TIROC (Trauma-informed Resilience Oriented Care) Blog Series
This blog is part of a series that focuses on understanding trauma and its effects on our lives, while also strengthening and building personal and collective resilience, as part of the library’s efforts to embrace the trauma-informed principles creating safe physical spaces and in our interactions with our customers and among library staff.
What are your goals for this year? What were your New Years Resolutions? Where do you see yourself in the next five, ten, twenty years?
No matter the context for these questions, they all point to the idea of setting goals for yourself and meeting the expectations that would result in meeting the goal set. But...how do you set a goal? How do you keep working to achieve that goal? What happens when your goal is met? How does making goals and meeting them build resilience? All excellent questions! Our goal here is to talk about what makes a goal, how can you craft a goal so that it can be met, and how meeting our goals can lead to stronger resilience.
New Years Resolutions
Many folks take the start of the new year to prepare resolutions or goals they want to meet in the new year. Personally, I don’t make new years resolutions in January. Why? Where I live, January is dark and cold, and I honestly don’t want to do anything that doesn’t involve being at home, under a blanket, with a bucket of some manner of hot beverage. I’m in no state during this time to create a goal, let alone achieve a goal made in the late-night delirium of a new years eve party. Instead, I like to make my goals for the year in Spring. Spring is a time for rebirth, regrowth, and newness. Energy is in abundance. I get the energy from nature to plan for the future ahead, the promise of more sunlight is fulfilled, and I’m ready to start moving forward again.
Goals and Building Resilience
Building resilience is what helps us bounce back when we’ve exhausted our efforts or meet any kind of challenge. The more resilience we have the quicker and more completely we can get back to our own normal after that experience. How does goal setting and achieving goals help build resilience? Success of any kind feels good and when we can see that we have experienced success and we can do hard things, when a hard or challenge presents itself, we can meet it directly knowing our own record of success. The better we can set our goals to ensure success, the more success we have and the better our resilience is for those challenges that arise.
What makes a goal?
A goal is simply anything you wish to achieve by certain amount of time. This could be something by a short period of time – hours, days, or weeks – or a long period of time – months or years. There is also some kind of motivation behind what you want to achieve. This is rather broad, though, and folks often fall into the trap of not meeting their goal simply because it’s too vague or broad, or it’s too specific and any variation would mean the goal hasn’t been met. So, how can we make better goals for ourselves and each other?
Introducing the SMART Goal
Advocated by George Duran in November 1981 issue of Management Review, setting objectives that are:
S – specific
M – measurable
A – attainable
R – relevant
T – time-bound
This means that a goal isn’t just something that you want to get done, it is something that you want to get done by a certain time relevant to your overall values is attainable and measurable. Each SMART step is something that either helps craft the goal, it also invites a check-in with the goal along the way to see if things are still working and you’re on your way to success. Success is what we want to see, not perfection, but seeing the goal through the end. Allowing yourself to make changes along the way helps keep us moving forward to success.
Goal’s Set, so what's next?
Setting a goal is half the battle to making change. While you may have prepared the perfect SMART goal, it means nothing if you don’t check in with the goal along the way. Are you on track? Do things need to be adjusted for reality? For long-term goals, it is vital to create milestones or checkpoints along the way. These checkpoints can offer an opportunity to not only check in to see if the goal is still relevant or if adjustments need to be made. These checkpoints also allow for celebration – you made it to this point, so let’s celebrate the work done so far! Celebrations are incredibly important to keep the momentum going on achieving those goals. And when you achieve that goal - celebrate that, too! Making the time to celebrate your achievements boosts your resilience in the long run.
Learn more about goal setting
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