Goal Setting Principals

By Karen Kleinwort ~ 12/22/2011

Last week I introduced you to Monica A Frank Ph.D with the first half of her article on Goal Setting. This week as promised I am presenting the last half of her article with "How Do You Develop Specific Goals".

Enjoy!

Guide to How to Set Achievable Goals

By Monica A. Frank, Ph.D.

HOW DO YOU DEVELOP SPECIFIC GOALS?

Develop specific goals. If goals are vague and unclear, they are not reachable. However, you also don't want to become discouraged by a goal that is too specific. Sometimes this may be based upon personality. One person may set a goal and if they don't achieve it in the specified time they just change the goal using what they learned from the process to improve the goal, whereas another person may set the same goal but become discouraged if they don't meet it in the specified time. Therefore, be as specific as your personality allows. For instance, it may be better in a weight loss plan to specify "I'm going to reduce the amount of sweets I eat" rather than specify a certain amount of weight to lose.

1) Long-term goals. Identify specific long-term goals. These are usually similar to the dream goal you imagined but they may be more specific. For instance, if your dream goal is to open a retail shop, your long-term goals may involve finding and renting the space, finishing the interior, purchasing the products, and hiring and training the employees.

2) Short-term goals. Once you have identified the long-term goals you can develop short-term goals to help you achieve each long-term goal. Using the retail shop example above, you may have short-term goals of researching the area where you want to open the shop to determine the competition, the availability of space, and the need or interest for your product.

3) Practice goals and competition goals. In sports and other activities involving competition, you want to develop goals for practice that will help you to meet your competition goals. For instance, I am currently training for a local stair-climb competition that raises money for the American Lung Association. My competition goal is to climb the 42 flights in less than 10 minutes this year (last year was 11:34). My practice goals involve gradually increasing the number of stairs I run in an allotted amount of time (usually 20 minutes).

Set target dates.

Develop strategies for achieving goals. Once you have developed the goals, you need to create a specific, concrete plan for achieving those goals. These strategies are a specific description of what you are going to do to achieve the goals as well as to evaluate the goals. The specific strategies should include daily tasks as well as longer-term plans.

If your goal is to reduce the amount of sweets you eat, what are the specific methods you will you to do that? Perhaps, you plan to write down all the sweets you eat so that you are aware of how much you eat which may, in turn, reduce the amount of sweets you consume. Or you may choose to remove sweets from your immediate vicinity so that it's more difficult to find them.

Develop support network for achieving goals. When I taught smoking cessation classes for the American Heart Association we instructed our classes to develop a goal with a quit date that they shared with other people they knew would be supportive. By sharing the goal, they developed a support network of people who were likely to check with them about their progress. This increased the likelihood of them quitting cigarettes. However, if your support network is critical and negative, you may find that sharing reduces motivation and success.

Develop plan for goal evaluation. Finally, you need a method to help you evaluate the goals you have set. The plan may keep track of progress, or it may need to determine if the strategies actually work towards accomplishing the goals, or it may need to examine what factors block the goal achievement. This part of the process becomes easier if you set measurable goals initially. The more comprehensive the evaluation, the more it allows you to modify goals or change strategies to achieve the desired outcome. One thing I always loved about behavior therapy that I tell my clients "There is no such thing as failure. There are so many different ways to achieve your goals, that each time something doesn't work it just gives us information to develop strategies that are more likely to work."

Example of implementing this procedure. I have the goal of developing my website. Currently, approximately 2500 people a month visit this site. My long-term goal is to attract 20,000 people a month within the next year. To achieve that goal I have developed short-term goals. One of my strategies for achieving this goal became one of my short-term goals which is to write two articles each week so that in a year I will have over 100 articles posted on this site. To write that many articles I needed to delineate particular times for me to write. I chose times during which I typically am most alert and motivated so as to increase the likelihood that I would follow the plan. Now the strategy I chose of writing two articles a week to increase traffic to my site might not work. So I've developed another short-term goal of examining Google Analytics monthly to determine if the number of visitors is increasing as the number of articles increase. If I find that the strategy doesn't work, I can then develop different goals or modify my goals and strategies for them to become more effective. I'll tell you in 2011 whether this worked.