One of the core skills most coaches deal with is goal setting. It seems relatively straight forward, yet most of us and our clients find it hard to achieve the goals we’ve set, so let’s take a good look at why that is and what we can do about it. The most common model for goal-setting is represented by the acronym SMART – specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time based. The other element that is usually stressed is that the goal should be positive; for instance, instead of saying “I will lose 20 pounds,” one might say, “I will have a stable, healthy weight of 12 stone.
“Specific” and “measurable” basically go together, and in certain arenas measuring is easy: money, weight, blood pressure, etc. Measuring other goals is more difficult because they are subjective – creativity, relaxation, or assertiveness, for instance. In some instances, a subjective scale works fine. For example, on a scale of 0 -10 how relaxed you feel? It’s very easy to put a number to a feeling. If the client finds it hard to come up with a subjective measurement, another alternative is to ask what behaviours would reflect the attainment of their desired state. We can ask, “What would you see and what would you hear if you were at your desired level of creativity?” Depending on their chosen fields, clients may use indicators such as number of words written, number of paintings generated or number of new ideas generated, etc.
It turns out that our teachers were on to something when they gave out gold stars or created charts using little rockets on a bulletin board to show our typing speed increasing. For a lot of people, charting or otherwise recording their progress is highly motivational. It’s also a good way to monitor whether or not the measures they are taking are working.
Usually “achievable” is defined as something that somebody else has been able to do – which raises the question of whether pre – Roger Bannister running the four-minute mile would have been considered an unachievable goal. “Realistic” relates to whether it’s something that you can reasonably expect to be able to do. That sounds fine until you remember George Bernard Shaw’s quote: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” This is not to say that it’s a mistake to consider whether a goal is do-able, just that setting the bar too low will de-motivate anybody who has a grand vision. Of course a grand vision is sometimes a delusion but in general it seems a good idea to encourage these visions as long as they can be broken down into manageable chunks.
One effective strategy is to formulate the goal as a hero’s journey using the model developed by the late Joseph Campbell in his book, The Hero With A Thousand Faces. he discovered that many myths have elements in common and he reduced it to what he called the monomyth. The fact is that there is something heroic about deciding what you want from life and then going for it, whether that’s in the area of health, career, family, community, education, or spiritual. If we can frame the goal in that way, especially from the beginning, it can be highly motivational.
A familiar quote in the self-development field is, “A goal without a deadline is only a wish.” I think that’s a very destructive notion. Deadlines can work fine when what needs to be done is totally under the control of the person setting the goal. For example, if I want to reach a certain healthy weight I may decide to achieve this by eating certain things and exercising for a particular period of time every day, and my deadline for reaching the target weight may be a month from now. As long as I have been accurate in gauging the effects of my new diet and exercise, and as long as I stick to the programme, the odds that I will attain the goal are very good. I may have a problem about following it through, but they won’t be caused by the deadline. The solution to deadline problems is to set the only deadline that matters : when the goal is reached. We can set deadlines for our own efforts, but the ultimate deadline is “whenever we’ve done whatever it takes to get done.”
Naturally this doesn’t mean that we just keep on doing what we’ve been doing, because if it’s not working then continuing to do it is not progress. We need to be smart and make our only deadline the achievement of the goal, we may end up changing strategies a number of times before we reach it. When one method doesn’t work it’s not a failure, it’s a learning experience. The only way we can fail is to stop trying.
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