Goals Improve Therapy
According to Zig Ziglar, "When you aim at nothing, you'll hit it every time." Therapeutic goals help move your time in counseling from an enjoyable experience to a growth experience.
Your counsellor will work with you to increase your self-awareness, assess situations and options, clarify needs, recognize patterns, plan for success and collaboratively use setbacks as feedback. Just as the tortoise enjoyed more success than the hare, you will benefit from taking small and consistent steps toward your goal.
Whether your goals are for personal growth, achieving success, replacing bad habits, better-regulating emotions, reducing anxiety or depression, or improving relationships, your therapy goals should be both realistic and challenging
How Therapy Goals Help You?
Goals can help you notice your progress. This awareness of your growth increases your self-confidence to continue moving forward.
Knowing what you are working toward can help reduce your stress because you are doing something to help yourself.
Being accountable to your counsellor can help keep you on track. Returning to talk to your counsellor can help you evaluate your progress and see setbacks as opportunities to dust yourself off, learn from the experience, and keep going.
Obstacles to Effective Goal Setting With Your Counselor
Withholding information or not being honest with your counsellor: the more open and honest you are with your counselor, the more they can help you set useful goals for therapy.
Being unsure of what you want: there are times when clients are unsure what they hope to get from counseling. Sometimes a good starting goal is to gain clarity about a particular situation or issue.
Reluctance to leave your comfort zone: what clients are currently experiencing is familiar to them, even when it may be a bit of a disaster. Sometimes clients are so used to their comfort zone that they resist change or set their expectations so low that they make little progress.
Fear of failure or fear of success: either of these can be obstacles to success in therapy. Your counselor can help you navigate your way through these interfering beliefs.
The beauty of counseling is in the collaboration between the clinical skill of the counselor and the openness and motivation of the client. Your counsellor will not be overly directive, but they will help you determine and more toward your goals. This focus on goals will help you avoid analysis paralysis, where you get stuck in overthinking a problem. Counseling is a unique journey, ranging from short-term therapy of 4-6 sessions to long-term treatments for complex or prolonged issues.
Sometimes therapy work is like peeling layers of an onion. Some clients feel relief after releasing the first layer. Often they return once they are ready to explore the next layer. At Bridge Counseling, we are happy to work with you for a few or many sessions. We can accommodate whatever is suitable for your issues, goals, and motivation.