Nurse Leader Insight: Avoiding 5 Key Mistakes in Goal Setting

By Rose O. Sherman, EdD, RN, FAAN

“Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow has not yet come. We have only today. Let us begin.” Mother Teresa

This is a good time of year to take some time to reflect on your leadership and life. 2014 will be here in less than one week and it is a great opportunity to set some personal or professional goals. Yet, research has shown that many of us begin the year with good intentions but then don’t follow through. Part of the reason may be a lack of personal commitment but sometimes it is an outcome of mistakes that we make in goal setting. So as you begin to plan your goal setting for 2014, avoid these five common mistakes:

1. Not writing your goals down – the evidence is strong that once a goal is written down, the likelihood of you following through is much stronger so take the time to write them down.

2. Establishing too many goals all at once – although it might be tempting to try to make changes in many areas of your life, changing habits can be quite difficult. It is far more effective to choose 2-5 than 10 or more.

3. Not making your goals measurable – all of us know from our professional work that goals need to be measurable yet often don’t practice this in our own lives. If you want to lose weight – specify how much. If you want to do a better job of connecting with your staff, how will you do this and how often.

4. Not setting a timeline – A deadline is one way to create urgency and force yourself to pay attention to what’s important. Without a deadline, there’s little pressure to get it done. It’s easy to procrastinate.

5. Not developing an action plan – You don’t need an elaborate action plan for each goal but you do need to identify the next action, so you can initiate and gain momentum. If returning to graduate school during 2014 is a professional goal for you, what steps will you take to achieve that goal.

Charles Duhigg, an investigative reporter for the New York Times, has written an interesting evidence-based book about how habits are formed and what we can do to change them. Duhigg contends that habits make up 40% of our daily routines, whether at work or at home. What you see in your work environments is in a sense a collection of habits that develop over time. Habits are the brain’s way of saving energy. Yet, not all of our work or personal habits are good habits. If we want to replace bad habits with good habits, we need to be more intentional. A good place to start is to develop more effective goals and avoid the mistakes discussed above.

Read to Lead

Duhigg, C. (2012). The Power of Habit: Why We do What We do in Life and Business. New York: Random House.