Supporting Champions

Happy New Year! This week’s guest is Christian Swann. Christian is an associate professor at Southern Cross University and specialises in research around goal setting and mental health. In Christian’s early research he noticed an interesting observation. While working with elite golfers he asked them what sort of goals they set for themselves. To his surprise the types of goals they set didn’t conform with the typical, off-the-shelf literature, such as outcome specific goals. This led him to delve a lot deeper into the area and astutely began to question many of the premises upon which goals setting methods are based, finding in many instances, that frameworks such as SMART goals do not comply with the basics of goal setting theory. Who knew? Well, probably a lot of us who have tried to use them? This is what we get into in this discussion, exploring the strengths and weaknesses of different ways of setting goals, weighing up process goals, outcome goals and performance goals. We discuss the use of open goals