At this point in the year, many of our goals for the new year have hit that predictable slide. Many years, I don’t even bother setting goals for myself because of the challenge of the keeping them up. But it doesn’t have to be like that. Goal setting and doing therapy have much in common, and there’s a method to both that’s worth taking some time to unpack so that we can make the most of both.
Becoming more specific
Have you ever tried to remove concrete that has been poured in the wrong spot? It’s back-breaking, sweat-inducing, tool-busting, colorful-word inspiring work. Concrete is solid stuff. It’s not wispy and hard to grasp like fog. Goals are much the same: they’re somewhere between rock solid and wispy as fog. Many of us come to a goal from a place of “I’ve had enough, something has to change,” but with little more detail than that. It’s a place of pain, not of clarity. We need to become more specific. This tries to take an abstract pain and make it more solid. When it’s solid, we can work with it.
A question I try to open every session of therapy with, right after we’ve had a chance to talk about whatever important thing bubbles up first, goes like this: “What would you like to walk away with from this session?” This is a calibrated question to start the process of taking the desire for therapy into a concrete, actionable goal that investigation and exercises can support measurable change with. A follow-up question can look like this: “If therapy was actually working for you, what kinds of changes would you expect to see in your life?”
Here we can take a goal from “I want to be less depressed” to “if I was less depressed I’d expect to have more energy, to have deeper relationships, to enjoy my activities again, and to take better care of myself. Taking better care of myself would involve showering more, even just every other day, and eating healthy foods. Healthy foods would mean foods that are fresh and have vegetables, fats, and proteins in them.” Notice how “better care of myself” could be more specific, and how “healthy foods” could be more specific.
Investigation
Describe the problem or what gets in the way of you making progress on your goals:
- How did you become aware of it?
- What are different things that added up to making this problem part of your life?
- What noticeable impact is this problem having in your life?
- If the problem continues, how does it develop in the future?
- Where did other people contribute to this problem, and where did you contribute to this problem?
Few problems are rarely exclusively your fault, or exclusively someone else’s fault. They’re also almost never 50/50. Getting a clearer picture here is important so that you can take responsibility for what is in your control. For example, in therapy, the only person that is available for change is the client. No one else is in the room to change. When you have a clear picture of what is in your control in reality, then you focus on the parts of the problem that can produce the biggest rewards for you. Otherwise, we set ourselves up for more fatigue, depression, or even despair.
Break it down into behaviours
We have limited resources: time, energy, and money. Large goals can require a lot of all three resources. It can feel overwhelming or even evoke despair to consider how far you are from your goal, or how much work may need to go into it. This is where being descriptive and investigating your goal and problem become useful to enable us to engage with our goals. We want results, but we get derailed along the way. Big goals can break down into smaller, more specific goals. “Getting healthier” can look like: more sleep, more exercise / less sitting, less time scrolling, more time with good people, eating better quality food, eating less/more food, etc. Any one of those sub-goals is in service of the big goal.
You don’t need progress in each of them in order to start getting healthier, though some will be worth more than others (especially sleep/food/good people). Each of those sub-goals can be broken down into specific behaviours. This is particularly important with a goal like “getting healthier” because it can be hard to know what progress looks like, which itself can be self-defeating.
Make it measureable
Specific behaviours will produce results. Here’s why it’s better to track behaviours rather than results. Results don’t always show up right away (known as lag measures, because they lag behind actions). You can track behaviors long before results show up. Tracked behaviors are Lead Measures because they lead to results before results show up. I frequently advise my clients to shift from a “completed the thing” mindset to “I completed the time set toward doing the thing” mindset. This is known as time-blocking in planning, rather than task-completion tracking. Completing behaviors is far more motivating to track, especially when completing tasks requires multiple sessions of behavior.
Breaking down a large, long term goal
Example time. To study for my licensing exam, I was told to give myself six months to study. Here’s what I did to see what it would take to be ready for a long-term goal:
- I counted the number of pages in my study material.
- I spent three sessions recording (1) time spent reading and (2) pages completed while making notes.
- Plotting average pages per hour, I could estimate how many hours my study material would take to complete.
- I compared that to the days remaining until my test, and discovered the average time per day I should complete.
All of that work resulted in something much easier to wrap my head around than “be ready to write in six months.” I had daily goals that were achievable now, and the behavior was simple: read and make notes for a set amount of time. I could have daily satisfaction in my progress, and not over-extend myself or end up anxiously behind not knowing if I’d be ready. Some days I could do more, other days I could do less, but because of how I was tracking, I knew when I could afford to do less. I had a behavioral budget, of sorts.
Habit stacking
Life is unpredictable. Life can throw us curve-balls, or perhaps our schedules are not entirely up to us. So setting aside time and effort for goals can be complicated, especially when we’re already so used to the rhythm and ritual of how life has been going. We aren’t consciously aware of our decisions nearly as often as we’d like to think. Bringing in new behaviours in support of a goal can be quite complicated then.
This is where habit stacking becomes your ace up your sleeve. You already have habits. Connecting a new behaviour to an existing one allows you to make an existing habit your cue for your new behaviour. For example, “once I’m done the dishes, I’ll set aside five minutes to plan out the three main things I want to accomplish tomorrow,” or, “after my morning shower, I will spend three minutes stretching,” or, “when I come home, I will spend two minutes intentionally breathing and grounding myself before I walk into my house.” Be this specific to have success.
Design for bad days
In business, there’s a term “minimum viable product (MVP),” and the same can be applied to behaviors. What would be one or two minimum viable behaviors for your goal? Three lines in a journal, ten pushups, an extra half hour of sleep? Of course, this isn’t the daily goal, but it still moves the needle in your life. Consistency overcomes. Consistency maintains the habit and enables opportunity.
Managing friction
Rubber mats make your cutting board less likely to unexpectedly slide. Deep treads on your tires give better control than bald tires, helping your car move where you want it to. The snack fridge next to your computer makes it easy to snack, whereas not having snacks in the house makes it harder to snack. One of the reasons rehab programs have trouble translating into long-term success is that those in recovery often are released right back into the same context that enabled addictive behaviors to begin with.
Every day you have limited consciousness and limited willpower. The best use of both of those resources is to manage friction in your environment: More friction on undesireable habits, less friction on desireable habits.
There are many more things that could be said about making your goals work for you, but I have selected these as some of the most meaningful ways to “move the needle forward” in your life. We don’t need a perfect plan before we begin to move, but we won’t get far without a plan to deviate from and improve upon. All of the above can be brought into therapy with your therapist for troubleshooting tailored specifically to you. This is a place to start.