Podcast: Crafting Goals That Stick: Your Blueprint to Thrive

Dr. Ross White is a Professor of Clinical Psychology at Queen’s University Belfast and the founder of Strive2Thrive, a clinical psychology consultancy firm that provides interventions and training to help individuals and organizations thrive. He is an expert in supporting the mental well-being of adults working in high-performance settings. Ross is the author of several books, including “The Tree That Bends: How a flexible mind can help you thrive.”

Our host, Gabe Howard, is an award-winning writer and speaker who lives with bipolar disorder. He is the author of the popular book, “Mental Illness is an Asshole and other Observations,” available from Amazon; signed copies are also available directly from the author. Gabe is also the host of the “Inside Bipolar” podcast with Dr. Nicole Washington.

Gabe makes his home in the suburbs of Columbus, Ohio. He lives with his supportive wife, Kendall, and a Miniature Schnauzer dog that he never wanted, but now can’t imagine life without. To book Gabe for your next event or learn more about him, please visit gabehoward.com.

Producer’s Note: Please be mindful that this transcript has been computer generated and therefore may contain inaccuracies and grammar errors. Thank you.

Announcer: You’re listening to Inside Mental Health: A Psych Central Podcast where experts share experiences and the latest thinking on mental health and psychology. Here’s your host, Gabe Howard.

Gabe Howard: Hey everybody, welcome to the podcast. This is your host Gabe Howard calling into the show today we have Dr. Ross G. White. Dr. White is a professor of clinical psychology at Queen’s University Belfast and the founder of Strive to Thrive. Dr. White is the author of several books, including “The Tree That Bends: How a flexible mind can help you thrive,” and he makes his home in Northern Ireland. Dr. White, welcome to the podcast.

Dr. Ross White: Oh, pleasure to be with you. Thanks, Gabe.

Gabe Howard: Well, I’ve got to say first, love your accent. I know you probably get that a lot when you’re on an American podcast, but I just I wanted to throw that right out there. And two, we’re going to be discussing setting SMART goals today. But when I say SMART, I don’t mean smart as in intelligent or a well thought out goal. But SMART is an acronym. So Dr. White, I want to throw it over to you. Can you explain to our audience what SMART stands for and what exactly a SMART goal is?

Dr. Ross White: Sure. So SMART is a wonderful acronym, and the S stands for specific. So if we’re going to set goals, it’s important to really keep them quite specific and concrete, so that we know specifically what we’re aiming at. The M stands for measurable. So it’s important for us to be able to track and to determine whether or not we’re making progress towards the achievement of the goal. The A stands for achievable right. So it needs to be within our gift. I could set the goal of winning the lotto or the lottery here in the UK, and unfortunately that’s not within my gift, right? So it needs to be achievable. And then the R is relevant. So it needs to be relevant to our sense of purpose and the larger scheme of things. If it’s part of a bigger project for example, it needs to be relevant to the completion of that project. And then the T is time limited. So we need to set specific dates by which we are going to hold ourselves to account to see whether or not we’ve actually achieved that goal. So it’s a wonderful framework, really widely used across different settings to help people try to, if you like, align the goals to this bigger picture in which they exist.

Gabe Howard: I want to make sure I get this right, and I really want to make sure that I’m setting SMART goals. So can we talk about the difference between a SMART goal and a not SMART goal? Like can you give an example of each one? And why one is SMART and one isn’t?

Dr. Ross White: So when you’re setting a goal, let’s say the goal is to write a book that’s a one that’s fresh in my mind. Right? So the specific element of it would be, well, I’m going to write a book about a particular topic. And that topic is to help a general readership understand the psychological processes that contribute to thriving. Lovely. Okay. Specific then the measurable, the M measurable element of that would be well, how am I going to demonstrate that I have contributed the work that will allow me to know that that goal has been achieved? Oh, 80,000 words. The publisher sets quite a concrete indices of. Well, are you making progress? So 80,000 words. That’s whenever I know that I’m in that ballpark for the completion of that project. Achievable is the A, well, is that going to be achievable? I’ve got a contract that stipulates. A date by which the manuscript needs to be delivered. I’ve got maybe 18 months between now. And then I’ve got the knowledge. I’ve got the insight. Can I get the job done? Yeah. I think that’s going to be achievable. I am transitioning from an academic style of writing where I’ve been writing for academic journals. The ivory tower of academia, and the challenge for me is to see if I cannot just educate, but can I entertain? Can I change up my writing style? Now that’s a question mark for me, Gabe, as I set that goal.

