THE PATHWAY TO EXCELLENCE
Everyone works. We work to earn, produce, create, and provide. As you move into and through adulthood, you will learn that your work can and should be more than just something you do to make money to support you and your loved ones. It’s about how you contribute values and value to others and to society as a whole. Again, 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).
Working is about answering the question: “Whose am I?” Working well is about building around us a supportive network of people for and with whom our sense of belonging, potential, and propensity to do that which is good and right in our lives might find a meaningful home. Working, therefore, is about the discovery of commitment that helps us to connect “Our Purpose”, “Our People”, “Our Place” and “Our Practice” through vocation and diligence and to meet the expectation to "Find our calling".
WORK AND VOCATION
In this way, working calls you to think about “to whom” and “for what” you will contribute yourself and your work – how you will connect people, place and purpose in your practice through your planning, social purpose and career development. This is what we mean when we say that your work is about your vocation – how you find your calling within the supportive network of people for and with whom your sense of belonging, fulfillment of potential and propensity to do good and right can come together. You use commitment and diligence to answer the question “Whose am I?”
THE VALUES FOR YOUR WORK AND ADDING VALUE THROUGH YOUR WORK
When you work, you can engage with specific values that help you to contribute to the formation of society and "how society's creation and distribution benefits its members:
- Cause: Dedicating your activity to a compelling social rationale, a reason “Why?” for your beliefs, aspirations, and actions
- Thriving: Understanding the nature of character, competency and wellness and their related graduate outcomes in a fit for purpose lifelong journey of learning
- Alignment: Discerning the need for meeting external expectations through your own actions
- Contribution: Encouraging service to others as the ultimate goal of a culture that can sustain us and moves us forward into our preferred future
- Legacy: Ensuring that social progress is nurtured and sustained beyond your immediate presence
As you move forward on The Pathway to Excellence, you will find that engaging in meaningful work and making connections with your peers will be easier when you commit to values of social purpose such as these. You can use them to share and consciously discuss your experiences of work. You can actively help others understand what it is like for you to move in the direction you need to go while being on The Pathway to Excellence.
It’s important, therefore, for you to figure out an appropriate level of engagement with these values of social purpose for yourself and to use them to connect your work to the story of your own character development. It’s also appropriate and useful for you to have high expectations for the values that inform your work. As a result, it’s important to not see work and life as opposing forces that must be balanced, but rather as a means of expressing your character and directing your competencies towards your purpose.
Therefore, although it’s important for each of us to be able to earn a living, your work is more than just a set of transactions, an exchange of effort and energy for money. Your work can help to achieve a wider goal of changing yourself and others for the better. You can contribute to the transformation of people so that they will thrive in their world, and so that they might become the best versions of themselves. Working, therefore, is more than just doing a job. It is a way to discover who you are as a person and help other people to do the same to validate the passport of your success as a Future Builder, Continuous Learner and Unlearner, and Solution Architect.
“Work is love made visible.”
Kahlil Gibran
THE JOURNEY TOWARDS MASTERY: WORK
As you work you need to be confident that you are doing a good job. To achieve this effectively, you will need to create a mental model of what high performance looks like for you. You must improve your ability to collect, monitor, and evaluate data on this progress. Intuition and gut instinct have a place, but they must be balanced by other people's perspectives, as well as the current situation of what you've done, what you're doing, and what you might do next.
You must also determine when it is appropriate to continue to grow in your current position and when it is time to move on to the next opportunity. For some, this is the result of restlessness, while others may require assistance in recognising that talent is best utilised somewhere else.
As you move from job to job, therefore, it will be important to remember that every job needs to help you to experience success on your way and help you contribute to the success of others. If you can give and keep your word, and put your values into action through your work, you will feel part of something that's bigger than yourself. Your sense of purpose and community will be validated. You will gain a stronger sense of belonging that progresses while you grow and serve others. You will begin to realise your own potential and meet the expectations of other people while doing what is good and right.
STEP FORWARD AND UP AS YOU WORK
The work you undertake throughout your life must be suited to your individual needs and circumstances, as well as meeting the expectations of others. When your work has meaning, you can invest yourself and your love for others into it. You can transform a job into a vocation, therefore, by thinking about your contribution, by putting your social purpose into action, and by honouring the needs of others.
PLANNING
Plans are the way in which we bring about our desired future. They make aspirations real; they give substance to goals. The success of our planning process depends on how well we are grounded in our own capacity and our ability to connect ourselves to the team and community around us. In this way, the real source of our ability to map out The Pathway To Excellence can be found in our character, the quality of the judgments we make, and the depth of the relationships that sustain us on our journey...
SOCIAL PURPOSE
Our social purpose is the fundamental reason we have for the way we live our lives. It always exists in relationship to those around us because it gives us the ability to craft and realise over time an honourable rationale for development of the civic character of belonging, the performance character of fulfilling our potential, and the moral character of doing what is good and right: how we might give of ourselves for the benefit of others...
