On setting daunting goals

Jo at Flowing Motion commented on yesterday’s post that

“if the goal isn’t daunting, it is probably not worth pursuing”

which got me thinking.

A couple of years back I was mentor to students at Napier University . They were studying for a degree in Human Resource Management . The course was accredited by the CIPD and as part of the accreditation process each student was required to keep a satisfactory learning plan and record  for submission at the end of their period of study.  The course leaders took them through what was required and explained the concept of SMART objectives. Their interaction with me as mentor was mainly by e-mail but I met with each group before they got started to talk about setting challenging goals.

Now, many of us remember our student days, and the time demands of reading, research , classtime and exam sitting kind of focus your mind for just as long as is needed. For many of my  mentees what I was asking them to do was just another burden and I met with some resistance. But by chipping away at them they gradually saw that instead of being something else to do it could be part of what they were already doing and I was really encouraged by the difference that made.

To start with the goals were along the lines of “passing the exam in xxxx”- Well, I let that pass in the first semester but then – unless they did – there would be no second semester anyway. But then I challenged them to think about what they would do with the academic learning eg how that would raise awareness of specialisms in HRM, what they wanted to focus on in their future careers, what kind of employers they would like to have ( and  indeed like to be !). Having completed the same course some years before I was well aware that the content and range was vast.

Into the third semester and I started to be really picky about insisting that goals were challenging - the kind Jo talks about. It was not my responsibility as mentor to tell the mentees what they should and shoudn’t focus on – but by now I had a keen sense of when the goal was not challenging for that individual – and would ask them to rethink if it was.

After all that – and bearing in the mind the initial resistance – the comments I received from the students as they were about to graduate were really encouraging. I hoped that the process they had become used to at University would become part of their regular practice. And that when it came to goal setting – they would not take the “easy option”