Is there any better feeling than choosing your own goal (desire/want...) and then pursuing it with total certainty of success?

The mind is clear and focused, energy levels are running at optimum and a resilience is present to reassure you that you can overcome any challenge or obstacle in your path, you feel good about yourself and your future life.

Contrast this scenario with how you feel when someone else sets you a goal that frankly you don't think you have a chance of completing successfully - bored, frustrated, overwhelmed, angry, fearful...

How can you manage the challenge of balancing desires with expectations?

There are only two approaches available:

1. The first and by far the most common is to downplay your personal desires and avoid setting ambitious goals in order to protect yourself from the risk of failure and the negative feelings that accompany it.

2. The second and more challenging approach is to create a purposeful vision for your life and break this down into short term goals that stretch you but do not extend too far beyond your current levels of expectation.

The majority of offenders have very low levels of positive expectation. They expect to be judged negatively, they expect the doors of opportunity to be closed to them, they expect life to continue to be a real struggle...

That is why the New Horizon Programme has been designed to inspire the participants to raise their expectations for themselves and their future life. Raising hope, re-building self worth, appreciating existing strengths... are all critical elements of breaking the cycle of reoffending.
 
By supporting each participant in authoring their own PACT, they perhaps for the first time ever experience setting personal goals that are meaningful to them and most importantly with the right support and encouragement become goals that they can grow to really believe in.

When expectations can be set at positive on a consistent basis. wonderful changes take place.
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The primary driver for every human being is to love and be loved, but within a judgmental society like our own our youngsters quickly learn from experience that love appears to be most often conditional:

"If you behave like this you are lovable, but if you don't you are not!"
So every child is left trying to navigate through the myriad of conditions presented to them by the adult authority figures in their lives - parents, family members, carers, teachers, role models, police...etc - Now if these authority figures could all agree and remain consistent on the conditions required to be lovable then 'conditional love' might prove effective and the child might stand a chance, but they don't.

Constantly being judged and criticised for failing to live up to the expectations of others that are present in every moment, rapidly erodes the natural sense of self-worth that every child is born with. A fear of failure and rejection blossoms, and the natural, child-like excitement of potentially thriving in this world starts to fade, to be replaced by pure survival as the primary goal for life's journey.

Too much thought and attention becomes focused on what is not wanted, in the flawed belief that 'pushing against what is not wanted' will minimise the likelihood of experiencing it. There is very little precious time spent focusing on what really is wanted and even where it does occur, the attention of the untrained emphasises the absence of what is wanted, reinforced by the increasingly established belief that 'I am not good enough' to deserve it anyway.

Hope is rapidly extinguished, trust in others diminishes and any authority figure can become the common enemy. Expectations of a hard life ahead are reinforced continually and the pain of unachieved desires is avoided by setting expectations unnaturally low.  Comfort is sought with those encountering similar challenges (e.g. gangs) or the individual unconsciously sets their compass on survival at any cost...

This is but one example of how our society maintains the perfect breeding ground for the next young offender
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