THE PATHWAY TO EXCELLENCE

Learning is about answering the question: “Who am I?” Learning well helps us to become stronger in all of the facets of our lives and apply these strengths to realising an evolving and increasingly selfless reason for doing what we do. Learning, therefore, is about the quest towards self-awareness that fosters a sense of “Our Purpose” through curiosity and wisdom and to meet the expectation to "Know ourselves".

As you learn throughout your life, a question you will often ask yourself is “Who am I?” Learning is about using curiosity and wisdom to build the self-awareness to know yourself and claim "My Purpose" by growing in values and beliefs, personal development and academic success.

LEARN WELL THROUGH SELF-AWARENESS

Self-awareness develops as you seek to answer this question while you move into adolescence and then adulthood. You will start to build an identity separate from your family. As you encounter people and personalities you admire, you will take on some of these traits for yourself and begin to build your character.

Opportunity, hope, and love will be powerful motivators and enablers for you as you build self-awareness. Instructors, coaches, mentors and leaders who are active learners and dedicated to their work will be very helpful in this respect. They can encourage you by showing you how to grow in the capacity to learn in your everyday life. More importantly, they will allow you to work toward this goal yourself while you are supported by your schools and communities.

“Knowing comes from learning, finding comes from seeking.”

Vaddey Ratner

LEARNING VALUES AND ADDING VALUE THROUGH YOUR LEARNING

Think about these terms as values (ideas and beliefs about what is good and right) and value (necessary and desirable things that you can give and receive that will improve the lives of others).

While you learn, you will also need to become equipped with values that can connect you to this sense of hope and the desire to be formed through relationships such as these:

Positivity: Inspiring your learning by creating and maintaining a positive tone and attitude
Excellence: Displaying an enthusiasm for learning by striving for the best possible outcomes
Capability: Building confidence and competence in learning by strengthening your knowledge, capacity, understanding and process
Motivation: Encouraging self-discipline and commitment to learning by boosting your mastery, autonomy and purpose
Personalisation: Enhancing learning by respecting and responding to differences and personal needs for yourself and others

People of good character stand by values such as these and act upon them. As they do so, their achievements and qualifications in the competency to learn can help them to build a passport that can validate their progress as Good People, Continuous Learners and Unlearners, and Solution Architects throughout their lives. In doing so, they will regularly move past self-interest and self-protection to put the needs of others ahead of their own.

THE JOURNEY TOWARDS MASTERY: LEARN

While understanding and applying this principle of selflessness is important in how you learn and grow in self-awareness, it’s also important to care about your own health, wellbeing and vocation. There’s no need to punish or deny yourself what you need to grow (within moderation). Please remember too that it’s in the wrestle between realisation (leaving your mark on the world) and replication (how you measure up to what others think of you) that you will bring everything you’ve learned about values and beliefs, personal development and academic success to fruition. As you learn, you will be able to use your growth in civic, performance, and moral character on your journey to move from self-centeredness to selflessness. You can leave the impression you need to make and match the world's standards.

STEP FORWARD AND UP AS YOU LEARN

So, growth in self-awareness will allow you to learn and improve in all areas of your life. This will empower you to put your knowledge, skills, disposition and habits to work toward a positive future. As you come to know yourself, you will be more likely to find your sense of purpose and become the person you need to be. You will be able to learn throughout your life with purpose while balancing your mark and measure of a person of good character.

VALUES AND BELIEFS

Our values and beliefs are those important ideas that come to drive all of what we do in our lives. The Pathway to Excellence requires us to work out what it is that we actually stand for and the impact that this has on what we do. In other words, that we need to do more than just live a life – we should seek to live a worthwhile and meaningful life that brings benefit to others and sustains our capacity to thrive in our world...

PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT

The foundation for our learning journey is an increasing understanding of who we are. For us to thrive, we need to acquire the knowledge, skills, dispositions, and learning habits for success. Personal development, therefore, is about the solutions we construct and the processes we employ to maintain the progress and sustain the wellness required to grow in self-awareness along The Pathway to Excellence...

ACADEMIC DEVELOPMENT

The formal process through which we acquire the knowledge, skills, dispositions, and learning habits for success is situated in our enrolment, progress and eventually qualification in an academic institution such as school, college, and university. While informal learning is important to the development of our whole person, there are considerable practical benefits to optimising our academic growth through the choices we make...

