Last week, Head-of-Charter Patrick Wilson was a guest speaker for teacher Kaitlin Morgan's Minarets Cs classes. Wilson’s presentation started with some information about himself before transitioning into the main body of his talk: goal setting.
“Change is going to happen” is what Wilson told the class of freshman, and even if it seems simple enough there’s more to the message, “It is whether you’re gonna control the change or are you going to let others control the change”. Educating kids on change, he went on to the difference between what distinguishes a pro from an amateur, “Amateurs have to be told what to do, pros don’t” and used this point to stress the importance of our school’s motto “Go Big, Go Pro, Go Now” with how maybe not every student sees what it actually represents.
Quoting Eleanor Roosevelt, “Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people”, he discussed the steps to goal setting as a means to create success within the students. Having a goal length and range on each goal in mind that you want to accomplish will significantly help ensure you create the habits you want. “People who write down their goals are 2x as likely to achieve them”, stated Wilson, and began to give examples of how to write down your goals. By adding a time frame, whether it’s short term or long term, setting a range to how much you perform this new habit, and stacking your new habit on top of one that already exists you can easily solidify it (ex: I will read for 30 minutes every day after I come home from school, but for no longer than 45 minutes, for this week). And with that, you can build off of it by increasing your minimum to 45 minutes of reading and your max as an hour or add more times to perform the new habit, and so on.
Before he left, he gave us one last challenge and one I’d like to include for anyone reading this as well: “make a goal that helps someone else or makes the world a better place”.