Dear Souls & Hearts Member,
We continue with our series on personal mission statements. In the last reflection, titled Your Personal Mission Statement: Who, What, Where, When, and Why?, I provided an overview of the different dimensions of a mission statement. Today, are reviewing missions and mission statements through the lens of parts.
Why?
If I were a betting man, I would wager that most personal mission statements are really driven by one or two or three primary manager parts. The managers are striving after goods as they know them, but are disconnected from so many of the other parts in their system. And manager parts who are unintegrated, not under the leadership and guidance of the innermost self are on a mission to get those attachment needs and integrity needs met on their own.
In contrast, a good mission statement should be more wholistic and integrated than what manager parts can create in isolation.
Parts, missions, values, and agendas.
Let’s back up a bit in spiral learning and review what we mean by “parts.” In my standard definition, parts feel like separate, independently operating personalities within us, each with own unique prominent needs, roles in our lives, emotions, body sensations, guiding beliefs and assumptions, typical thoughts, intentions, desires, attitudes, impulses, interpersonal style, and world view.
And in the September 11, 2024 reflection titled Understanding Values More Deeply, I noted how each part also has his or her own values. These values reflect the goods parts perceive would meet their attachment needs and integrity needs.
I argue that we have as many internal missions as we have unintegrated parts, striving to meet their needs. If you have eight unintegrated part, I assume you have at least eight unintegrated personal missions, with at least one mission corresponding to each unintegrated part.
And we call those individual, parts-based missions “agendas.”
Agendas vs. mission
What is the difference between an agenda and a mission?
An agenda is very specific and narrowly focused on the needs of one or more parts; agendas do not consider the good of all the parts in the entire system. The often feel pressured, with a sense of desperation. In pursuing agendas, parts are attached to using particular means to get particular outcomes in a particular timeframe.
Agendas also tend to be very inwardly focused, not considering others’ experience deeply and not considering others’ well-being.
Parts driven by their agendas lack vision. They don’t really have anything like a vision statement. Often, unintegrated parts’ visions could be described as “negative”, trying to stop something, or to move away from something. For example, a firefighter might be just trying to stop the pain of unresolved grief. There’s not much distance between “vision” and “mission” there, no “shining city on a hill” that the firefighter is aspiring toward. Rather, there’s an immediate mission (or agenda) to numb the intensity of the excruciating feelings.
Parts assume that if only they can accomplish their agendas, then everything will somehow be all right, a phenomena I call “if-onlyism” and which Greg Morse captured well in his article The Ache of ‘If Only’.
For example, an inner critic’s vision may be that everything will be better if the person escapes from something, such as just stopping a bad habit – excessive eating for example. Inner critics such as these often have an agenda to suppress and silence firefighter parts who binge eat, without getting curious about those parts.
Choreographer Richard Marcel I has said “Vision without mission is lame; mission without vision is blind.” In other words, we need the vision for the mission – that’s why we started with vision statements. You can think of an agenda as part-driven mission that is often blind toward other parts, such as the binge-eating firefighter in this example.
And we need our values clearly articulated – because a mission without values can quickly degenerate into the ends justifying the means.
In contrast, a personal mission is deliberately chosen, considering the good of all the parts in the system in an integrated, cooperative, collaborative way. No part is left out, no part is left behind, no part is disadvantaged.
Missions also open outward, considering the good of others in all their parts. Missions consider the broader social systems in our environments.
From conflicting agendas to a unified personal mission
If you’ve been following these reflections, you know that I use a telescope to symbolize vision, a lantern to represent values, and in the last reflection, I settled on boots as the image of a mission.
I see the separate, conflicting, polarized agendas as the little boots that the parts wear, in their efforts to make good things happen, like in the left side of the drawing above. You can see the jumble of boots, disorganized and uncoordinated, that results from the lack of interior integration at a natural level.
In this case, mission statements can be instrumentalized, even weaponized against parts deemed “problematic” or even evil because of the means they are attempting to use to meet needs. That reminds me of Nancy Sinatra’s 1966 hit lyrics: “These boots are made for walkin’ / And that’s just what they’ll do. One of these days these boots are gonna walk all over you.” Those lyrics capture the polarizations that can exist among parts’ opposing agendas.
In contrast, the system of a person with a mission is like a well-coordinated rowing crew, with the parts like the rowers under the direction of the innermost self in the role of coxswain.
At the beginning of the recent film adaptation of “Boys in the Boat”, Al Ulbrickson Sr,, Coach of the 1936 University of Washington rowing team says “Eight-man crew is the most difficult team sport in the world.” Why? Because of how integrated those eight have to be, working together in synchrony under the direction of the coxswain.
At the end of the film, crew member Joe Rantz’s grandson asked him more than fifty years later
“Did you like rowing eight-man crew?”
“Eight?” Rantz responded.
“Yeah.”
“We were never eight. We were one.”
