Dr. Dawn-Elise Snipes walks through eight questions to catch goal-setting mistakes in recovery. She covers why goals fail: unclear motivation, too many at once, no rewards built in. The fix is smaller steps, one focused goal, and matching your temperament, like writing one index card a day instead of overhauling your whole life.
Hey there, everybody, and welcome back to the Addiction and Mental Health Disorders treatment Manual. I'm your host, Dr. Donnelly Snipes. And this is unit one, part 22, preventing goal setting pitfalls. Spend about 30 minutes thinking about common goal setting pitfalls and how you can avoid them. Why do you or do you not engage in your recovery behaviors right now? So the things that you want to do, the goals that you're setting, first thing is thinking about why is it that you're not doing those things right now? Why are you not getting good sleep? Why are you not journaling? Why are you not doing those things? Okay, so it's important to think about why you're, why you are not doing those and address those issues. Too often people focus on only the reasons they should make the change and not the obstacles, not the things that say, you know what, maybe it's not that big of a deal. And we talked about this in the parts that we did earlier. On motivation, it's important to recognize that you're doing something because it has a benefit. And you need to figure out all of the things that may hold you back from being fully committed and fully motivated to change. If you set goals that are too big, that can be a pitfall. If you say, I am going to achieve this goal in two months and I am going to be perfect at it from day one, that's not realistic and that may be too big. What is it that you can actually accomplish? What is realistic and achievable today? What is realistic and achievable this week? Sometimes people will start processing, for example, their guilt and resentments. Okay, well, a lot of times in recovery, people have a whole bunch of those. So setting the goal of, I'm going to go see my therapist or my sponsor and I'm going to process this this week and I'm going to be done with it. That's not realistic. One of the tricks that I have or tools that I have a lot of my clients do, is they get index cards and they write a guilt or a resentment on each index card. And then each day they work, they do one index card. They process that one thing. But because they have so many, it often takes several weeks or even months to work through each one of those guilts and resentments. So it's important to set goals that are achievable. What is it you can do today? I can work through or I can process this one guilt or this one resentment. If you set goals that are too hard, then that is also going to undermine your Confidence in your ability to change. If you say, from day one I'm going to be perfect, or from day one I'm going to do this 99 of the time, that may not be achievable. So what you want to look at is what is realistic for you to do right now. Setting too many goals is also a problem. A lot of times when people start in recovery, they're like, I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired. I just want to change everything. Change people, places, things, how I react. I want to change everything. Okay, we'll get there. But like anything else in life, if you start doing too many things, you're not going to focus all of your attention on any one thing. You're probably going to rush through it. So you're, so you get to everything, but you're getting to everything in sort of a half assed fashion. It's important to recognize that. Pick one goal, one positive change in any area of your life is going to have positive changes on most, if not all other areas of your life. Okay, so just for example, resetting your circadian rhythms or detoxing, that is going to have reciprocal effects on your mood, on your energy. And when you, when you're feeling better emotionally and you've got more energy and your thoughts are a little bit clearer, then you're going to be able to focus better at work. You're probably gonna have more energy for your relationships. You know, it's just a cascade effect. So something simple, one change, if you do it well, is going to benefit every other area of your life. Setting goals without sufficient rewards is also a huge pitfall. Remember I talked earlier about behavior strain? If you set this goal and it goes on for too long, when we make changes, it's uncomfortable and it takes a lot of energy. And you need to have those rewards along the way to keep your motivation up. If you don't have those rewards, eventually you're going to start going, you know what, this ain't worth it. Think about if you've ever tried to, to make a New Year's resolution. And a lot of people do this for exercise and they say, I'm going to go and I start going to the gym and I'm going to get in shape and I'm going to get healthier. Well, that's great. But they don't effectively define what that means. So after, you know, one or two weeks of going to the gym, when they haven't seen themselves going from a couch potato to Mr. Or Ms. America, they start Getting frustrated and, and so it's important to recognize what is it that you can accomplish in a day. You can get to the gym, you can do 30 minutes on the treadmill. Okay, that's an accomplishment score. You did it. Give yourself a pat on the back. What can you do in a week? What can you do in a month? And be realistic about the changes that you expect and make sure that you're getting. Giving yourself rewards along the way, aside from just the satisfaction of achieving your goal, what can you do in order to make it worth your while? Basically, setting goals that are too specific can also be a problem. If you set a goal that says I need to be able to do this perfectly, then that doesn't give you any wiggle room. Or I need to be able to achieve this this particular way. And if you can't, then oops. Graduating college is a goal that a lot of people set. I want to graduate college. Well, that's a pretty broad goal. That's great. If I say I want to graduate college in four years with a degree in medicine, well, that's probably not achievable in four years. And it is very specific. So if I get in there and I realize that I don't have the skills necessary to get into and complete medical school, then I'm going to feel like I failed. So setting the goal that says I'm going to graduate, I'm going to get a degree, that's much more, that gives you a lot more wiggle room in case you have to drop back and punt a little bit and failing to individualize to your temperament. And I have several videos on the YouTube channel that talk about this because it's so important. Extroverts, for example, and I'll just talk about addiction here. Extroverts tend to do great in 12 step meetings and celebrate recovery meetings and other kinds of meetings where there's lots of people and they can draw energy and get that sense of community. They love that. Extroverts just suck that up. Introverts, on the other hand, find that very draining, overwhelming. They do better with individual sponsors or small big book studies or counselors or something else. So it's important to know what sorts of environments are going to be motivating and supportive of you. People who are focused on facts, sensing is what we call it. When they're focused on facts and details, they may miss the big picture. And people who are intuitive tend to focus on the big picture, what recovery looks like and how awesome it's going to be. But they miss the details, all the little things they need to do in order to achieve recovery. So it's important that people are aware of their particular temperament and particular pitfalls that are common to their temperament in the recovery process. So if you want to learn more about that, check out those videos on the YouTube channel. But think about the goals you're setting. Make sure that it's not too big. Make sure that you've addressed all of the reasons that you want to make this change, as well as anything that might hold you back from making the change. Make sure that you are not spreading yourself too thin, that you've got enough rewards, and that you've individualized to your temperament. Setting goals is essential to create a road map for recovery. Change takes time, and there are no shortcuts. Once you've defined your goals and the steps to achieve them, then you can begin tracking your progress.
