Thoughts about Goal Setting
I’ve been thinking a lot about goals lately. It started when I was flipping through Facebook posts of my “friends” and the following enticed me to stop and read.
A Dream Written Down with a Date Becomes a Goal
A Goal Broken Down into Steps Becomes a Plan
A plan Backed by Action Makes Your Dreams Come True.
How true. I thought of all of the goals that I had set in my life, some reached and others not so much. Every year we all set New Year’s Goals, but those are the worst for me. I rarely got beyond March with those goals. Then I started thinking of all the patients that I have worked with on goal setting. We didn’t always work on patient set goals, but rather just orders from the patient’s doctor. Then came our assessments on templates where there were about 8 goals listed that could be checked off. Most patients just picked a few on our checklist without a lot of motivation or thought going into it. Finally, we moved on to SMART Goals. Specific, Measurable, Attainable or Achievable, Relevant and Time Based. This was certainly a step in the right direction, but I often struggled with helping patients set goals that were all of these things and which they had any hopes of accomplishing. I think a lot of educators felt the same way, but we had to try.
A tipping point for me was the year that I was lucky enough to be asked to facilitate a course sponsored by Roche called Creative Coaching. During the day and a half course, we worked with a corporate coach to present a program directed toward teaching diabetes educators how to coach their patients using methods often seen only in large corporations. That is where I first learned about the 5 Whys. The 5 Whys is a problem solving exercise designed to unearth the root of a problem. It was developed and fine-tuned within the Toyota Motor Corporation in the ‘50s as a critical component of its problem solving training. It works well for drilling down general goals into specifics that are meaningful and relevant to the person setting them. I’ll describe this more in my blog next month.
Jan McWilliams, RN, MSN, CDE, BC-ADM