Goal Setting Essay

Goal-Setting Communities

“Setting goals is very important,” says Robert Pasick. “It’s how you tell your mind what you want – what you want to succeed at, what you want to create. And effective goal-setting is both an art and a science.”

Research into the human brain and nervous reveals that we are active result-seeking organisms. Without effective goal-setting, however, we can become anxious and preoccupied with what could go awry. This fixation on the negative, Pasick feels, can make us terribly unproductive.

His research points to an alternative: four ways to create meaningful and achievable goals. His approach involve addressing specific questions:

1. What? What are the specific and measurable goals you want to achieve? They need to be specific and measurable to distinguish them from vague dreams (“to be the best in my field” or “to make a lot of money”).

2. By when? Research shows that 90 day goals are most effective, especially when establishing corporate goals. Longer than that removes them from daily activities; if they are too short, the come to resemble our daily to-do lists.

3. Why? Why is each goal important? What set of values (self-esteem? security?) are the specific goals crucial to achieving? For example, a goal of completing successful clinical trials in Europe within the next 3 months might be important because this is needed in order to achieve approval in the United States, which is important to make the company profitable.

4. How? What process, step by step and day by day, will you use to achieve each goal?

Pasick sees this kind of thoughtful and explicit goal-setting as applicable in three interlocking areas of our lives: Work, Family, and what he calls Personal Health and Wellness. The latter area includes such things as community involvement, friendships, artistic and creative endeavors, and our spiritual lives.

He stresses that the most meaningful goals are “I goals.” For example, he does not see an appropriate Family goal as having Junior be accepted at Yale or become starting quarterback on the football team. When parents do that, they are often projecting their own failures onto their kids. Instead, an “I goal” defines behavior for the individual goal-setter. A parent might have as a goal to provide his or her child with one day per week to be involved in supporting that child’s academic, artistic or athletic pursuits. The emphasis is on taking responsibility for our own behavior rather than blaming factors that make our lives appear to be out of our control.

Pasick takes a systems approach to goal setting. “We are all part of an interconnected system,” he says, “and if we take an action, it will change the system, however slightly.” This holds true whether the system is as small as a family or as large as a workplace, a community, or the world. Through effective goal setting we take responsibility for our own future rather than acting the role of helpless victims of external circumstances. He credits the book Change the World by his U-M colleague, Bob Quinn, for clarifying and developing this idea.

Pasick’s approach to goal setting also takes advantage of what research shows about the value of community. “It’s hard to counteract a mindset that says that things are too hard, too difficult. Individual effort may not be enough.” To counter that kind of mindset, he relies on the community approach found so successful in groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous, Weight Watchers and Smoke Stoppers. Research has shown that individuals can grow and learn from a group committed to a common cause. It may be as simple as hearing someone say, “I know somebody who . . . .” In addition, peer pressure helps keep community members on task, sustaining them in pursuit of their goals. The group becomes a resource on many levels.

The payoff from goal setting communities? The obvious one is in the successful achievement of our goals, which helps us fulfill our lives at work, with our families, or in terms of personal well being. An additional benefit comes from the feelings derived from any success – a sense of increased confidence and optimism. And finally, participants gain an enriched quality of life from working with a supportive community in pursuit of meaningful goals.