Setting goals

Have you tried working towards a goal in the past where you did not make much progress?

Think of New Year’s resolutions that people try to do but may have given up on days or weeks later. One of the reasons this might have happened is that they did not plan out how they would work towards their goal.

The first step of setting a goal we can hope to achieve in feedback is to identify what our intended outcome is – what we want to achieve. This is called our outcome goal. For this course, your outcome goal might be something like ‘improving work’ or ‘better engagement with feedback’. This is what you want to have done.

The next step is identifying a behavioural goal, which is something you can do to get there. You might make the behavioural goal to ‘seek feedback from others’.

Often, broad behaviour goals like seeking feedback involve a range of different specific behaviours. For example, if someone’s broad behaviour goal is to eat more healthily, this might involve specific behaviours such as:

• Learning what a healthy diet looks like for them, and what a serving of foods like fruits or vegetables are
• Buying healthier foods according to recommended dietary guidelines
• Measuring out servings according to guidelines (e.g. for fruit and vegetables)
• Preparing or cooking at home where you can choose the ingredients
• Making sure to take lunch and snacks to work to avoid needing to eat out
• Prioritising and preparing meals (sometimes in advance) to avoid ordering take-away food
• Consuming more healthy foods like fruit or vegetables in general

To help us to work on achieving our behaviour goal of seeking feedback, we first need to identify what the specific behaviours are. Some of these might be:

• Writing out a request for seeking feedback
• Identifying when and how to seek feedback, and what feedback to ask for
• Gathering previously received feedback from similar tasks
• Using sources like generative AI, Grammarly or Microsoft Office’s in-built editor or spell check
• Verbally asking someone for feedback or sending an email
• Being specific when asking for feedback

Now that we have at least one specific behaviour we can do, we can write down the goal we want to achieve. This helps us with identifying exactly what we want to do, and how we will do it.

_{What do I want to do? How will I work towards my goal?}

The behaviour that you aim to do needs to be something you can do, and it needs to be specific in that you know what you need to do, and when and where you will do it.

For example, using the eating example, we might choose to focus on eating more vegetables (but still broad for flexibility of vegetable type), or focus on specifically eating more spinach. You might focus on increasing vegetable intake for snacks, at lunch, at dinner, or a mix of these.

In terms of seeking feedback, as a student, you might want to focus on receiving specific feedback on an assignment that will help you with your writing style. In the workplace, you might want to focus on improving your presentation skills, how you make a coffee for a customer, or improving some specific skill relevant to your employment.

We can use what we specifically want to improve to identify when we will seek feedback and what feedback to ask for, and how we will do it. Examples include seeking feedback via email when we submit the document to a supervisor, or in person, such as, ‘When you have a chance, please watch me make this coffee and give me feedback on how I do latte art’.

_{How will I know I am making steps towards achieving my goal?}

We can make a plan of action by considering how we measure what we will do, or the behaviour related to our goal. Often, goals involve increasing intensity (strength of something we do), frequency (how many times we do something) or duration (how long we do something for) of an action.

For eating more vegetables, we can specify the number of serves per day we want to consume, as this is something we can count, and would be classed as increasing intensity.

For seeking feedback, an intensity goal might involve making a better quality feedback request, or asking for feedback from someone we know might be more likely to give us critical comments. A frequency goal could involve asking for feedback more often, for example, once per week, or every time we produce a draft of an important document. Duration goals could include the amount of time we devote to seeking feedback and to processing the information we receive.

_{When will I know I have achieved my goal?}

It is important to set a time in which you will review your goal to see how well you achieved it. This can allow you to adjust your goal so you can either make it more challenging after being successful, or make it a little less challenging or change focus if you found it impossible to do or no longer important to you.

This might be a few weeks or a few months’ time from the date that you start your goal. The key thing is to regularly review your progress.

Using the above information, we can now write what action we intend to take. Using the vegetables goal example, we can write the following intention:

For the next month, when it is dinner time, I will eat three serves of vegetables. I will review my goal on March 30.

For the next month, when I complete a piece of work and send it to a colleague or supervisor, I will ask them to provide feedback on up to three specific areas I want to improve the most. I will review my goal on March 30.

_{Some tips}

• Focus on working towards only one or a few goals at once. Too many can be overwhelming to start with.
• Start with a goal that is challenging but is not impossible for you to do. You can always adjust your goal later if it was too easy or too hard.
• Find it hard to meet a specific goal? It is okay to make it a little broader if it will be more achievable for you. For example, using the example goals above, you might choose to aim to eat three serves of vegetables any time in a day, or you might choose to consider requesting feedback on at least one document or task in a week (even if the work is not complete).
• Consider the resources and opportunities available to you. For example, if your goal is to seek feedback on your presentation skills over the next week and you do not have the opportunity to deliver a presentation, you might want to change the timeframe that you will complete the goal, or change your goal to something that would fit into your current circumstances.
• Put your goals somewhere that you can easily and frequently refer to them, to remind yourself what you planned to do and when you will do it by. For example, in your work bag, in your planner, on your computer home screen or on the wall next to your work space – these are good places if they will prompt you to do the behaviour you intend to do in the place where you will likely have to do it. Just like putting a note on the fridge to ‘eat more vegetables’ might help someone to eat them.
• Said you would do something every day but only did it two days out of the week? That is still progress. For example, aim to add another day for the next week, and another for the week after, so that you gradually increase the level of challenge.

Share your thoughts

Write your own goal (or action intention) and share it in the comments below.

Tell others what you think about their goals and intentions. Do you think they considered all the important elements to help get them started?

Optionally, write up to two more goals you might try to work towards. You don’t have to share these, unless you want to.