Monday, May 9, 2011

Intro to O-SMEAC: My Mission is a Better Life

Don't you love the word "mission?" I do. You tell me which sounds more exciting: "Your job is to deliver the mail" OR "your mission is to ensure that your people receive the materials they are sent by outside sources in a timely manner?" Ok. I may have embellished a little bit on the second one, but can you blame me? Once you use the word mission you almost have to get serious.

I think one of the reasons the word mission has such a psychological impact on me is that it really conveys a sense of purpose. The word itself refers to "a specific task with which a person or a group is charged," so it's clear that a mission is intentional. It anticipates an end goal and it's been dedicated to a person or group of people who are assumed to have the resources to accomplish it. A mission is organized. It has an impact. And, best of all, a mission is exciting! Maybe the word reminds me of crawling around in the ditch in the dark at summer camp trying not to get caught in our night games or maybe I've seen too many war movies, but missions always seem so risky and mysterious. It's quite a big deal to be involved in a mission. And if you complete the mission successfully? Well, that's pretty exciting too.

So what better way to trick myself into accomplishing some goals than by using some fancy lingo? It's all about the presentation. Do I want to have chips or ice cream while I watch Law and Order: SVU before I got to bed? Of course. Will the knowledge that A. those things are not healthy, B. it's not good to eat late at night and C. eating while watching TV tends to be mindless and therefore pointless be enough to compel me to forgo the temporal desires for the greater good of my body? Highly unlikely. However, I'm going to put my own claim to the test that presenting my goals in the form of missions will create enough influence to tip the scales to my benefit (um, literally and figuratively where the aforementioned goal is concerned). Of course, the benefit of engaging in a mission isn't just about the wording. Missions involve planning and accountability and those things can go a real long way in achieving goals too.

Being, as you know, a goal-oriented person, I have goals a-plenty. Some of the goals are personally imperative and some of the goals are simply novel. My goal -- yeah, I have a goal for how to accomplish my goals -- is to "mission-ize" them and take full advantage of the psychological repercussions.

Knowing very little about actual mission planning (a high school night mission to ransack our youth pastors' office as payback for their prank which ultimately resulted in the cops being called because our cars where "suspiciously" parked on a side road and having to explain ourselves in the church parking lot at night doesn't really make me an expert), I am going to borrow from the Few and the Proud. Believe it or not, I've picked up a lot from the military in the few looooooong years that Stud has been in.

The Marines follow a Five Paragraph Order entitled O-SMEAC when engaging in a mission. Here's the break down:

O- Orientation: the background information leading up to the situation

S- Situation: what's going on

M- Mission: the outline of the desired outcomes (who, what, where, when and why)

E- Execution: the most significant part- HOW the mission is to be completed

A- Administration and logistics: the support and resources for the mission

C- Command and signal: who's in charge and how will things be communicated

Check out this link for a more detailed explanation of O-SMEAC.

So that's the plan. I'm going to O-SMEAC my way to a better life. Do you get excited about missions? What do you want to "mission-ize" in your life?

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