CAREER DEVELOPMENT
Career development is how we bring meaning to the work we do by preparing and connecting the steps we take on The Pathway To Excellence. Our jobs, experience, and learning all help us to develop the character and competencies we need to thrive in our world. How we assemble the scope and sequence of what we do and the opportunities that are presented is all part of the process. We need to ensure that what we do forms a coherent narrative that aligns with who we are now and who we are becoming...
GOAL-SETTING
Without clear direction and targets, we can find ourselves moving through life uninspired, unenthused, and aimless. We can lack specificity in what we want to achieve, and may have no idea how to do it. Setting goals is the way that we give ourselves clear targets, focus, and purpose for getting up each day and keep on keeping on. Goal setting is fundamental in motivating ourselves to improve our abilities, performance, and humanity on an everyday basis...
PERSONAL BRANDING
Our story lives in the minds of others. How we use our kindness, honesty, and love is how we demonstrate our strength of character. How we show our resilience, professionalism, and our decision-making ability is how we demonstrate our performance. How we live with honesty, selflessness, and service is how we demonstrate our leadership. The building of our reputation through doing what is good and right is the way we manifest a good personal brand...
CAREER DEVELOPMENT PROGRAM
What do we envision for ourselves in the future? Whether we aspire to a certain profession, a series of achievements or financial security, our ambitions that we incorporate into our career development program need to be specific, manageable and planned. Basing them upon what we enjoy, what we are good at doing and what we value is the basis of our program having meaning. Doing so causes our program to align with our interests, and inspires us to keep going as we embark on the journey...
SELF-REGULATION
At some point, we will believe that we have the goals and tools necessary to do the thing that we need to do. Execution and commitment will then be required to complete the task, achieve the goal, or enact the change that we believe is important. It is the ability to do what we say we will do and stick at this task that distinguishes us from others. We have all heard the expression 'if you're going to talk the talk, you've got to walk the walk'. Learning about self-regulation is learning to walk, learning to keep on The Pathway to Excellence...
PURPOSE, PLACE, PEOPLE, PRACTICE
Understanding our vocation on The Pathway to Excellence seems to be much about defining our sense of purpose. For it is through their sense of mission that we are best formed in terms of our vocational practice, and inevitably also our leadership practice. This practice is usually intensely practical and rarely shaped by an established theoretical model (although it should be). It is highly situational and responsive to the need to situate ourselves within and then balance the different pressures associated with charting the course of a group, team, organisation or community from yesterday to today to tomorrow...
CAREER DEVELOPMENT PROGRESS
As much as our career is based upon practical experiences and growth, it is also about growing our character, competencies and wellness. The ambition of our work should be to not only to succeed in a literal sense, but also to aspire to be a better, more whole person tomorrow than we are today. Our Career Development Progress is about engaging in ongoing reflection, authoring our own narrative of ambition and purpose, and adapting as our life, and our world, move around us...
PROJECT MANAGEMENT
One of the defining features of the way in which our world goes about what it does is that it divides up the doing of things into projects. A project is a way of setting a goal and drawing into the achievement of that goal all of the resources that will be needed to complete the goal in a timely fashion. Many projects are limited in their time-frame; others stretch out in phases that link one goal to another to another. All projects should, ideally, be linked to a central idea about what we are trying to achieve personally, socially, or professionally...
SOCIAL RECOGNITION
We all want to feel heard. We all want to feel seen. We all want to feel valued. Our standing within our community, and the perception others have of us, play a central role in how we feel about ourselves. If we are people of good character, individuals of integrity who are genuinely interested in the success and wellness of others, then in our being and becoming, we are more likely to receive social recognition for how we learn, live, lead, and work. We need to work through the best way to gain appropriate social recognition...
DISPOSITION TOWARDS CAREER
We need to adopt an approach to establishing and maintaining our career development progress – how we set and achieve goals in our career so we can grow in our character, competencies, and wellness, while also attending to the practical requirements for looking after ourselves and those who share our lives. We need to work through the best ways to boost our disposition towards career...
EVALUATION AND ASSESSMENT SKILLS
Our judgment is perhaps the most important tool of our trade that we will ever need. All of us need a way to be able to work out what is the right thing to do, the right way to do it, the right time to change direction, the right time to bring something to a conclusion. We will need to learn to use both a combination of the intuitive on-the-spot or snap judgment which we can use to establish what is most likely to be the correct answer, as well as the longer-term evidence-based process by which we might test this initial answer and adjust our approach based on what we are discovering along the way...
SOCIAL IMPACT
What do we bring to our world? Each of us is unique. Each of us has a purpose and value that underlines everything we do. Each of us of has the potential to add to the character of our community. Working to create positive social impact is about accepting that all of these statements can and should apply to us. And we need to accept the responsibility that flows from this, as well as the capacity to bring benefit to the lives of others in accordance with our sense of social purpose...
WORK EXPERIENCE AND INTERNSHIPS
The sequence of growth in our professional career is defined by taking the opportunities that present themselves to us. Further opportunities may also be engineered and manifested by us. Rarely are we ever spoon-fed any opportunity to prove ourselves or our abilities to contribute to an organisation. We need to identify how we might provide an ongoing demonstration of character, competency, and capacity in our personal and professional lives...