The key to remaining sober long term is to make this a priority in your life. If you start to lose sight of why refraining from alcohol or drugs is so important, it will weaken your sobriety and you will be at higher risk of relapse. One way to help ensure that staying sober remains a priority is to create a mission statement.
What is a Mission Statement?
If you own your own business or you are interested in entrepreneurship, you will probably have heard the word mission statement before. You may also have come across it when investigating any type of commercial enterprise – for example, many online sellers will have a mission statement. This document is an overview of the aims and values of the company, telling you what they are about and what they are trying to achieve.
Some businesses just create a mission statement because it is something they learned to do in business school. It just becomes something to check off the list when creating a company. This attitude is a shame because it means that the founders of these businesses, as well as their employees and customers, do not benefit from it. A mission statement is more or less the destination the company is aiming towards; if they do not have it then they can easily become lost.
The reason many companies fail after some initial success is they forget what they are about, so they stop doing the things that made them successful. This can easily happen as a company grows and the demands pull managers in different directions. Unless the mission statement is there to keep reorientation within the company, it is easy to end up completely off-track.
Importance of a Mission Statement in Recovery
A mission statement is important in sobriety for the same reason that it is good in business – it keeps you moving in the right direction. One of the things about sobriety is that it means there will be many new and interesting things happening in your life. The problem with this is that these can pull you in different directions. If you are not careful, you could be pulled in a direction that puts your sobriety at risk. For example, you may find that after you become sober, you are far more effective in your career – this is fantastic, but if you allow it to you could become so obsessed with work that it weakens your recovery. You need a mission statement to help ensure that sobriety remains your number one priority.
How to Create Your Mission Plan for Addiction Recovery
- A mission plan should not be too long – it should just be a summary of your aspirations and goals in sobriety. You can do a longer document for your own reference if you think this is going to helpful, but this will not be your mission plan.
- Avoid any unnecessary language or fluff – try to use as few words as possible (your mission statement should not be more than a couple of hundred words).
- You do not have to ever show this document to anyone else, so do not worry about what others are going to think about it – this is all about you.
- It needs to be as clear as possible.
- Only put in things that matter to you and the things you think ‘should’ matter to you.
- Your mission statement should include a statement of why sobriety is important to you and what you are trying to achieve in your new life.
- Your goals need to be realistic but also ambitious enough to give your sobriety some momentum.
- Don’t just write your mission statement and put it in a drawer to gather dust – this needs to become a part of your life, so keep it near and refer to it often.
- You do not write your mission statement in stone – this means that you should be willing to make changes to it as your ideas about life change.
