that idea, and the mission, vision, values that I already had designed, and I smushed those two ideas together to create our personal mission, vision, and values.

We used ChatGPT as a thinking partner, not really a shortcut. Not to just decide all of this for us, but to ask us meaningful questions that we could really take the time to answer and then arrive at all of these things together as a couple.

And that distinction matters. We didn't ask it to just write something pretty. We asked it to help us think more clearly—think through these questions—and then it reflected back what we were actually saying, which was really cool because sometimes I can get into my head a little bit and then I lose my focus.

So that really, really helped us focus. And the result wasn't something aspirational and fluffy. It was something really stabilizing for us—something that made us both kind of say, “Yes. This is how we want to live.”

And it was really fun to go through this together. I wouldn't say it was easy. We had conversations that were deep and meaningful, but the result was really cool.

So I'm going to talk to you kind of openly, and I'm going to share our actual mission, vision, and values with you. It's personal, but that's how I roll. I share what's working for us, our personal struggles, any decisions we're making—when things don't work, when they work—all that. I am really straightforward with you, so I'm going to keep it real here today, too.

When you're in business with your spouse, you make thousands of shared decisions. Sometimes they're spoken. Sometimes they're assumed. Sometimes they're never even really discussed out loud. You can both be hardworking. You can both have really good intentions. You can both be super committed to your business and to your marriage, and you can have really different definitions of what is success, what is enough, what actually feels like freedom, what stability looks like, and what the word “later” looks like.

Like, do you mean next year? Do you mean in 10 years? Do you mean, like, on your deathbed? What kind of things does “later” look like to you?

In fact, we had some pretty big discussions around money—how our families of origin operated financially, fears that we had around money, what feels safe for us, and things like that.

These kind of conversations happened a couple months ago when Joe and I were discussing another book that I was working through with my friend Shayna, which is called Secrets of the Millionaire Mind. Side note: I highly recommend that book as well. Definitely some deep, meaningful conversations came out of that about finances for us.

Doing this exercise together inspired us to talk about more than just money. We talked about how we want other people to feel when they're around us, what feels peaceful to us, and our dreams as we grow old together.

Creating a personal mission, vision, and values gave us shared language around our future. And I think this can change our future conversations from looking something like, “Why are you pushing back on this?” to, “Does this move us toward or away from what we said—and we agreed together—matters most?”

We've been married for over 25 years, and these conversations lately have been super meaningful for us.

We're big proponents of The Five Love Languages book—and I know I'm throwing a lot of books at you today—but that book absolutely transformed our relationship from the very beginning.

This exercise provided us with something to help us choose the things that we do and don't bring into our lives. That decision clarity is powerful.

All right, so I'm going to share with you what we landed on—not because this should be your mission, vision, and values, but just so you can hear what's possible when you do this work.

Really honestly, here's our mission statement:

“Our mission is to walk faithfully together, cultivating a peaceful and joyful life where our marriage thrives. Our time is sovereign, and our work supports—not consumes—our calling. Rooted in our Orthodox Christian faith, we seek to model love, stability, and generosity, so our family and community always feel welcome, restored, and at home with us.”

I was talking with one of the members in our coworking center, and he asked me, “What does that mean to me—that our time is sovereign?” And to me, it means that we own our time, we protect our time. It's something that we know we can't restore. It's fleeting, right? We only have a certain amount of time, and once you use it, you can't get it back. So we want to be really intentional about our time. And the word “sovereign” really just felt right in that mission statement.

All right, so then our vision:

“We envision a life of ordered freedom, anchored in prayer, health, and intentional rhythms, where our marriage is continually enriched. Our calendars and finances are chosen with wisdom, and our home is a place of peace, laughter, faith, and welcome. We are building a legacy in which our children and grandchildren feel emotionally safe, deeply loved, and joyfully drawn to be with us.”

Now, we don't even have grandchildren, but we're thinking about forming our mission, vision, and values for the rest of our lives. And we do surely hope that we have grandchildren at some point. And we want all of our children, grandchildren, family members to always feel like when they come to us and our home, that they feel like they're in a safe place where they can have peace. And so we really want to create that peace.

