How to Prepare for an LDS Mission

Nobody arrives at the MTC ready. That is not a failure of preparation; it is what the training centre is for. What preparation actually decides is how much of your first three months is spent learning to be a missionary and how much is spent learning to be an adult.

This is the advice half of mission preparation — the habits, skills and expectations that transfer into the field. If you want the ordered list of appointments, paperwork and dates instead, that is the mission preparation checklist.

What being prepared actually means

Ask ten returned missionaries what they wish they had done before leaving and you get a strikingly consistent answer, and it is almost never “memorised more scriptures”. It is some version of: I wish I had already been the kind of person who does hard things on a normal Tuesday.

A mission is not primarily an intellectual test. It is eighteen months to two years of getting up early, working when it is not working, living closely with someone you did not choose, and doing all of that without your usual supports. Everything below is aimed at that, rather than at knowing more.

Build the study habit before you need it

Missionaries study every morning. The ones who find that valuable are almost always the ones who were already doing something like it, and the ones who find it a slog are usually meeting the habit for the first time in a room in Provo at 8am.

The useful preparation is small and boring: same time, same place, every day, for long enough that skipping it feels strange. Twenty minutes is plenty. What you are training is not comprehension, it is the absence of a decision.

Two things make it stick. Write something down each time, even a sentence, because study without output slides into reading. And read the Book of Mormon straight through at least once rather than in fragments — you cannot teach the shape of a book you have only ever sampled.

Learn to teach a person, not a lesson

New missionaries usually know the material and struggle to deliver it, because they have practised reciting rather than conversing. The two feel similar in your head and look nothing alike from the other side of a kitchen table.

The correction is unglamorous. Explain something you believe, out loud, to someone who is allowed to interrupt you, and let them. Do it with a sibling, a friend, a parent, anyone. The point is not performance, it is discovering how much of what you say only makes sense inside your own head.

Three specific exercises are worth more than the rest:

• Explain the Restoration in three minutes. Then do it in one. The compression forces you to work out what the centre of it is.
• Open the Book of Mormon with someone rather than describing it. Read four verses together and ask them what they made of it.
• Ask a question and then say nothing. Most missionaries fill silence that was about to become the useful part of the conversation.

Get comfortable being turned down

Most people you talk to will not be interested. This is the single most predictable feature of missionary work and the one that surprises new missionaries most, because it is very hard to imagine in advance how it feels on the fortieth door of a wet afternoon.

What helps is having a working relationship with rejection before you go. Not a philosophy about it — practice. Ask for things you might not get. Start conversations with strangers who owe you nothing. Take a job that involves being told no by people who are not being unkind about it, just uninterested.

The mental move you are practising is separating “this did not work” from “I am not good at this”. Missionaries who can hold those apart have a much easier time in a slow area, and every mission has slow areas.

Become independent in small ways

Independence is not a personality trait you decide to have; it is a set of things you have done before. The gap that shows up in the field is rarely dramatic. It is not knowing what to cook, not knowing how much food costs, not noticing that a shirt needs washing until it very obviously does.

The practical version is to take things over one at a time in the year before you leave. Cook the family dinner once a week rather than learning six recipes in a rush. Do your own laundry from now on. Do your own shopping with your own money and notice what a week costs. Book your own appointments and turn up to them.

The list of skills matters less than the ownership. A missionary who has been running some part of their own life for a year adapts to running all of it much faster than one who was handed the whole thing at once.

Learn to live with someone you did not choose

You will be with a companion nearly every waking hour. Some of them will become lifelong friends. Some of them you will find genuinely hard, and you will still be with them at breakfast.

Almost nothing prepares for this except doing something like it. If you have never shared a room, share one for a few weeks. If you have always had a door you could close, notice how you behave when you cannot close it.

The skill underneath it is raising a small problem while it is still small. Most companionship difficulties are not caused by the difficulty; they are caused by three weeks of not mentioning it. Being able to say “can we talk about how we are planning the day” without it becoming an argument is a learnable thing, and home is a much cheaper place to learn it.