Dr. Ross White:. Is that going to be achievable? Let’s see. Let’s see how things unfold. Now the goal is it relevant is the R. Well, my purpose is to take some of this more complex psychological knowledge and get it into a format that would allow people to understand it, to engage with the material. So I think writing a book is a great way to do that. And then, of course, the time limited element was the piece that I mentioned a bit earlier about, well, there’ll be a deadline. The publisher will want this book by a particular date, and that’s what I’m going to be working to. And I’ll be able to review my progress accordingly at that point. Now, a non-SMART goal might be just to sort of say to myself, hey, yeah, everybody’s got a book in them, right? So maybe I’ll just write a book and it doesn’t really develop into any of that sort of more concrete information about, well, how do I operationalize that? How do I make that goal real? Right? So hopefully that that speaks to your question. The the Non-SMART can fall down on any of those five indicators of whether it’s specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, or time limited.

Gabe Howard: I’m conceptualizing this in my own mind as like a non-SMART goal would be get a college degree, whereas a SMART goal would be enroll for classes, take a class, pass a class. Right? Like one is this this giant idea? I will have a college degree. And the other one is I will fill out the application. Am I am I sort of describing that right? A SMART goal versus a non-SMART goal?

Dr. Ross White: Yeah, you’re certainly speaking to a key element of this that the SMART elements are about helping you to operationalize that more vague expression off the goal so that you can actually start to really get a clear understanding of how that’s going to happen.

Gabe Howard: I have another question that came from reading your book, Dr. White. And in your book you express concerns about concepts such as mental toughness and grit and resiliency. And there was a part of me that’s like, well, now, now wait a minute. You don’t want people to be mentally tough. You don’t want people to have resiliency and grit?

Dr. Ross White: [Laughter]

Gabe Howard: Like that. You want them to what? Like be sheepish and fail. But but as I read, I, I learned and I know you can’t summarize the whole book in one answer, but I think you might be one of the first people that I’ve heard say, you know, look, mental toughness and grit is not as great as we think it is. And yet we’re cheerleading it with the largest megaphones in the world.

Dr. Ross White: Yeah, it’s a compelling sell, right? You know, I look on social media and I full of admiration for some of these influencers who have come from backgrounds in the military and are very persuasive in their messaging about the need to be tough, the need to be resilient. And, you know, I look at people like Jocko Willink, right? And David Goggins. David Goggins, like, in his videos, he’s running along. And this is a guy who’s ex-marine, ex-special forces ultramarathon runner endurance athlete. And he’s in great physical shape, and he’s running along, and he’ll do his little talk to cameras. He runs and he’ll finish all of his videos with the catchphrase stay hard! Yeah, and I’m watching that. And I’m thinking yeah.

Gabe Howard: Well, yeah, with the music and everything.

Dr. Ross White: Oh, yeah.

Gabe Howard: It’s like you’re you’re kind of pumped, right? It’s like a montage.

Dr. Ross White: All right, yeah. Yes.

Gabe Howard: But. But what does it mean?

Dr. Ross White: Yeah. Well, this is the point that I think toughness resilience, staying hard, being gritty. Absolutely have their role and their place. I am not dissing the importance of those traits. I am a little concerned about some of the science that sits behind it okay. So mental toughness if you look at the definitions that have been proposed for mental toughness, I would argue it’s been described as everything. And when you describe something as everything, it ends up being nothing, right? There are lots of competing definitions proposed by proponents of mental toughness and even how it’s measured. The Mental Toughness Questionnaire 48 is one of the most widely used questionnaires, but there are some concerns about the validity of that as a tool and whether it’s actually measuring what its claim claims to measure.

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Gabe Howard: I’m going to use myself as an example for a moment, Dr. White, because one of the things that I think about is every time I have a goal, I have two problems. One, it’s either so poorly defined that I have no idea if I actually achieved it. That’s problem number one or problem number two is I know that I achieved it and then I immediately make another goal. And I know there’s sort of two questions wrapped in one here, but I want to throw it back to you because it seems like you need to make a goal that is really definable. You need to understand whether or not you hit it. So that’s perfect. But don’t you then just immediately set another goal and put yourself back into the same rat race?

