Last night we had our support group which went well. Our Psychologist Fiona ran the night with about 15 people who attended.
The topic discussed this week was “Goals and Values for a Healthy Lifestyle”.
The main points discussed were:
GOALS are achievable and set to have specific outcomes. Using the SMART acronym is a good way to come up with attainable and specific goals.
Specific – setting specific goals is much more attainable than setting a general goal. When setting a specific goal the aim is to answer the 6 “W” questions. Who is involved? What do I want to accomplish? Where: Identify Location. When: establish a time frame. Which: Identify requirements and constraints. Why: Specific reasons, purposes or benefits of accomplishing the goal.
Measureable – establish concrete criteria for measuring progress toward the attainment of each goal you set. This helps you stay on track and reach your target, as well as experiencing the sense of achievement along the way.
Attainable: when you identify goals that are most important to you, you begin to figure out ways you can make them come true. You develop the attitude, abilities, skills and financial capacity to reach them.
Realistic: to be realistic, a goal must represent an objective toward which you are both willing and able to work.
Timely – a timeframe is important to create a sense of urgency and also evaluate progress.
VALUES describe how you would like to act; they are qualities of our action. They represent ways we would like to behave. For example, a value might be “taking care of yourself” or “being physically active”. Values are like a compass. They guide you in a direction, but you never permanently reach the value. Thus a value cannot be permanently achieved, nor can it be permanently lost. You don’t fail according to your values, because you can set them again and they are generally an intrinsic way of living.
GOALS VS VALUES
Goals are specific and measureable and if we do not meet our goals then we can feel like we haven’t succeeded. If our goals do not produce the desired outcome we can feel that we have failed. Values, on the other hand are not measurable or specific, they are way if being (acting). You can never fail according to your values. When looking at values we define success as acting consistently with your values, not by outcome.
Our next support group will be held on Wednesday 17th June 2015 run by Fiona. It will be held in our rooms in Suite 3 Level 5 St George Private Hospital at 7pm.
Hope to see you all there 🙂
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