Why Setting Small Goals is Key to Making Progress

When a new client decides to come to therapy, they often want to make some substantial change in their life. These changes can include lessening their anxiety, changing their job, improving their relationship, or learning coping skills for depression. Our society is one driven by instant gratification: everything is just a click or Google search away. Sometimes these expectations cross over into the therapy room. While it would be nice to completely solve our problems in just a few sessions, most often, setting small goals is the key to progress in therapy.

Define your overall goals

The most important part about breaking down a goal is to first know what your overall goal is. What are you looking to achieve? Consider what it look like. What does it feel like to you? Consider your ultimate goal in order to think about the smaller steps towards achieving it.

Breaking down smaller goals

Once you have your main goal defined, start to think about the steps you need to take in order to achieve that goal. For example, if your main goal is to feel happier, your smaller goals might be to reduce anxiety, improve your mood, or take on more activities that you enjoy. Break these goals down even further. To reduce anxiety, you may need to develop a stress management plan. You might also need to learn coping skills for anxiety, or consider expanding your support system.

Why does this work?

You can measure your progress

Completing small goals helps us track progress over time, because it’s easier to see how much we have accomplished over any span of time. We can measure progress towards our goals every day, week, month, or year to establish how much longer we have until we achieve our goal fully, and also evaluate other steps that we might have to take.

Sense of achievement 

Also, completing small goals also helps us gain a sense of achievement, as we can gain the benefits and burst of motivation to keep going after every small completion. When we solely focus on completing a large goal, it’s easy to lose stamina and motivation if we can’t recognize small wins along the way.

Avoid feeling overwhelmed and set yourself up for success

Additionally, when we focus on large goals, it can feel overwhelming or daunting to complete them, and we may feel discouraged because of this. When we break our goals into more manageable chunks, small steps tend to feel less overwhelming. Further, when we set large goals, we can make the mistake of setting ourselves up for failure–or seeking to accomplish more than we can at one time–which we cannot reasonably achieve. By breaking down our steps towards success, we avoid this by taking on only what we can manage in a specified amount of time.

If you’re seeking support in working towards your therapy goals, reach out for mental health support to get started on the right track towards success.

Sam Nolan is a Licensed Professional Counselor and Provisionally Licensed Art Therapist. Learn more about Sam here.

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