Goal-Setting
As a tool for organization, not motivation
What is one the biggest values we add to our clients?
The ability to help our clients organize their mindset and strategies.
The Role of Goal-Setting
No matter what our clients come to us with, I always find it ironic that we find ourselves needing to organize our thoughts before we do anything else. This holds true for clients who are just trying to optimize their performance or clients who are dealing with real struggles.
Because of this, I find myself using goal-setting as an organizational tool. It has become part of the organizational process and I don’t even teach it formally anymore.
What’s the problem?
In order to solve that, what are our priorities?
In order to address these areas, what are our routines and strategies?
It has become part of the process vs. a specific “skill” that should be taught. This is an on-going conversation as a template to help us establish and monitor a plan.
WHY DOES IT MATTER?
As a field we talk about goal-setting in two ways:
SMART Goals
Process-Performance-Outcome
What do these processes lack? We continue to miss on what it means to build “processes” for clients. Various SMART goal acronyms, still do not teach us how to help athletes break out of the “outcome” focused mentality. In addition, separating goals into process-performance-outcome also leaves us falling short. Even the seminole authors of goal-setting (i.e. Lock and colleagues) have stated how goal-setting doesn’t help us address complex issues by themselves. But that doesn’t mean it’s not needed - it just means it needs a bit of repurposing and keeping a couple considerations in mind when we use goals.
THE PATH AHEAD
So much of our work is helping clients organize their approaches and thought processes. Goal-setting can really help us do that, but one of my favorite implementations of goal-setting is to help athletes establish two things:
Priorities
Routines
Helping athletes establish priorities, breaks things into manageable parts. Developing routines to grow or address each priority area, helps cultivate a more process-oriented mindset. Neither of which requiring a formal lecture on “goal-setting”, but making goal-setting part of the planning process. The best part of this approach is that goal-setting allows us to organize our full repertoire of skills and concepts. In a previous article, I discussed how I designed a new SMART goal acronym to account for change strategies and support (see article SMART Goals ). The point is, although goal-setting by itself falls short on complex topics, we can still use it to its full potential by having goal-setting models help us organize a solid game plan.
A game-plan that not only organizing client needs, but the various skills/strategies and support options for clients - without having to make it a formal presentation. Just some food for thought.
What have been some of your creative approaches with goal-setting?
Love the idea of tying in, identity. Great way to lean into values and drivers as well. I actually hadn't thought of that approach with goal-setting and I think it is much more meaningful than just solely reflecting on values which I have seen done in other models.
One additional piece I've added to the outcome-performance-process framework is identity. I do this with some athletes and some general mental health people as well. I have used it by stated letting them i.d. the outcome they want, "To place at state" "To make this team" etc... but then we go a step deeper and I ask them to think about why they want that outcome. Inevitably I've been able to move the person to a place where they realize they really want to be the kind of person who is skilled enough to place at State or make this elite team or whatever. So we discuss the need to be clear about who they want to be, and then work back to what that kind of person would do. Too many people I think start with the what to do, hoping it will translate into the who they are, but really we need to start with identity, and then it becomes easier to I.D. the processes/strategies/etc that a person like that would do.