Life Goals

Life Goals boosts young people’s confidence in their own strengths and their belief that they can handle difficult situations and challen- ges successfully by themselves.

The starting situation: a lack of confidence and doubts in one’s own self-efficacy

Three-in-ten do not believe they can improve their performance at school or master difficult situations.

Young people lacking in self-confidence and self-assurance less commonly believe that they can use their skills to change things in their environment as well as for themselves. While confident girls and boys set challenging goals and exhibit greater determination when attempting to achieve them, young people lacking this self-confidence believe that they are wasting their time and effort by investing in their own learning progress. This means that adolescents who lack confidence

in their own self-effectiveness less frequently develop their full potential or have opportunities to discover and experience their own strengths. What is even worse is that these girls and boys are at risk of becoming frustrated and disorientated, and of dropping out of the school system early, and they become more difficult to reach through appropriate educational measures later.

Socioeconomically disadvantaged young people are particularly affected by the resulting lack of participation in society. What’s required is a new understanding of successful leaning as well as space for the development of potential that fosters confidence in one’s own skills.

Our offer

Life Goals opens up this space. Children from schools with a high need for support develop their potentials in football-based competence training sessions while the coaches boost the young people’s confidence in their own strengths and skills. Participants develop competences such as motivation, autonomy and frustration management in a play-based way in 14 training units and put their own problem-solving processes to the test. The young people then share and discuss their experiences with the Life Goals coaches and integrate what they have learnt into their daily lives.

The participants learn how to name individual competences, strengthen their personalities, develop a realistic, dynamic self-image, and recognise their own areas of personal develop- ment. They use this self-assessment as well as the valuable competences obtained in the training units as orientation for their future careers and lives.

Within the framework of the priority project "Play Fair! - Together against Violence", funded by the Ministry of Sport, a special offer with new social competences for the prevention of violence and extremism was developed and implemented at schools and clubs.

The Life Goals Toolkit: Using the handbook to awaken football’s educational potential

Football is often used as a panacea for social, economic or political challenges. This regularly gives rise to the impression that merely playing football or membership of a football club alone leads to positive changes at the individual or social level. But concepts with a demonstrable impact are needed if football is to be used as a vehicle for social and sustainable change. The Life Goals Toolkit, sponsored by the Austrian Ministry of Sport, provides the tools for autonomously and effectively using football as a vehicle for positive individual or collective change.

It is aimed at trainers and educators seeking to empower young people to see themselves as active practitioners of their own learning while at the same time exploiting the unifying power of football. Life Goals thus facilitates not only football-related participation opportunities but also the formation and development of competencies through social learning.