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By David CM Carter
The UK government’s focus on adult lifelong learning is welcome. Everyone should indeed have the opportunity to actualise their potential, their entelechy.
However, having slid from #1 to #30 in global league tables of productivity over the last 40 years, the UK needs to quickly wake up and accept Einstein’s wisdom that ‘doing the same thing, over and over again, expecting a different result’ is the definition of insanity.
The problems of work readiness identified by the CBI are a matter of Character, not skills. Character is the foundation of our success in all areas of life. If we can learn how to be better, we will do better by extension. For that to happen, our innate Character needs to be unlocked.
The barrier to unleashing this potential is a lack of an appropriate structure to aid educationalists. The Entelechy approach, based on years of research, codifies Character, soft skills, and behaviours for the first time. It is a framework of 54 Character Qualities that define what we need to evolve, to become our best self.
Entelechy has codified the 77 soft skills demanded by employers as ‘missing’ and mapped the 54 Character Qualities against them, that underpin their development.
The Entelechy innovation is the teaching of Character Qualities – in their own right.
The Entelechy disruption is to how they are taught. With Character Qualities, such as kind, adaptable, resilient, accountable, and reliable, the Entelechy heutagogy not only assesses that the learner understands what each one means (which is how they are taught and assessed today) but more importantly assesses that the learner ‘becomes’ more kind, adaptable, resilient, accountable, and reliable – and that these new behaviours are validated by two 3rd party qualified and appropriate assessors.
What sets ‘the best’ above ‘the rest’?
Its three simple things:
The capabilities to achieve our entelechy – the best version of ourselves – is a combination of ‘dreams’, ‘skills’ and ‘character’.
Some believe that a skill is something you learn, but your character is something you are born with. Moreover, the character that you are born with will result in it being easier (or harder) to learn skills.
We believe that we all have the same set of innate capabilities to develop ‘skills’ and ‘character’ and its working on both, that sets apart the ‘best’ from ‘the rest’. Character can be learned – just like any skill. Character capability is innate in all of us and it’s easy to unlock and develop.
When people start thinking about the skills they need for the future, they often miss out on thinking about who they are and need to become.
Here are some steps to imagining and becoming your desired FUTURE SELF:
Dr. Daniel Gilbert, a Harvard psychologist, found that people don’t do a very good job predicting their future, not because they can’t… but because they don’t! The reason why, from Gilbert’s research, is that very few people spend much time imagining their future selves. They assume that who they are today is who they’ll always be.
If we asked 1m people to comment on the thesis above, that the 3 simple things that are required to achieve success are a) a dream b) skills and c) character I am sure that 90% would agree. Despite agreeing, 90 per cent would normally do nothing about it. We can help the 90% become like the 10% who resonate with the new information and become lifelong learners. To do things to become a better version of themselves. To develop their entelechy through character.
David Carter is CEO of Entelechy Academy