Our core values: faith, peace, family, stability, generosity.

Each one came with depth—a definition of its own—and I don't want to keep reading all about us, so I'll spare you all of the explanations behind each one. But those five values, those are going to inform our decision-making from now forward.

Faith is first because it's so important to us and it guides really every decision we make in our family and in our business. And then everything else stems from that.

These aren't just things that we value. These are things that we set out to actively protect.

We also talked about 10-year goals—not hustle goals, not ego goals, but life goals. Things like owning our primary home outright. Owning a vacation home, or somewhere where we can return every year and share with our family. Not having standing meetings after mid-afternoon. Right now, we have a lot of commitments in the evenings, and that's fine for the season that we're in right now. But as time goes on and our business can live without us more and more, we really want to protect our time away from work, especially in the evenings.

Taking trips based on desire, not calendar constraints. Total financial freedom and the ability to give generously. And really, a focus on health—feeling physically capable, confident, and in excellent health.

These goals didn't feel stressful. They felt orienting—like a compass—because in order to make sure our life turns out the way that honors our dreams, our mission, vision, values, and all of our 10-year goals, we have to make lots of tiny decisions today. Atomic Habits style.

I want to help you do this for yourself, whether you're a couple or not. Everyone deserves a personal mission, vision, and values to make decisions by.

You don't need a weekend retreat or 12 hours in the car. You don't need a perfect answer. You don't need better questions. I'm going to give you five prompts that you can copy and paste into ChatGPT to start this conversation thoughtfully.

And I'll make sure they're in the show notes for you so you can just cut and paste them.

Prompt #1: Your personal mission

You're going to put into ChatGPT:

“I want to create a personal mission statement to guide my life decisions, not a business mission. Please walk me through this step by step by asking reflective questions in these areas: health (things like brain, body, and beliefs), life, cash, clutter, or calendar. Wellness work only at a high level, as to support your life, not the focus. Ask one question at a time and wait for my response before continuing.”

Prompt #2: Your ideal future self

“Help me imagine my life 10 to 15 years from now if my systems are working and my life feels spacious. Ask me reflective questions about time, relationships, financial and time security, and what I'm most proud of protecting.”

Prompt #3: Boundary

“Now help me define the life I intentionally do not want. Ask questions about stress, I'm rejecting patterns I've left behind, warning signs of drift, and what I never want people I love to say about my life.”

Prompt #4: Synthesis:

“Please synthesize everything I've shared into core themes. Name a clear North Star, and write five personal mission statement options I can refine.”

And finally, prompt #5: Vision & Values

“Using my finalized mission statement, help me identify potential core values that align with it. Generate a hundred options and then guide me to narrow them down to three to five values with clear definitions and a personal vision statement.”

That's it. You're going to take those things in that order and put them into ChatGPT, and then the important part: go slowly. Let it be imperfect. Think through your answers. Talk to your partner if you have one, or your family if you want to involve your children. That's even cooler. If you can get everybody involved, think through all of your answers together. Answer them imperfectly. Don't stress out about it. Say what's on your mind, and really just work through this together.

This process felt so grounding for us—not because it added more structure, but because it reminded us why that structure matters.

Growing business owners often skip this work until things feel hard—not just for their personal things, but also for their business. Clarity prevents friction later.

This year, each month of the Summit Club has intentional time and space for taking care of ourselves, not just our businesses—not because it's trendy, but because of the first line that flight attendant always says when you get on the plane: put your own oxygen mask on first. Otherwise, you won't be able to serve anyone in your business or in your family.

As you move through this week, I'll leave you with this question: What decisions are you making right now without a clearly defined personal compass?

I hope this episode was a blessing to you and your family. Thank you so much for giving me the gift of your time today. I don't take it lightly.

If you do this exercise and you want to share your mission, vision, and values to inspire others, I'd love it if you would drop it into my social posts about this episode.

As you think about this week, notice where this shows up in your own business. If you want to go deeper into this work, including the Summit Club Mastermind and other ways we support service-based business owners, you can explore everything@outcomeacademy.com.

Thanks for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode.