Value Based Goal Setting
One of the things that is important to establish when starting treatment or even if you are having continuing treatment for a longer term or recurring issue is…. what you are hoping to achieve?
Why are you here? Why have you sought treatment?
An instinctive answer is to say “get rid of pain” or “reduce pain” or “stop pain coming back”
They are all useful answers and a main driver as to why people will seek care. But we want to delve deeper than that. Why do you want to get rid of the pain? Why have you sought treatment now and not earlier or at a later date?
Being in pain can change lots of things and make you feel like a different person. It can prevent us doing things that matter to us. Pain can:
- make us do less overall
- mean we do less of or even stop things we enjoy
Lets think about what your pain means for you….
- What does it interfere with?
- Does it stop you doing anything?
- Are there activities that are not as enjoyable anymore because of the pain?
If I had a magic wand and I said to you that tomorrow you would not have to worry about your pain. What would that mean? How would your life be different?
Choose one or two activities or examples and write them down. Then quantify where you are on a scale of 1-10 in relation to being able to do that activity. 0 is you can’t even contemplate doing anything at all related to it and 10 is you can do it without any issues at all.
This is important as it can shift our mindset to a towards a goal rather than away from pain. Moving towards a goal as opposed to away from pain is a subtle change but can make a big difference. It helps us develop a solution focused mindset and approach. Below is a video of our Chiropractor Mark talking about value based goal setting.
SMART goals
Now we have a goal and our reason why it can be good to get even more clear with it by making it into a SMART goal. SMART is an acronym that stands for
S Specific
M Measurable
A Attainable
R Relavent
T Time bound
For example a goal of “I want to get fitter” turns into “In one month I would like to be able to run 1K or 1000 meters without stopping”
Another example “I want to be able to play with my grandkids” turns into “by the start of the school holidays in 4 weeks I would like to be able to push my grandkids on the swings for more than 5 minues”
Below is a video of our Chiropractor Mark talking about SMART goal setting.
Goal setting is a valuable aspect for treatment and self management of pain. I hope you have found this useful.
Mark Jessop- Chiropractor at Prime Therapy Clinic