Toolkit: Inner Development Goals

💡 Fantastic resource! The Sustainable Development Goals are great, but so often technical solutions and policies alone aren’t enough. Maybe we need to look to ourselves and think about our own inner skills and capacities. What about Inner Development Goals?

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The Inner Development Goals (IDGs) were developed out of a coalition non-profit focused on personal inner development. The guidance helps identify the inner skills and qualities that help people work more effectively toward the SDGs.

The goals were launched in 2021 after surveying 1,000+ experts, CEOs, researchers, and practitioners worldwide. And since, the framework has grown into a Guide covering 25 skills across 5 dimensions.

Where the SDGs describe what outer change is needed (climate action, equality, sustainable cities etc.) the IDGs describe the inner capacities that make that change achievable:
🔹 Being: self-awareness, presence, inner compass
🔹 Thinking: critical thinking, complexity awareness, perspective-taking
🔹 Relating: empathy, compassion, connectedness
🔹 Collaborating: communication, trust, co-creation
🔹 Acting: courage, creativity, perseverance

Without these, technical and policy solutions alone tend to be too slow, too fragile, or too short-lived.

Thanks to Rebecca Wolf for sharing these with me!

What do you think about these goals?