Lifelong Learning Plan
Mission

I have both personal and professional reasons for wanting to develop a lifelong learning plan. I am in Clarksville, TN, near the Army post at Fort Campbell, Kentucky and am currently a federal employee—but my goal is, upon completing my Master Degree in Health Care Administration, to work in the Army Substance Abuse program. This is my goal because in my childhood I saw my mother struggle with substance abuse and experienced what it is like to grow up in that kind of environment. While she struggled with addiction, my brothers and I bounced from post to post—there was a lot of instability and we all suffered as a result of it. I would like to run a facility where the children of such situations can reside with their sole custody parent. It would be a facility that holistically treats the addicted parent and helps with providing the stability needed to raise children at the same time.

The steps that I need to take to achieve this goal are to complete my Master Degree program and then move on to obtaining my PHD in Health Care Administration. This will help me to focus on the current and developing issues in both general management and health care administration. It will also help me to form good habits of staying up to date on current literature and evidence based practice in the field of management and administration as well as in healthcare advances in treating substance abuse clients and their providing supportive services for their families. I also want to practice more with holistic care and healing and integrative care wherein I work with other healthcare specialists to make sure all clients’ needs are being met. To do this, I will be pursuing a job in the Army Substance Abuse program and will express my desires to the administrator there to launch or take part in integrative care delivery.

Environment

 I plan on staying in the area as there is a lot of work to be done here in terms of facilitating and developing the Army Substance Abuse program and I have put down some roots here; however, I am willing to go wherever the Army needs me. Just working in the Substance Abuse program is the main thing and getting the permission and support to develop and launch the facility I have planned for families is the ultimate goal. The environment I see myself being involved in for the next ten years is thus one with structure and organization, which is how I see the Army.

Vision

Maxwell’s (1998) 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership will be the guiding the management book that provides the basis for my understanding/approaches as a manager. It looks at how to win over followers and identifies 21 specific factors that make great leaders. Some of it is ability, some of it is influence, some of it is the adherence to the process of development, and some of it is vision. A good point that Maxwell (1998) makes is that leaders have to be secure enough to give power to others. Leaders who are micro-managers will never succeed long term because they do not empower others but rather try to control them. That is not the recipe for a healthy, functioning team. Leaders aim instead to raise up other leaders. Leaders also get others to buy into them first and then they get them to buy into the vision. Finding a way to win, tapping into where the momentum is heading, prioritizing to make action meaningful and knowing when other actions are meaningless and wasteful—all these are qualities of a leader in Maxwell’s (1998) opinion, and none of them are wrong. Also, knowing when to lead and knowing how to lead followers as well as other leaders is essential to growth. True leadership is not something that can be contained in a simple statement or book. Leadership is complex and there is no one-size-fits-all approach to it (Northouse, 2016). As Stogdill (1948) notes there are many different personal factors that can be associated with leadership, from personality traits to background to experience and so on.

The guiding healthcare book that provides the basis for my understanding/approaches/actions in the health care arena will be Freeman’s (2001) book Substance Abuse Intervention, Prevention, Rehabilitation, and Systems Change: Helping Individuals, Families, and Groups to Empower Themselves. This book covers a lot of ground and goes over the different ways in which healthcare and social workers can better address the needs...…have too many classes or my workload is too much and I am not getting enough time in with my family then it will require an adjustment either with my strategies or tactics. I will assess the strategies to see if they are helping me to reach my objectives by giving myself a six month time frame of analysis and then analyzing the data with stakeholders to see what their interpretation is. If an adjustment is needed with tactics or strategies it will be made at that point.

Risk Factors

There are many risks associated but with wanting to have a goal of opening a facility like the one I have envisioned. It will require guidance and investment, and it will require evidence based practice to show that it is a feasible design. This means there needs to be studies that have been done that show how effective this sort of enterprise can be, but if this is the only facility like it then it will likely be the trial facility and will serve as a proof of concept. It could turn out that it does not work, but in science that is not necessarily a failure, it is simply evidence that can be used to develop a better model of care.

Risk factors in my own lifelong planning program consist of issues with family, work and school. External risk factors like the COVID-19 crisis have made everything harder for many people, and so there are a lot of new demands on everybody at this time. Families are home more and need more care, and some people are laid off work while others are overwhelmed as is the case in the healthcare industry. So there is a lot of compassion and care that is needed at this time.

Other risk factors include not having enough money saved up to prevent stress and worry about whether I can make it through all my schooling, or what the needs of my family might be. To mitigate this factor, I can start saving now and to mitigate against other issues I can start planning with my family so that we all know ahead of time what our needs are going to be in any given situation.

References

Freeman, E. (2001). Substance Abuse…