Sunday, August 12, 2012

GAS Up Your Student Leadership Training

Is student leadership training on your horizon? Do you wish to enable your young people to become the successful individuals that you know that they can be? If so, make sure your student leadership training includes:
  • Goals Action Plan
  • Attitude Redevelopment
  • Self Leadership Skills
After working with numerous schools and speaking at national conferences. I have witnessed very few student leadership programs that delivered truly sustainable life long skills. The main reason for this failure is because there is no Goals Action Plan.
Many student leadership programs talk about goals and action plans. However, they expect the students to construct their own. Tell me how many adults have personal action plans for life and yet we expect young people to physically construct their own plans.

Also, I have not observed many student leadership programs where the main focus was goal setting and goal achievement. Since goals are a critical part of life and necessary to reach ongoing levels of success, the exclusion of goals as the main focus is only setting young people up for failure. Unless I am mistaken, Goal Setting 101 is still not part of the standard K-16 experience.
Attitude Redevelopment must be embraced by each student. Since attitudes are habits of thought, changing attitudes must start from within each student. No one can change anyone's behavior. Of course this means, that leadership must be internally driven and is opposed to many of the student leadership training programs that are externally driven.
Self Leadership Skills are the third and final capacity to be included within any truly effective student leadership program. These skills include, but should not be limited to:
  • Communication
  • Confidence
  • Courage
  • Decision Making
  • Motivation
  • Problem Solving
  • Resiliency
  • Self-esteem

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