How far have you taken your goals?

Or do you set goals at all?

As people, we find ourselves yearning for more than we have and to stretch beyond any perceived limitations in our lives. Yet, formal goal setting can stir a lot of anxiety in us. When we set about creating a real goal to achieve anything that means we are setting ourselves up to take actions we haven’t taken before in our lives. We have to figure out new steps, new people, or find new resources, all which may have never existed before we set this goal. What’s worst is our goals may not absolutely come to fruition how we planned thus proving against what we set to do. Furthermore, we are setting ourselves up to either succeed or fail because we may just go on not taking the actions we hoped to start at the beginning of our new goal. Thus we might face a huge amount of disappointment just by living the lives we’re already living.

Somehow, we still figure out ways to set goals and achieve them or we don’t. If only we can move closer to the side of more goals achieved than not, and if they are not if is for  good purpose. This is one of the primary motivations for my development of the Purposely Chosen Women’s Leadership program curriculum.

Below is a selection from the entire curriculum plan that overviews the driving theories behind this program’s development.

Limitless Ambition is a non-profit organization developing a community adult enrichment program titled Purposely Chosen Women’s Leadership Series. The focus of the program is to equip women with the skills and tools they need to be successful in their careers or entrepreneurial ventures. Limitless Ambition has a mission to have educational, motivational, and inspirational programs that use mentoring, community outreach and other resources to increase the economic equity of the female gender. Incorporating this mission into the program is a major component of the design. In addition, this program will be a way to further enhance the lives of women ages 18-30 by helping them get to a level of success so they can, in turn, support and mentor the success of emerging young women.

This is a new curriculum as the organization is a start-up and is in the process of beginning to connect with the local community within the Akron, Ohio area. Our program organizers firmly believe in the ideas of establishing self-efficacy through skills and tools mastery. Using the time and space of the program to ensure practice is what, we believe, will set us apart from other non-profit organizations. This means our curriculum will be designed with an emphasis on experiential learning, which works as a “holistic integrative perspective” by combining “experience, perception, cognition, and behavior” (Kolb, 1984, p.21), to help students embody the content and proposed outcomes of the program.

The foundation of the program incorporates the research based on self-efficacy and organizational learning theories. Both theories propose the importance of working with the root triggers, motivations, fears, and causes to produce an effective outcome. The design of the workshops is modeled on experiential learning, which provides an adequate format to sustain our theoretical goals.Students practice during the workshop sessions allowing them to grow comfortable with their confidence while surrounding by a supportive network of women learning with them. 

The key goal is to build self-efficacy, which ensures that participants will gain confidence in the practices of career and entrepreneurial success by enacting out the process it takes to achieve it. Propelled by Albert Bandura, self-efficacy can be defined as “the conviction that one can successfully execute the behavior to produce the outcomes” (Bandura, 1977, p. 79). Finally, organizational learning theory works to ensure that limits to success are overcome through using group dynamics to “adapt to changing environments, draw lessons from past successes and failures, and detect and correct errors of the past, anticipate and respond to impending threats, engage in continuous innovation, and build and realize images of a desirable future” (Harper and Quay, p. 145).

Both self-efficacy and organizational learning theory focus on the development of the Self and our ability to respond to setbacks, limits, or crises on the way to accomplishing a defined goal. We find the experiential learning model to be a great fit for driving forward both theoretical tenets. The model places personal experience in relation to abstract concepts as at the center of learning. Then it places a heavy emphasis on the feedback through reflection, observation, and active assessment by the student to integrate what is being learned (Kolb, 1984).

Overall, the concepts incorporated with our mission will help develop curriculum that helps every individual woman draft a plan and method for achieving their desired outcomes in their careers or entrepreneurial projects. It will equip them with ways to successfully execute their plans and prepare them for evaluating ways to overcome limits that arise on the path to their goal.

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