Goal setting: A critical skill for change

Pain management is many things to many people, but most of us would agree that if life hasn’t changed in some way after pain management, then it hasn’t really been effective.  For change to actually happen and be maintained, Prochaska and DiClemente and others (eg Miller, Rollnick and colleagues) identify that people must believe the change to be important, and that they have the ability to make it happen successfully.

I’ve posted earlier on self regulation (eg this reading, and this post), making the point that it is made up of several components, one of which is goal setting.

When I went to Google to search the words ‘goal setting’, 13,200,000 hits came up in 0.16 seconds, so goal setting seems to be rather popular – and yet it’s often the most difficult session to facilitate in the three week pain management programme I work in, and some of the ‘goals’ I’ve seen written for patients just don’t look anything like the kind of goals that can actually be measured! So perhaps goal setting is both popular but not easily carried out in ‘real life’.

So, how do we set goals? It sounds easy if you’ve learned to set goals early in life, but for so many of the people I see it’s not a familiar activity. The research literature in psychology abounds with various models and influences on goal setting and achievement, which doesn’t really help a busy practitioner who may well be drawing on knowledge from first year professional training! And unfortunately, the information readily available online is often of variable quality.

I’m going to start with some random thoughts, mainly based on conclusions drawn from a motivational approach – tomorrow I’ll fill in with some literature!

Firstly, goals need to be relevant to the person. That means that the person believes that the goal is important. Importance is predicated upon things that the person values (see the New Zealand School Curriculum definition here)- these are usually abstract beliefs that, through action, become evident. The same action can represent many values (eg daily exercise can represent ‘time out’, ‘commitment to my wellbeing’, ‘a way to keep my partner/husband/dog happy’). And similarly, values can be fulfilled or operationalised in many different ways (eg ‘caring for my family’ can be achieved by ‘being in a high paid job’, ‘being home when they get home after school’, ‘always going to sports activities with the kids’).

Sometimes, the values appear to conflict with each other – it’s quite common for someone (perhaps yourself?) to value ‘being healthy’ while at the same time valuing ‘relaxing’ – how those values are played out in the real world may mean the person eating healthily in one part of the day, then drinking alcohol as a primary way to relax! I’ve seen this in people who say on the one hand that they’d like to return to work, but on the other, they don’t think they can – because they can’t continue working in the way that they’re used to. There is a conflict between two different values: the values that constitute ‘being a good worker’ (which is operationalised as ‘always doing a job at 120%’) and ‘being able to cope’ (which is operationalised as ‘never allowing my pain to fluctuate’).

The second is that goals need to be achievable. That is, the person needs to feel confident enough that they can actually succeed in making the goal happen. When pain becomes chronic, confidence to achieve goals can often be eroded, especially if pain is feared or avoided. Successive failures to achieve goals only serve to confirm that taking a risk by setting a goal should be avoided. And this seems to be much more the case if the goal is particularly important – and of course, if it’s not important at all, it just won’t happen!

It almost goes without saying that goals need to be specific and measurable – exactly what is it that the person has to do, and how will they know they’ve achieved. This is much more difficult if the area of goal development is complex, or requires sub-goals to be achieved in order to attain a longer-term goal.

Tomorrow: some readings on goal and goal-setting, and over this week – tools to use to help people set and maintain goal-directed behaviour.

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