SMART Goals aren't always smart
The acronym SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Timely) is a guide for creating effective goals. It’s well-meaning. Indeed, it’s even helpful often enough. It was ingrained into my psyche since middle school, during which we created SMART goals for our high school years. For a goal to be beneficial and effective, it must be Specific. As in, what specifically are you wishing to accomplish? What is the before/after change? And how is that Measured? One those little facets are determined, it must be asked if this goal is Attainable. Is it something that, by one’s own action, can be changed or achieved? Is it Realistic that such change will occur? Sure, it’s within one’s own power to lose weight most of the time, but is it realistic to lose that weight in a week or a month? And lastly, there’s a question of Timeliness. What’s the timeline for this goal?
For most behavior change, this is a fine, fine template. But I suppose that’s my problem with it. Much of our growth as humans is not a matter of mere behavior change. The assessment and development of values and their congruent character and behavior is difficult to nail down. More so, it’s not a matter of timeliness. As a therapist, I’m required to complete a treatment plan with my clients that is comprised of a SMART goal. “This is what we’re working on, this is how we’ll measure it, this is the timeline.” In other words, as I see it, we’re condensing the totality of human growth and even mental health into single sentence goals tracked at, most often, 90- or 180-day increments.
This bothers me. Mostly because of my own attempts at self-improvement. Those genuine attempts, which I define as those past attempts whereas I developed goals for myself with a genuine level of commitment toward which I made efforts on par and to be expected for my corresponding levels of insight and consciousness, date as far back as 2013. And because I’m the type of person that I am, I still have a digital copy of those goals.
It was New Year’s. December 28, 2013, to be exact. Below is the list of goals I made for myself.
Read more (complete 1/2 of reading list)
Live a healthier life
Pray/meditate more
Journal every day
Be a better friend
Be a better boyfriend
Try harder in academic endeavors
Control spending habits
Be less selfish
You’ll notice that not a one of these are written as a SMART goal. Worse, progress was incremental. Hell, near incidental. I find that I still struggle with some of these to this day.
My goals for the next year, also recorded in my same OneNote file, is significantly longer and therefore not appropriate to paste here. It’s two pages of goals with accompanying steps and smaller goals. I suppose that’s closer to a SMART approach. However, in short, it’s a lot of the same: more time in prayer and meditation, more time reading, more time practicing contentment, less spending money, and simultaneously being more likeable and caring less about what others think of me.
You’ll see the same or similar goals for New Year’s in 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019…the final year I recorded these kinds of resolutions. I’ve since opted to focus on a theme and a accompanying quote for the entire year. This is even further away from the concept of the SMART goal than my previous lists of resolutions.
Here’s the humorous, if not ironic, part. I meditate more than I ever have. I journal more than I ever have, in multiple formats/mediums. I spend more time reading, going as far as to religiously update my Goodreads as a form of accountability and a form of expression. I no longer pursue stillness to the extent that I simply live it, more often than ever, and more enjoyably so.
It took small, incremental improvements, many of which I did not consciously or purposefully track by the end of 2019. To be truthful, I write this with a sense of pride, as well. Not to be boastful, certainly. But for one of the first times in my life, I feel compelled to write it and to say it out loud to myself: I’m proud of me. So many of the facets of success, as I saw it in the past, are now values I hold closely with little to no connection made to the concept of success or personhood. Those values manifested over time. There was no black-and-white lurch forward. Even now, with massive changes and improvements, it’s still shades of grey. Yet, that fosters even greater pride, the knowledge that I’ve improved the way that I have and the opportunity to continue onward with it.
For those that don’t know me, though perhaps it bears itself forthrightly enough in some of my writing, I’m not a very proud person. I do not practice self-love well. When I graduated with my master’s with a 4.0, I did not feel proud; I felt like I did exactly as I should have, and therefore, felt unimpressed. Content, perhaps, but nothing more. Yet, here I am, having completed such a significant task, and having demonstrated great success in some goals stemming back over a decade.
I’m proud of myself. I’m internalizing that my success was not the result of SMART goals and behavior change a la Wendy Wood. I’m also not denigrating the benefits of those; after all, I reference both SMART goals and Dr. Wood in my sessions regularly. I am, however, offering acknowledgement to those of us for whom progress is slow. For those hopes and dreams, and the resulting progress, that simply cannot fit into a SMART goal.
Don’t get so caught up in the specificities and the timeline that the bigger picture gets buried.
Header picture courtesy of Unsplash.