Over the last several Leadership Lab pieces, we’ve been describing a broad constellation of measures we recommend people use in their leader development work. In this installment, we’re going to turn to a construct closely related to the subject of our last Leadership Lab. However, where last time we discussed self-concept clarity (SCC)—the clear sense of who you are—this time we’re discussing aspirational self-clarity[RB1] —your sense of who you want to become.
While many people talk about the importance of knowing who you want to become in the future, there hasn’t been a concrete measure—or even a particularly clear definition—of what this actually means.
Given our work at the Doerr Institute, which seeks to develop college students into leaders, we felt it was important to have such a measure. So, with the help of colleagues at other institutions, we developed the aspirational self-clarity (ASC) scale and recently published it in the Journal of Personality Assessment.
Like its cousin, the SCC, the ASC isn’t an essential measure in every leader development setting. However, it can be especially valuable in developmental work that is identity-based, purpose-driven, and goal-oriented.
It’s also a construct that we’ve been examining internally at the Doerr Institute for a long time, and we’ve been able to observe it across several contexts, including our Activation program, in which students receive a semester of professional leadership coaching, and programs that equip students to use coaching skills in their own leadership approaches.\
At the same time, aspirational self-clarity remains a new construct, and even with a published measure now available, it’s still something we’re continuing to observe and learn about—which makes it especially exciting to discuss.
Defining Aspirational Self-Clarity
We define aspirational self-clarity as the extent to which a person’s vision of their desired future self is certain, well-defined, and consistently held. Put more simply, having high aspirational self-clarity means that you actually know and have a consistent idea of who you want to become—i.e., you can define it, describe it, and elaborate on it.
Aspirational self-clarity doesn’t show up as vaguely positive statements about future development like “I want to grow as a person” or “I want to become a leader.” Instead, high aspirational self-clarity means that someone can say what “growth” or “leadership” actually means to them and what that looks like in their lives,
Importantly, aspirational self-clarity doesn’t require a person to have only one future self. Just like people can have different roles and identities in the present (e.g., a parent, a friend, a professional dog walker), they can also hold different aspirational selves across different parts of their life. Indeed, those aspirational selves might even be “contingent selves,” with two mutually exclusive future selves being held in tandem and dependent on external events. For example, a medical student might have multiple clear aspirational selves that depend on what residency they match into. Those futures are mutually exclusive—the med student won’t do both an orthopedic surgery and internal medicine residency at the same time—but still clear, meaningful, and internally coherent.
This is why aspirational self-clarity isn’t just about ambitions, preferences, or “dreams,” but is instead about a vision of the self that is concrete enough to guide behavior and shape personal development. It’s the kind of self-understanding that allows people to set goals, organize their efforts, and evaluate their progress in their journey toward who they want to become. Indeed, our research has shown that not only is high aspirational self-clarity consistently associated with markers of wellbeing, such as life satisfaction and self-esteem, but it is also uniquely predictive of indicators of a growth orientation above and beyond clarity of the current self.
Our research on aspirational self-clarity shows that while many people want to improve themselves and have hopes for their future, fewer people have a clear and stable vision for who they want to become. And that clarity (or lack of clarity) regarding the desired future self turns out to be really important.
Besides all this, it’s also important to note that aspirational self-clarity is not inherently positive, prosocial, or “good.” Having a clear sense of who you want to become doesn’t guarantee that you want to become someone healthy, wise, or compassionate. Indeed, you might have a clear, definite, stable vision of your future self as a supervillain and still score high on a measure like the ASC.
Aspirational Self-Clarity and Leader Development
Not all leader development deals with identity or the future self; sometimes it’s simply about gaining specific knowledge, skills, and abilities. However, when leader development is identity-based—especially in settings like a university, where students are still forming both their sense of who they are and their sense of who they want to become—aspirational self-clarity can be a very important construct to understand and measure.
Importantly, though, aspirational self-clarity isn’t just for college students. Development isn’t a destination at which people “arrive.” It is an ongoing process. As people continue to grow, new ideals for the future self will emerge. Thus, when aspirational self-clarity increases alongside other indicators in a leader development program, we can be more confident that we’re not just developing current leadership skills, but setting a trajectory for future leadership growth.
At the same time, aspirational self-clarity is still a new construct, so we’re continuing to study how it develops. However, we already have some important clues. We’ve found that purpose articulation processes, which can be largely self-administered, are able to increase scores on the ASC scale, whereas simply setting goals does not appear to be enough.
Coaching also appears to be an especially powerful tool for building aspirational self-clarity. As we have tracked ASC scores in students who receive executive coaching—and even those who learn coaching skills themselves—we consistently see these scores increase over time.
Thus, while aspirational self-clarity remains an emerging area of work for us, it’s one that’s particularly rich and exciting!
Measuring Aspirational Self-Clarity
As you might imagine, this is an unusually easy Leadership Lab as far as recommending measures goes, given that we’ve only just published the ASC scale! We’ve included both the measure and a reference for it at the bottom of this piece.
As far as whether to measure aspirational self-clarity as an outcome of a particular initiative, I have a few suggestions. First, aspirational self-clarity is especially worth measuring in identity-focused developmental programs. If you’re trying to help people develop into someone new, then it’s useful to understand how clearly and concretely they can envision the person they want to become. This makes many coaching programs a natural fit for measuring aspirational self-clarity. The same is true for programs that involve a heavy dose of self-reflection, future-self work, or purpose articulation—all can benefit from understanding the degree to which people’s aspirational selves are made clearer as a result of an intervention you have designed.
On the other hand, aspirational self-clarity is less likely to be essential in settings that focus on narrow skill training or specific challenges less directly relevant to identity. In such settings, especially when survey space is limited, aspirational self-clarity might not be worth prioritizing.
Conclusion
People have long spoken about the importance of knowing who you want to become, and the ASC scale gives us a way to empirically measure that concept. Thus, while there’s still much to learn about how aspirational self-clarity manifests, develops, and interacts with other constructs, we’re already seeing its utility in our own leader development programs. And in any developmental context focused on who people are becoming, that makes the ASC a measure worth consideration.
The Aspirational Self-Clarity Scale:
- I am confident in my sense of who I want to become in the future.
- On one day I might have one notion of who I want to be, and on another day I might have a different notion. [reverse coded]
- In general, I have a clear sense of what my ideal self looks like.
- When I think about the kind of person I would like to be in the future, I’m not really sure who that is. [reverse coded]
- I have a clear image in mind for who I want to become.
- My desires regarding who I want to be change all the time. [reverse coded]
- I can easily describe who I want to be in ten years.
If using, please cite as: Brown, R. P., Hertel, A., Pomerantz, A. L., Lodi-Smith, J., Westmoreland, K., & Parsons, S. (in press). On knowing who you want to become: Validating a measure of aspirational self-clarity. Journal of Personality Assessment. https://doi.org/10.1080/00223891.2026.2650793
