After running a number of workshops where I’ve been able to teach AmbitionMapping as a tool for educators to help students find their focus, I’ve decided to launch a small AmbitionMapping workbook that teachers can use in the classroom. This can be used by high school, advanced middle school, and even college teachers and instructors, as well as homeschool parents.
AmbitionMapping is our project to create a practical and actionable goal-setting workshop. After you enter your email address below, check your email for a message and a link to the workbook.
Most goal-setting workshops and exercises fail for one of two reasons:
- When asked what they want to do, become, or experience, participants don’t know. I’ve had dozens of teachers report to me that when they try to help students set educational, professional, or personal goals, the students can’t make progress because they don’t know what they want.
- They provide little in terms of actionable items and granularity. Sure, you may figure out you want to become a doctor or launch your own business, but there’s a large gap between where you are now and getting there. Even programs like Jordan Peterson’s Self-Authoring (which I do recommend) focus more on daily habits and routines than immediate, actionable items.
We address this in a few ways. We use sentence completion exercises to pump students’ intuitions about, first, what they want to avoid in their lives and, second, what they want in their lives. Then, we use a step-by-step reverse induction process to ask them to figure out what they need to do right now to start building towards that life.
The goal here is not to create a perfect plan or to make them slaves to some future they imagine. Having nebulous goals is better than having no goals. People who feel like they are growing and improving are happier, less likely to turn to drugs and violence, and are able to make investments in the future.
This workbook can be applied with students to help them see a path to where they want to go and start working on it. It’s my hope and my team’s hope that you find it helpful.