New Year, New (SMART) Goals…
Goals are something I talk about with all my clients. Starting from session one all the way until the last session, goals will be what focus our time together in therapy and help to provide a roadmap to a final destination so we know where we are headed and how we will get there. Goals are important because they help to give us things to work towards that matter to us. Goals are rooted in our values. Even if we don’t know what those values are, the goals we set can point to the values we deem the most important. Values represent things that matter to us, and goals help us make those values concrete and operational. Goals, also, help us to build emotional resiliency and, thus, better emotion regulation. When we work on our values, we build positive experiences over the long term and these experiences help to increase positive emotions over the long term, thus increasing better emotion regulation.
The problem is most people struggle to set effective goals. So, how do you set an effective goal?
An effective goal needs to meet five requirements.
1. It needs to be Specific
2. It needs to be Measurable
3. It must be Attainable or Achievable
4. Make sure it is Relevant
5. It needs to be Time-limited
In other words, it should be SMART. SMART goals are an excellent way to structure and organize a goal. I know what you might be thinking…What does all this mean and how do I do it? Let me explain and break it down in ways that might be easier to understand. When I first heard about SMART goals, I really resisted using them. That was mostly because I didn’t understand how to use them or see the value in them. As a big-picture thinker, details can become overwhelming and extraneous to me. However, as they say, the devil is in the details. If you don’t know what that means, think back to the last time you set out to do something, and failed to plan appropriately, only to find things quickly go off the rails. Still don’t know what I mean? Does “fail to plan and plan to fail” make things clearer? Maybe now you are starting to understand the value in SMART goals.
If you have ever struggled with staying consistent with setting a goal and seeing it through, it could be that you just didn’t know how to structure it. SMART goals can help. Let’s use an example to illustrate this. I am sitting at home eating take out for NYE and realize that I have spent most of 2024 eating take out. Last time I checked, paying Uber Eats, wasn’t the best way to invest money. I decide that I would like to learn how to cook in 2025 as way to save money and learn a new skill (Values represented: Financial security, creativity, self-development). I set a goal to learn how to cook. Well, that’s a good start, but when it comes time to begin working on this goal, I don’t know how to start or what to work on exactly. Am I learning to cook certain recipes or am I just picking and choosing at random? Do I take a cooking class? I also don’t know how often I am working on this goal or for how long. How do I know when I have learned how to cook? Is it when I master certain recipes or when I can cook without a recipe? I don’t know how I measure my success or when I might need to adjust the goal. Because of this, I quickly become overwhelmed and after a week of haphazard cooking, I resort to eating girl dinners (popcorn, sliced cheese, and cashews, anyone?) or ordering from Uber Eats or Skip the Dishes. What went wrong? Was I just not disciplined enough or am I just doomed to a life of TV dinners, KD and hot dogs and popcorn? The problem was not me or my effort. The problem was the goal itself.
To begin with, it was not specific enough. I didn’t know what I was actually working towards. Learning to cook is a great endeavor, it’s just not a great goal. The goal needed to be more specific. What am I working towards exactly? Your goal should tell you exactly what you will be doing as you work towards this goal in specific terms. I needed to narrow down what I wanted to learn to cook or what sort of cooking skill I wanted to learn. Maybe I wanted to learn to make Italian food (still too general), or I could learn to make one new recipe a week (winner winner chicken dinner!). Now we have a specific goal: I am going to learn to make one new recipe a week.
Additionally, this goal is Measurable. I can measure my success by whether or not I learn a new recipe every week. Is this goal Attainable? Yes, for me, this is a reasonable goal. I can try the recipe one night or two nights to give me some practice and still not feel overwhelmed or get sick of eating enchiladas twice in the same week. This goal is Relevant to me because it is important, as I want to improve my cooking skills and save money. Lastly, I can make this goal Time-Limited by giving myself a starting and ending point. I will learn to make one new recipe a week starting this week for the next 6 weeks. *Chef’s Kiss* We have a perfectly structured goal.
Here are some other important tips when setting and working towards goals:
Have a way to track your progress: Visual tools work best. Create a sheet or calendar that you post up somewhere you will see it every day and track your progress daily.
Evaluate how you are doing week to week: Don’t wait until the time is up to evaluate how you are doing as this does not give you any opportunities to adjust.
Don’t be afraid to adjust your goal: Did you quickly realize you started out too ambitiously with your goal and won’t be able to maintain the pace? Don’t be afraid to adjust. You can always scale back and make it more manageable. Adjusting your goal is always better than abandoning it completely.
Start small: Don’t set too big of a goal or too many goals at once. Baby steps make for consistent progress. When you start too big and can’t complete the goal, you increase the sense of shame around not being able to meet the goal. This makes it harder to re-attempt the goal as you now have the added sense of previous failure. However, small steps are more likely to bring about success and when we have success (no matter how small) the desired behavior is now reinforced, and reinforced behavior gets repeated.
If you don’t meet your goal, re-evaluate what went wrong and try again: If the goal is relevant enough to you, it is worth giving it another shot. (Something important to consider, goals that are not relevant to you, even though they may be relevant to someone close to you, will not be meaningful enough to you and you most likely won’t stick to it because it doesn’t really match values that are important to you).
As you think about your new goals this year, try putting them into SMART goals and see how you do. I’d love to hear about your goals for the new year. What are you working towards? Stay tuned. In the coming days, I will be sharing a couple of my new goals for the year and how I am using SMART goals to help.