There was a deep sense that what was best for each of those rowers was best for all in the boat. The rowers, under the leadership of the coxswain became one in vision, one in values, one in mission. I don’t know of a better statement of multiplicity in unity that Rantz’s claim that “We were never eight. We were one.”
One can imagine the chaos of a rowing shell in which each of the rowers is pursuing his or her own agenda, disconnected from the others. Or you don’t have to imagine it; here’s a three-minute video of a series of rowing fails, all in one regatta, with the rowers not integrated into a cohesive whole.
A personal mission must be found, not created
One final distinction between the agenda of a part and a solid, integrated personal mission statement is that the mission is discovered; it’s a response to a call. In contrast, an agenda is generated by a part. A mission statement has lots of room for God to work; an agenda is too narrow, too desperate, too focused on control for that.
So going back to the boot analogy, we are not to be cobblers or bootmakers; rather, we are called to find the mission that fits us. The boots are already there; God has already provided them. We just have to find them, put them on, and walk the road to our vision, our shining city on a hill, lighting the way with our values, all in God’s grace.
So our goal is to have one personal vision, informed by and guarded by a one values statement, and carried out through one mission statement. And that mission should be from God.
(And on the note of missions from God, just for fun and memories, here’s two-minute montage of the Blues Brothers focused on their mission from God. Not for exact replication in your life – unless, of course, you are a blues musician and the Catholic orphanage that raised you is about to be shuttered for failure to pay back taxes.)
In the next reflection due out on February 10, 2025, I will take you step-by-step through a process to write your mission statement. On February 11, 2025 from 8:00 PM to 9:00 PM, I will meet with those who have signed up for the Zoom workshop and we will go through the process of writing together. Write me at crisis@soulsandhearts.com if you haven’t already to be added to the list.
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Less than one week until the RCC opens its 9th cohort!
Do you desire unity within the multiplicity of your own parts? Would you like all your parts to better work together to love God, your family, and friends, and yourself? If so, you may be interested in joining more than 300 other faithful Catholics already on this journey.
That’s the work we do together in the Resilient Catholics Community, all informed by Internal Family Systems and solidly grounded in a Catholic anthropology. Our year-long structured program will guide you step-by-step through a process of first discovering, and later, loving those parts within yourself.
Throughout February, we’ll be open for new applications to join our ninth cohort, named for its patron, St. Ignatius of Loyola. You’ll begin by taking the PartsFinder Pro, which is designed to help you identify 10-15 of your parts, and their interrelationships inside of you. The PFP can jumpstart your own personal parts work, helping you to understand and love yourself so that you can love God wholehearted and your neighbor much better.
Have questions? They may have been answered during an informational meeting we held last week. Watch a recording of this Q&A session, read, and listen to testimonials, and join our RCC interest list on our landing page here.
Helping others starts with helping yourself
If you’re a Catholic priest, spiritual director, therapist, counselor, or coach, you know how many people need help. It’s easy to forget to take care of yourself when the external demands are so high in today’s world.
That’s why we want to help you with your human formation. Learn how to apply IFS concepts to your personal life, let us help you “refill your own cup,” so you have more to give to those you serve. We are now registering formators for our Spring 2025 Foundations Experiential Groups. No previous IFS training is necessary to participate in FEGs.
These groups:
- Are limited to nine Catholic formators
- Are led by experienced Catholic IFS-trained practitioners
- Meet via Zoom for 90 minutes for each of 10 sessions, over the course of five months
- Practice IFS techniques, working on our own real issues within our own internal systems, in the holding environment of the group and in independent practice in triads (You can see how practice triads work by watching episodes 151and 152 of the IIC podcast)
- Engage in interpersonal processing among the members, based on an IFS understanding of parts and self, harmonized with our Catholic faith
- Provide discussion space for the two recorded lectures that cover a chapter of Internal Family Systems Therapy (2nd ed.) by Schwartz and Sweezy.
- Include a sequence of 10 sessions (15 hours total) at only $700 per person, which works out to only $70 per session (in addition to the $40 per month basic subscription fee to join the Formation for Formators community).
- Are a gateway to advanced groups that focus on specialized topics for more experienced members.
New and advanced groups start in February and March of 2025; a few are nearly full already. Put a deposit down now to hold your seat. Find out more here and go here for registration and for the days, times, and the leaders of each group.
The One Inside remix
Tammy Sollenberger, host of The One Inside podcast liked the experiential exercise I did on loving with your parts in episode on December 14, 2024 so much that she broke it out into another episode – check out the 14-minute experience on YouTube or here.
Call me with questions
Remember that I host “Conversation Hours” every Tuesday and Thursday from 4:30 PM to 5:30 PM Eastern time for all of you. Call me at 317-567-9594 if you have any questions, particularly if you want to know more about joining the RCC or participating in an FEG. I would love to talk with you.
Finally, as always, we beg your prayers. Everything we do must be supported by a foundation of prayer.
Warm regards in Christ and His Mother,
Dr. Peter