Mastering Your Ambitions: A Guide to Setting and Achieving Goals

With the beginning of a new year many of us are looking ahead at the year to set goals or ambitions for the year - whether personal or professional!

Raise your hand if you have ever set new year resolutions to break them in the first month, week or day! #guilty

One thing seems to be clear, we all desire to be or do better at something (even if its simply perfecting perfection!). So how do we accomplish this? We like to approach personal and professional goal setting similarly to how we set and achieve goals with our individuals and families in therapy!

Feeling overwhelmed? If you aren't in a space to plan the big picture skip to the bottom and review our simplified plan!

Step 1: Know your why - what are we working towards? what will the long term impact be and why is that important to you?

Step 2: Clearly define your goals. Consider dividing your goals into long-term (more than a few months, or goals that require focus on more than one thing) and short-term (can be accomplished in a few days, weeks or possibly a month or two).

If it's a long-term goal, break that down into multiple steps or short-term goals. In ABA we call this a task analysis.
For short term goals you may even consider identifying what in SLP we call "sub-steps" to identify smaller, more manageable steps.
Consider the language in your goal.
1. Are you trying to STOP doing something? Rephrase this to the replacement behaviour you are going to START doing, or do more of.
2. Does your goal allow for life to happen or account for obstacles? If your goal requires perfection to meet it, is it truly achievable?
3. Your mindset can be tied to your language (external or subvocal) - have you ever signed up for a volunteer position and then talked about it as something you have to do, as opposed to something you want to do or get to do to fulfill your ultimate goal or your why? Language can be so powerful!
Turn your goals into SMART statements. Goals should be:

We also recommend checking in with yourself about whether your goals are physically and psychologically sustainable. If they aren't, they don't meet "attainable" and you may need to break your goal down even further, or revise your goal.

Step 3: Identify the resources, skills and/or supports you need to achieve your goal

Step 4: Identify what will keep you motivated - this can be the hardest part!

Identify reinforcement that is:
1. Meaningful to you
2. In line with your goals
  1. Spoiler alert: rewarding yourself with food when you are working towards mindful eating habits is not as helpful as you may think! Similarly, rewarding yourself with an expensive vacation for paying down debt is also counteractive to your long term goal of financial freedom)
Consider reinforcement that is tied to achieving your sub-goals or goals (contingent), as well as rewards that you can enjoy anytime to reinforce your efforts along the way (non-contingent).
Consider social reinforcement through recognition from friends, family or a mentor who can cheer you on, provide accountability and encouragement!
Consider getting creative with reinforcement - pair something you like with something you are trying to learn to like (e.g., listen to music when you workout or study) or add a habit into your established routine (e.g., take your vitamins before you brush your teeth).

Step 5: Track your progress - this doesn't need to be super detailed, but you should be able to identify when you are making progress, plateauing or heading in the opposite direction of your goal so you can adjust when needed.

Consider using apps to track your progress, for example:
1. Habits: trying to establish a new habit in your daily or weekly routine? Try out a habit tracker app!
2. Health: trying to establish healthier habits related to fitness or health - there are apps for that!
3. Skills: many new skills like learning a new language may track your progress for you as you progress through lessons
Consider the final product - if your goal is to knit 3 scarves your progress is tracked by what you are producing.
Consider sampling your progress every so often instead of every time you complete the target task. For example, if wanting to increase how many push-ups you can do, you could sample your progress once a month while you cross train instead of tracking this specific skill daily or weekly)
Consider chunking your data across time. For example, if your goal is to increase how many books you read, and you read large books, tracking every week may not be as exciting as tracking monthly or quarterly, or comparing across years.
Consider using a journal, data sheet or workbook to track and reflect on your goals. We included some FREE trackers and worksheets for you to checkout.

Note: A lot of times the PROCESS is just as important, if not more important, than the outcome.

We see this a lot of times in clinical practice where goals have been met but the process to get there relied on something arbitrary like memorization and doesn't allow for sustainable long term progress - raise your hand if you ever used a pneumonic to memorize a diagram in science class and didn't actually learn the concepts or retain any of the information past the test/exam... but we digress.

Step 6: Problem Solve! When challenges arise:

What can you learn about yourself?
If you've identified a barrier you didn't know about or recognize previously how can you plan to overcome it?
How are you going to adjust to meet your long-term goals and stick to your why?
Are there skills you need to improve to help you reach your goals?

And for those times where life gets in the way and you just want to start somewhere, here is a simplified approach to goal setting that will help you reinforce closer approximations as you work to achieve your goal(s):

We can't wait to hear about all the goals you achieve this year!