There are hundreds of books and thousands of web pages dedicated to setting goals. I certainly am not going to argue the point: Goals are extremely important. As a nurse, setting goals is an everyday process. As we develop our plan of care for the patient we must set goals both to drive our choice of interventions and to give us an objective milepost against which to measure the patient’s progress.

Many of the websites and books I’ve looked at tend to focus on a linear process of setting a goal, working towards achievement of the goal and evaluating success in light of the goal. And this is a good process which, again, mirrors what takes place in nursing. The problem with this approach, I think, is the fact that seldom do our lives run in linear fashion. Our lives tend to look much more like the web: tentacles stretching out to a wide variety of ideas, activities, people, concepts, interests, values and more. Many of these things are internally driven. There are also external factors working on us such as changes in work schedules, financial concerns, bills that need to be paid, deadlines that must be met and so on. All these internal and external factors tend to muddy the waters where goal identification and achievement are concerned. In other words, it ain’t as easy as the books would have you think!

Goals are overarching

When we set goals, we are reaching for the “big ideas”, for the Grand Scheme. The goal becomes the North Star, guiding our progress onward, giving direction to our lives. But our lives are lived in the minutiae. We have to deal with the thousand little things that come into our day-to-day lives. Many of these may have nothing to do with our goals, and may even work in contradiction to them. There is, for example, apparently a rule in my karma that says that if I get a dollar that I can put toward my savings goal, something will come along to lay claim to it, thwarting movement towards the goal.

These things get in the way of keeping one eye on our goal, in the same way that a thick forest canopy prevents us from seeing the North Star. Occasionally we get a glimpse of it to know that we are still moving in the right direction, but at other times it is obscured by the individual leaves on the trees that collectively block out the night sky. All the little things in our lives collectively block our view of our goals at times, and only at sporadic intervals are we able to reorient ourselves in relation to our goals.

Other times we become so bogged down in the details of working toward our goal that we forget what our overall target is. For example, my students have the overall goal of becoming a nurse. In the day-to-day struggle of reading, studying, testing and so forth, along with the other demands of their lives, they become so focused on the goal of “making the grade” they forget that their goal is to become a nurse. Their thinking shifts to seeing the grade, a milepost along the road to nurse-dom, as the goal. They obsess over a two point error, despite the fact that their overall grades are strong and definitely moving toward their goal.

The 5,000 foot view

When students become so obsessed about grades, I have to remind them to take a step back and review what they are working toward, and to evaluate where they are in relation to that. In other words, “What are you working toward? What is your goal?” And then giving them some perspective on where they are and their current concern affects or is affected by their goal. “Does this [whatever the concern is] prevent you from achieving your goal? Are you still moving toward your goal?” “Is this concern really worth worrying about in the greater scheme of things?”

Getting that 5,000 foot lay of the land helps them to refocus their energies in the right direction. Increasingly, I am encouraging my students to take the time to stop and review where they are and evaluate their worries in relation to that. Doing so can relieve a tremendous amount of stress in the life of a nursing student (which is an already highly stressed life!) It is during those high-stress, times, by the way, that taking that time is most important. No need to expend energy on things that simply are not important!

Regardless of whether you are a student working toward a degree, an employee working toward completion of project, or someone who simply wants to improve you life, identifying what is important to you, identifying where you want to go and taking the time to periodically evaluate you progress is vital to your success.