Goal Setting Workshop
Goals, goals, goals,
Everyone has them, everyone wants to achieve them, but most of us don’t succeed.
Why is that?
Because setting up achievable, realistic and easy to track goals takes more thinking then just writing down what you want to achieve as a new years resolution for example. Nothing against new years resolutions, but knowing how to set up your goals is a good way to start. This way we know how to keep track of our progress and see what we have achieved. Eventually it can help you with the development of valuable routines. I wanted to make sure that everyone who is setting up goals, has a plan to hold on to. Of course, with my background in instructional design and teaching, I know goals can change. Especially after a formative evaluation goals can change or have to be adjusted.
Request/need: People need to have the knowledge on how to set up their goals and need guidance achieving them. This workshop was specifically designed for the international community at Stanford University. For people who, like myself, moved to a different country that needed to figure out what they could/wanted to do, and/or how to plan their PHD and Post-doc without getting stressed out because of the pressure they were under.
Goal: Knowing how to set up goals using the SMART acronym and how to track them.
Solution: I provided a hands-on workshop, ‘Setting goals through journaling’, where I would provide the participants with concepts from research and my own real-life examples for future plans and goal-setting. We walked through multiple exercises together and learned through feedback from each other.
Medium: Prezi presentation, hands-on workshop session.
Walk through my Hands-On Workshop
Research Based
Why do you need to set up goals?
What benefits are their in doing this, keeping track of them etc?
I wanted to address this first, because a lot of people only see the pretty and well-outlined bullet journaling on Pinterest. This isn’t what goal setting is about, but it can be for people who want to be more creative.
We discussed research which showed us that goal setting and writing our thoughts down can help reduce stress, give us clarity about how to achieve our goals and can help us regulate our mood because of the dopamine release.
The ‘Why?’ is very important when creating a learning experience for adults.
Strategize through Exercise
All the participants had a different reason for coming to the workshop, but I wanted to provide everyone with the same strategy or plan to follow: SMART.
SMART stands for specific, measurable, actionable, realistic and time-bound. This way they were able to set up goals together, and transfer their new skill to set goals at home. After, we gave feedback to each other’s goals with the SMART principles as guidance to improve them.
We almost never reach our goals solely by ourselves, therefore I provided the group with a format called ‘Web of support’. They had to write down who could help them achieving their goals. This provided a lot of security for some of the participants.
Having a plan gave them clarity and precise steps to follow and come back too when they were feeling stuck.
Formats
For the last part of the workshop I provided a few examples of my own with a ‘Level 10 Plan’ format. Participants could use this format to work on goals for different categories in their life and keep track of them.
I provided formats for all of them so they could finish them at home as a draft version. This way they could get a feeling for the format, before writing their goals down neatly in their journals. As a take-home resource I created an infographic they could use for guidance, see below.
This SMART goals infographic can be used in a personal and professional setting. I’ve provided this many times to the partner teams I worked with to make sure they had clear and correct guidance on creating their goals.