Developing Your Personal Brand Map, Part 3: Productivity & Identity

Plan your work. Produce what you’ve planned. Spend more time at Play. 

I define Play as effectively doing while delightfully being. That’s where you want to get to–learning how to live your life at play. Play is not more leisure or frivolous pursuits. It’s more about finding the work that matters, planning the positive future that you imagine, and yielding the fruit of effectiveness and delight. It’s a journey filled with growth and achievement and making a difference. (I started talking about this in Something to Guide You.) Your personal brand map should begin with what I call a Productivity Map. It includes your mission, vision, and values. You may have some of that in your head, but you have to draw it out. You need to create a map that leads where you want to go.

Mission: An Important Assignment 

What is your important assignment with regard to what you are building? What specifically are you trying to build?

Vision: Plan Your Future 

Vision is the ability to think about or plan the future with imagination and wisdom. You can use your personal brand map to plan your future. 

Values: What are the basic, fundamental beliefs that guide you?

Values are the basic and fundamental beliefs that guide or motivate your attitudes and your actions. Your values are that which is good, desirable and worthwhile to you–not good, desirable, worthwhile to everyone else. How do you define good, and You have to take the time to work through how you define good for yourself. I suggest breaking your values down into three words–not big long paragraphs and prose. What are those three primary words that summarize your fundamental beliefs. 

Once you understand how to effectively describe your assignment, plan your future with imagination and wisdom, and the beliefs that guide you, your Productivity Map will be complete. You will have completed the vital step of writing your mission, vision, and values down.