Goal setting — again!

This post is most definitely an opinion piece, because once again I’m struggling with the practicalities of goal setting with people experiencing chronic pain. There is no doubt at all that goal setting is an integral part of pain management – it’s designed to focus the input, make sure the underlying reasons for using [...]

Don’t go to the internet to get good information about chronic pain

…it’s true, you know, the quality of the information about chronic pain found on the internet is poor – at least it was when this study was conducted (of course, that was before this blog got started!). ‘In December 2007, there were an estimated 1.3 billion Internet users worldwide with the usage growth increasing [...]

Goals or actions?

Goals seem to work best when they’re important to the person, and the person has sufficient confidence that they’re going to be achieved. But…’there is many a slip betwixt cup and lip’ – while the goal might be set, actually getting there depends on many things. I wonder whether we can inadvertently slip up when [...]

Tell me what you want, what you really, really want

A theme in almost any reading about health is that treatment should be patient-focused, typically goal-directed and have some sort of measureable impact. Over the past few weeks I’ve been reading about the process of goal setting and motivation, finding that there can be quite some differences between what a therapist sees as a [...]

Activity levels – a ‘budgeting’ approach

Unlike most of my posts, this one doesn’t have specific research to back it up. I guess this reflects the lack of research in the area of applied pain management! After discussing activity levels, especially over-doing activity, I thought it might be helpful to review some of the ways I’ve worked with people [...]

The process of moving towards valued actions

Another in a mini-series on values and actions, stimulated by reading about ACT, or Acceptance and Commitment Therapy.
For many of the people I work with, remaining committed to a set of actions that lead towards a desired goal seems to be a very challenging thing. Often, at a one-month review, I find one group [...]

Self efficacy for returning to work

Flexible goals and distress: a research study

Feedback, difficulty and satisfaction: goals!

To summarise yesterday’s post, this quote from Latham & Locke (2007):
The theory of goal setting states that there is a positive
linear relationship between a specific high goal and task
performance. Thus, the theory makes explicit that a specific
high goal leads to even higher performance than urging
people to do their best. A goal also affects satisfaction
in that [...]

Practical and useful goal-setting theory?

Some people doubt the existance of a theory that happens to be either practical or useful, but perhaps this review (which is now relatively old, but still good!) will prove the rule. While this review covers goal-setting within an industrial/organisational context, it still offers some helpful advice and findings from both experimental and ‘field’ [...]