DUMB

I suck at writing SMART goals (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, timely). I always have. They drove me particularly crazy in the years I worked as a Speech Pathologist and it wasn't until my exit interview that I worked out why. I don't feel capable of predicting a patient's progress. I treated people who'd had strokes or head injuries and whose brains were damaged, and while it is possible to make general predictions, I think that we who do not yet properly understand recovery's process should hardly be expected to place a figure on its accleration over the course of a week or two. Goal-setting ends up no more than a reflection of past professional experience or the positivity, or otherwise, of the individual therapist. At my exit interview, it seemed to me that efficacy would be better measured according to whether treatment had been fitting and whether the professional had worked hard. It is possible to have input of the highest standard and yet only see minimal improvement because of personal factors (the person is a quitter or has despaired) or because their impairment is simply far too grave.*

But I also suck at writing SMART goals for me and you would hope that I would have a better chance of gauging what might reasonably be expected there. They feel so foreignly masculine, cold. I don't know what I'm aiming for in life, for the next two or three years. I mean I do have some plans of what I wish to do, sometimes quite concrete ones, and I could certainly tell you all about the philosophy behind my plans, and even, with a little pushing, what my desired outcomes would be - but to have to lay down individual steps and dates by which the steps will be done, something in me balks and bad.

The problem with SMART goals is that they bring a too-weighty responsibility, an end to romance, an abridging of how life is lived and they are sometimes simply unnecessary. I'm not sure I have the maturity, wisdom or creativity to plan out my years and I feel like in the doing of it I would be making a commitment to that path and that is no small deal for me. Nor do I particularly want to have it all mapped out - there's a romance to reactivity and heat-of-the-moment decisions that I don't wish to lose. What's more, like tests at school, I feel goals often fail to do a very good job of capturing and describing life's successes and failures. Life's more nuanced, more context-bound than something you can place a tick or cross against. And oftentimes I don't actually need a goal - I'm already well aware of how I'm doing at something. I don't need to think up some way of measuring my progress in Spanish - I'm speaking it all the time, noticing my mistakes and triumphs, and I can tell you exactly how I'm going anytime you want to ask.

Yet I did write myself goals for last year and at my pastor's urging, made them SMARTer, and many of them served me well. They worked well when I:

• wrote down what I was already doing and later reviewed the list to see if any had slipped; 
• wrote down the things that I hoped to make part of my life's routine; 
• was forced to think about what less intuitive or obvious success would actually look like (so for example, if I wasn't feeling like I was really part of my new church yet was ticking off the steps, then I knew I was doing okay); 
• had to include things I wasn't pumped for, difficult things; 
• got the satisfaction of ticking off concrete achievements.

The moral of the story is: write goals, write SMART goals if the steps or timing matter and write 'dumb' goals if you only need a memory jog. And don't include unrealistic goals because they'll only look accusingly at you and make you hate the whole thing . . . and yet, you might just want to include one or two because perhaps the writing of them will turn them into a mental possibility, and, you never know, the guilt or glimmering hope of them may just get the better of you.



*Of course, at this point - and before - the professional will also consider how to make their client's life functionally helpful, whatever their impairment, and goals are certainly a little easier to set here, but, even so, the social context brings its own complications which can equally well confound the meaningful setting of goals.