Get your body used to the schedule

The physical demand of a mission is not intensity, it is repetition: early mornings, long days, a lot of walking or cycling, and very little of the recovery time you are used to. If you want to see what you are training for, the sample missionary daily schedule sets it out hour by hour.

Two adjustments are worth making months in advance. Move your sleep — early to bed, early up, every day including weekends, until it is normal rather than something you are enduring. And build ordinary walking or cycling stamina, so several miles a day is unremarkable rather than an event.

If you are going somewhere with a climate you have never lived in, this matters more, not less. Heat and cold both compound tiredness, and the first month is when everything else is also new.

Build emotional resilience honestly

The Church publishes Adjusting to Missionary Life precisely because adjusting is normal and difficult. Read it before you go, while it is theory, rather than in week three when you need it.

The most useful preparation here is learning to describe your own state in words to another human being. Missionaries who can say “I have been low for about two weeks and I do not really know why” get help early. Missionaries who cannot tend to arrive at the same conversation months later and in worse shape.

If you already have support — a counsellor, a therapist, a prescription — plan the transition with them rather than stopping abruptly before you leave. Ongoing treatment is compatible with missionary service. Silently discontinuing it is the thing that causes problems.

Learn to handle money

Missionaries receive funds each month from the mission for food, transport and living costs, and those funds are meant for exactly that. Personal spending is expected to be minimal. Neither of those arrangements is difficult, but both assume you can track what you spend without thinking hard about it.

So the preparation is simple: run a budget now, for six months, on your own money. Not an app you check once. An actual habit of knowing roughly what you have and where it went.

The other financial preparation is the conversation with your family about the monthly contribution — what it currently is, who is contributing, and how it gets paid every month without anyone having to remember. Your bishop can tell you the current amount for your country; it is not a number worth taking from a third-party website. How mission finances work explains the structure behind that figure, and has a planner for working out what you need to save each month.

Prepare to be away from home

Missionaries stay in touch with their families, but the rhythm of it is set by mission guidelines rather than by whoever misses whom most, and it changes over time. Whatever the current arrangement is when you leave, it will feel like less contact than you are used to.

The preparation that helps is on both sides. For you: get used to not resolving everything immediately. A worry you cannot act on for six days is a different kind of worry, and learning to set one down is a skill.

For your family: agree in advance what they will and will not send your way. Most missionaries would rather know about a family difficulty than find out afterwards. Most would rather not receive a running commentary on a decision they cannot influence. Having that conversation before you leave is much easier than having it by email from another continent.

Understand what a missionary is actually for

It is worth being clear about the job before you have it. A mission call includes an assignment — teaching the gospel, supporting the work of Church departments or units, or serving in the local community — and that assignment is secondary to the call itself. Missionaries are called to serve; where and how is a detail that can even change mid-mission.

That framing is not a consolation prize. It is the thing that keeps a mission steady when the assignment is not what you pictured, which is a very common experience. People who go out attached to a specific image of what their mission will look like tend to have a harder first few months than people who went out attached to the work.

Prepare your family, not just yourself

Preparation is usually framed around the missionary, and then a family spends two years working out logistics they were never briefed on. Some of the most useful things you can do before leaving are for them.

• Write the dates down in a place everyone can reach — your reporting date, and the month you are expected home. These are the questions they will be asked most, by people they cannot avoid at church.
• Explain how contact actually works in your mission, so nobody is quietly hurt by a gap that was always going to happen.
• Agree who the point of contact is, so an update does not get forwarded eleven times and still miss your grandmother.
• Tell them what post costs and how long it takes before anyone posts a parcel that costs more than its contents.

There is more on the family side of this in how to share missionary updates with family.

Keep your expectations honest

The last piece of preparation is the hardest to do deliberately: expecting a mission to be ordinary most of the time.

Missions are described, understandably, through their high points. The daily reality is a lot of walking, a lot of conversations that go nowhere in particular, planning meetings, cleaning a flat, and stretches where the work is simply slow. None of that means anything has gone wrong, and the missionaries who struggle most are frequently the ones who assumed it did.

Prepare for the ordinary days and the good ones look after themselves. When the call arrives, the practical side starts immediately — that is covered in what to do after receiving your mission call.