VALUES AND BELIEFS

CORE BELIEFS AND MORAL CODE

We need to understand our place and responsibilities within the world. This a lifelong challenge – the challenge of identity. On our journey towards this we will face many difficult decisions, life changing moments, and of course all the living that takes place in between. To navigate this, we need a system to understand what we do, why we do it and why it is important to us. The answers to these questions come from our core beliefs and moral code...

PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT

EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE

We all feel many things in our lives. Happiness, sadness, confusion, anger, joy, mischievousness, anxiety, grief, elation, contentment, boredom, satisfaction – the list can go on and on. All of these emotions are very human and most all of will experience them and many more besides all the time. We need to build our capacity for emotional intelligence – how we manage our own feelings and the feelings of others in our lives…

ACADEMIC DEVELOPMENT

ACADEMIC DEVELOPMENT PROGRAM

We should all aspire to be lifelong learners. One of the central components of this process is our academic program, in particular the path we choose to follow with our tertiary education. No matter where we find ourselves and what we find ourselves doing it is important that we undergo a process of understanding how our aspirations, strengths and past performance can be brought together to put us on a path to success and fulfilment…

VALUES AND BELIEFS

ETHICAL DECISION-MAKING

The choices we make in our day to day lives grow to define us as people. If we have identified our core beliefs and moral code, then we should next consider how these apply to our lives. Ethical decision making is about adopting an approach to making choices based on our values. This approach will help us to identify the good and right answers in order for us to live a life based on the appreciation of what is good and right...

PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT

REFLECTIVE HABITS

We want people to live lives where they are confident in who they are and what they do. This is fundamental to The Pathway to Excellence. Yet, none of us can ever be entirely correct in everything we think and do. Nor should we allow ourselves to confuse confidence with certainty. We all make mistakes and act under the influence of either inadequately framed or inappropriate ideas...

ACADEMIC DEVELOPMENT

ACADEMIC DEVELOPMENT PROGRESS

Academic progress is about our plan to hit our targets, how we work towards this, and how we might recalibrate when we lose our way. Our academic performance has a unique influence over our future, our motivation, and how we feel about ourselves. When we feel like we are succeeding and fulfilling our potential, we are inspired to continue and encouraged to aspire for more. A focus on results is important…

VALUES AND BELIEFS

VALUES IN ACTION

Our values are only useful to the extent we commit to applying them in our lives. Manifesting our world and the person we want to be through actioning what we believe to be important is the path we must take in order to stop simply surviving or existing, and (instead) start living. This is about making specific choices about what we will and will not do according to the principles set by our core beliefs and moral code. We need to work through the best way to situate our values in action...

PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT

HEALTH

Good health begins with the basics. All of us live a healthier life when we get the right amount of sleep, good food, exercise, and routine on a daily basis. What these things mean specifically will change depending on the where and when of our lives. Nonetheless, whatever our underlying physiological condition, we will do better when we take control of how we treat our body and its basic needs. We need to work through the best ways to boost our health...

ACADEMIC DEVELOPMENT

DISPOSITION TOWARDS STUDY

Disposition towards study is about how we make the specific choices about what we will and will not do to maintain a positive approach and to take responsibility for our learning in our academic program. The study habits we employ, the way we use our resources, and the mindset we take into our learning are all essential elements of this process. So, how do we equip ourselves with the ability to do all of these to a high level in order to succeed in our academic pursuits?...

VALUES AND BELIEFS

SPIRITUAL PRACTICE

It's a very human thing to wonder if we are alone in the universe. Looking at Earth and its remarkable complexity as a planetary system operating within an even more complex solar system and then even further beyond that, it’s quite normal for us to wonder about our significance in this vast and seemingly limitless array of connections and rules that hold all of this together. After all, we’re not the first to stare at the stars and wonder where it all came from, what it all means and how it all operates…

PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT

WELLNESS

How well we feel is intimately connected to our health, happiness and confidence. It is a reflection of our connectedness to a sense of purpose that is itself connected to the depth of our bonds with the people who surround us, the place where we are located, and what we do as our daily practice as we go about learning, living, leading and working. We need to locate our personal development within an holistic approach to our wellness...

ACADEMIC DEVELOPMENT

ACADEMIC GRADES AND QUALIFICATIONS

Our academic grades and qualifications represent significant milestones on our learning journey. We need to develop the skill of knowing how to place what we are learning and achieving into the context of what we will need to maximise our choices in life. We need to track our performances, monitor our progress towards achieving them and reflect on what we have learnt after completing them...