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4 Steps in Building Your Own Youth Leadership Values Training Initiative
Yes, you can do it. This is easy to "get a handle on". Start first by working with the full support of your assembled team, including parents, educators, and other professionals as appropriate. Next, we will show, in four easy steps, how your team can conceptualize and role out your own Youth Leadership Values Training Initiative. Let us start with the basics and take a building block approach.
In doing so, in step one we will examine Four Key Personality Characteristics for Youth Leadership Development Emphasis which should be nurtured, grown, and become abundantly present in order to form the foundation for a successful Youth Leadership Values Training initiative.
Building Your Own Youth Leadership Values Training Initiative
Step 1: Emphasizing
FOUR KEY PERSONALITY CHARACTERISTICS FOR YOUTH LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT EMPHASIS
Everyone, regardless of age, has a basic need to feel good about themselves and their capabilities, have an uplifting and hopeful view of life, and learn to relate to others in a moral and ethical way. It is axiomatic that in order to do so we will need to acquire a healthily +Self-Esteem, a balance of +Self Confidence, an upbeat and positive "I can do" +Attitude of Expectations, and we must also learn to develop and use key Core Values in order to "navigate" with a moral conscience using our internal +Moral/Ethical Life's View.
Think of these enduring personality characteristics as the four legs supporting the table from which we will do our life's work. The sturdy, firm, and level tabletop is comprised of our personal values. Together, they provide structural integrity and support for the inner strength necessary to rise above adversity; to strive, achieve, and accomplish our dreams; to interact and to relate to our friends, family, loved ones, teammates and co-workers. All of this provides a stable platform from which we can deal with the many challenges that life inevitably puts in our paths.
Not only are these traits grounded in our self-definition of who we are today, the degree to which they are present determines in large measure who and what we will become tomorrow. Because of this, we can confidently say that as the quantity and quality of these Personality Characteristics are increasingly influenced by our personal Core Values, together they become the benchmarks for a self-fulfilling prophecy of how we will respond to life's challenges and opportunities.
In step two, we will then show how these Four Key Personality Characteristics fit into four Leadership Development Quadrants, which your team will use to individualize the way you go about helping each aspiring youthful participant. You can track their progress as they move through each of these four Quadrants and they grow and progress from LDQ4 Leadership Apprentices to LDQ3 Aspiring Peer Leaders, and then to LDQ2 Emerging Peer Leaders, and upward as they arrive at the LDQ1 Leader/Role Model/Mentor Level.
Building Your Own Youth Leadership Values Training Initiative
Step 2: Understanding The Conceptual Framework
HOW KEY PERSONALITY CHARACTERISTICS INTER-RELATE WITHIN FOUR LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT QUADRANTS (LDQ's)
The four Personality Characteristics of +Self-Esteem, +Self-Confidence, +Attitude of Expectations, and +Moral/Ethical Life's View was just explained in step one. The obvious question before us now is: why does the suggested format for a Youth Leadership Values Training initiative begin with an emphasis on developing and strengthening these four key Personality Characteristics? Why not just skip this and go to the focus on Leadership Values Training?
The answer is that these Personality Characteristics represent a necessary and logical starting point for character development, and they must be present to a significant degree as prerequisites in order for the core Leadership Values to have fertile ground for growth. This website, Youth Leadership Values Training further illustrates this point in considerable detail.
Next, in step three we will focus on knowing the Leadership Core Values of Integrity, Achievement, Responsibility, and Courage and how they synergistically interact with the four Personality Characteristics that we have targeted for development.
Building Your Own Youth Leadership Values Training Initiative
Step 3: Knowing
VALUES THAT ARE KEY TO LEADERSHIP SUCCESS:
Integrity, Achievement, Responsibility, and Courage
This step introduces an important precept: The Interplay of Leadership Core Values with Key Personality Characteristics for Youth Leadership Development Program Emphasis. Our goal on the following pages is to assist the reader in:
- Knowing: which Values are Key to Leadership Success.
- Focus on the Critical Few: Integrity, Achievement, Responsibility, and Courage
- Lay these Foundation Values and Related Values Will Flourish
- Knowing: how the Leadership Core Values overlap and interrelate as they overlay each of the four
- Leadership Development Quadrants.
- Knowing: how the Leadership Core Values of Integrity, Achievement, Responsibility, and Courage synergistically interact with the four Personality Characteristics that we have targeted for development. These four Core Values have been found to be critical components of Youth Leadership Values Training for the Leaders of Tomorrow.
Last, but by no means least, is step four, and it is perhaps the most important factor of all - Your Team's Role and Involvement in establishing & implementing an Action Plan in order to make this goal of Youth Leadership Values Training for the Leaders of Tomorrow an accomplished and successful reality.
Building Your Own Youth Leadership Values Training Initiative
Step 4: Your Team's Role & Involvement
IMPLEMENTING YOUR YOUTH LEADERSHIP VALUES TRAINING ACTION PLAN
Let's start off by explaining that How your team ultimately goes about implementing your own Youth Leadership Values Training Action Plan, and for whom, is entirely your decision in concert with team mates, parents, and professionals supporting your efforts and working with you in this endeavor. This step of How you go about it can be approached as formally or informally, or as ambitiously or modestly as you wish.
We are not taking a side on which action plan is "Best" for you. That is for you to decide, and the number of adults and youth involved plus the depth of your resources and expertise may ultimately become modifiers of how ambitious an undertaking you choose. To "get you thinking" we will however, share with you, in brief outline format, what some experts in the field of Values/Character education have to say on the topic.
As you read this web site, Youth Leadership Values Training, we have organized both with the assumption that you are doing so with the intent of formulating your own approach to Youth Leadership Values Training. To that end, we urge the reader to supplement our admittedly brief outline approach by reading the in-depth information provided in the full text of this website, and by the various quoted authors and researchers by going directly to the listed resources and bibliography. By doing so, you insure that you have positioned each author's intent in the proper context, and to the best benefit of your own Youth Leadership Values Training initiative.
Armed with this "4 Step approach" for building your own Youth Leadership Values Training Initiative, it is our hope that you will be on your way and knowledgeable with not only What you need to focus on, but also How you might go about it.
Choosing Your Approach to Youth Leadership Values Training
In researching this website, Youth Leadership Values Training, we identified patterns based on analyzing various combinations of the following six methods of values training. A full page of this website is devoted to a discussion, in detail, of the options for you to consider. As you review them, you might think about incorporating at least some or perhaps all of these methods as you develop Action Plans for implementing your own Youth Leadership Values Training initiatives:
Youth Leadership Values Training For The Leaders of Tomorrow
- Teaching Values by Role Model Example
- Using Stories, Skits & Songs to Communicate Values
- Identifying Hero Examples to Teach Values
- Leading Informal Small Group Values Discussions
- Values Taught via Challenging Outdoor Activities
- Choosing Mentors to Nurture and Tutor Values
To help you get started, we have developed some example values training programs you may want to consider using which are matched up with the six Leadership Values Training methods outlined above.
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