<aside> ℹ️ CU Fellows are encouraged to adopt and fill out the Leadership Blueprint during the Fellowship and beyond. What is it and why is it useful to them? This document answers these questions.
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The "Leadership Blueprint" is an innovative personal development tool developed by Civics Unplugged to give people a digital home-base to document their leadership journey so far and chart the long road ahead.
The Leadership Blueprint helps people understand who they are and define who they strive to become. It does this by weaving together the many parts of someone's identity and aspirations into a single piece of digital fabric. The Blueprint empowers people to make identity development the evolutionary and purpose-driven activity that it was meant to be.
Self-awareness matters because your level of self-awareness sets the upper limit of your individual effectiveness. Documenting your aspirations matters because having a clear vision for the future helps you define productivity and success on short, medium, and long-term time horizons.
During the Civics Unplugged Fellowship, each Fellow will fill out different parts of their own Leadership Blueprint through a set of carefully developed exercises which we at CU call "Leadership Quests". Each Quest interrelates with other Quests and helps cultivate self-awareness and self-transformation.
The Blueprint is an essential component of the Civics Unplugged Fellowship curriculum. Civics Unplugged Fellows will be guided in how to fill out their own Leadership Blueprint through the course of the Fellowship. While the Blueprint was especially designed to facilitate the personal transformation of the program's Fellows, the Blueprint can be and has been successfully adopted by non-Fellows.
*"The Leadership Blueprint pushed me to acknowledge that my priorities, motivations, and goals were disconnected from my values and aspirations. Having a digital blueprint of my life has really helped me understand who I am and have the power to become."
The Blueprint design is based on insights from the latest science on: future-oriented visualization, values development and internalization, goal-oriented writing, self-reflection and self-awareness, cultivation of civic purpose, intrinsic goal-setting, positive psychology, wise interventions, accountability partners, ePortfolios, integrative learning, identity formation, self-directed learning, gratitude practices, mindfulness, systems thinking, curiosity, and more.
Overarching philosophical principles that have guided Blueprint design are: