One of the things I learned from Amanda Itliong when she was with the Haas Center for Public Service at Stanford was the need for an “individual learning plan” which charts out a person’s steps towards leadership objectives. Here is some text from the Haas website (http://studentaffairs.stanford.edu/haas/principles/document)…
Reflection Questions
What does your personal plan for preparation look like? How might you creatively build preparation into your program design? How has your academic work prepared you for this experience? Where do you see connections between your academic/intellectual background and practical application? What have you not been prepared for in the past and what did you learn from that?
I picked up the book “Me: Five Years from Now” by Sheree Bykofsky. It provides some ideas on areas of life to focus on for life-planning. This showed me that there are at least two approaches: (a) we could discuss how a learning plan is comparable to strategic navigation and risk management, or (b) we can keep it at simple by just asking “Where will you be 6 months from now?”, “…1 year from now?” or “5 years from now?”
I favor the latter for youth but it should be framed as an action plan where not only are there places/positions listed, but also actions/directions to get there (addressing the getting from point A to point B problem we often see). From Bykofsky, we also learn that we should ask ourselves “Which actions can we start today?” and “Which tasks will take time?” There should be a forward-moving tendency to the action plan and minimal chance of inertia.