Dr. Ross White: Let me speak to that point first. And I love my acronyms, right. And yeah, I’ve got this NUTS and SAGE. That sounds like a recipe for stuffing that you might have at Thanksgiving or Christmas, but NUTS and SAGE is actually two separate acronyms. And NUTS stands for Next Unachieved Thing. And we have that drive if you like to squirrel away to accumulate more and more, that leads us to be quite restless to the extent that we don’t savor the achievement of a particular goal, we kind of move straight on to the next thing. So SAGE is Something’s Always Going to Entice, and we as humans will have that urge to push for more. And that is, if you like, bred into us as we’re growing up, you know, there’s that kind of, oh, don’t rest on your laurels, right? Don’t get too big for your boots and don’t get high on your own supply. Right?

Gabe Howard: [Laughter] Bring it to the modern era.

Dr. Ross White: Yeah. And there’s that kind of tall poppy syndrome that we talk about that particularly in Ireland and in the UK, tall poppy syndrome is. Well, if you get a little above your station, somebody’s bound to come along to try to cut you down, to bring you back down to earth. Right. So there’s some of that raining on the other person’s parade, almost to serve, to kind of keep them, you know, within the sort of acceptable level of ego as opposed to them just getting this inflated sense of themselves. So there’s almost like a policing of savoring and celebrating your goals in some cultures, in some societies perhaps North America may be a little different from some of our more conservative approaches in Ireland or in the UK. I’m not sure. But yeah, we have that next unachieved things. Something’s always going to entice, and we just get into a space where we don’t take the opportunity to actually savor and celebrate the achievement of goals. And in the book, I talk about how important it is to be proactive in planning how you’re either going to celebrate the achievement of a goal or indeed commiserate. Commiserate if you fall short on that goal, and we have to allow our time for that processing to take place. And a great way to do that, Gabe, is to use what’s called a pre-commitment device around savoring. So a pre-commitment device is more broadly used to help us with our motivation. So, for example, if I was setting the goal of losing weight, a pre-commitment device would be me committing to not buying in a gallon tub of ice cream with my weekly shop.

Dr. Ross White: I am committing to making a choice now that will hopefully pay off, and assist me to remain motivated in my efforts to lose weight. If the ice cream is not in the house, I can’t eat it. Therefore, that is supporting my effort to to lose weight. But we can have pre-commitment devices about savoring. A pre-commitment device around savoring would be for me to say that I commit, and I share this commitment in the form of a contract with a colleague or a friend, or a family member. I commit to taking a week-long vacation that we’re going to book in now, at the point that that deadline has passed for working towards the achievement of that specific goal that I’ve been working on and remember. SMART. SMART is about being time limited with the T at the end. So let’s book in a week to go away, to reflect, to take time, to revitalize, to reset so that we can potentially go again. So it’s not about having that straight on to the next thing, not marking the occasion, not marking the completion or the lack of completion of a particular goal. So pre-commitment devices, I think, can be a nice way of creating a contract whereby we do take the time to mark the end of a period of of goal setting.

Gabe Howard: As I think about your SMART goals, I’m thinking about the acronym and I’m getting hung up on the T, timely. And here’s just a little a little insight into how my mind works. I was walking watching this documentary on an old civilization that, you know, hasn’t been around in centuries. And one of the things that they talked about is that they built an aqueduct, and they knew when they started this project that it was going to take approximately 90 years to really come to fruition. That’s multiple generations. But yet they thought it was a good goal and they achieved it. And they, they ushered in a new era, albeit almost a century later. But it was just really fascinating to see how they put that goal together. But I also think, well, that doesn’t seem like a SMART goal. 90 years, multiple generations. Your children’s children’s children. No no no no, Dr. White would have sat you down and said, listen, that’s not a timely goal. So can you speak about timely when you talk about. Because I think a lot of people are really going to get themselves psyched out and think, well, that’s just going to take too long. So clearly it’s not a good goal.

Dr. Ross White: Yeah, I think that’s a great point. And history is full of very similar examples. Right. So Gaudi, the architect, and the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, which only got weatherproof, I think 3 or 4 years ago, long after Gaudi’s death. Wow. You know, and the legacy of his architecture and the the build time for this to be a project that he committed to knowing full well that it wouldn’t be completed in his lifetime. So the t team is the time limited? And it is about inviting us to reflect on when we are going to have an opportunity to review the contribution that we’ve been making towards the goal. And within a big project, such as the completion of a cathedral, there are going to be many, many, many subgoals that individuals and craftsmen would have been committing to completing, whether it was the carving of a sculpture to be part of the interior of the church, whether it be the preparation of stained glass windows for the the cathedral, there’s something about lots of subgoals that individuals can then hold themselves account to account for in terms of the progress that they’re making. Thing. So the SMART thing for those individuals to do would be to recognize that, yes, they’re working on a particular goal that’s part of this bigger project, and that they’re going to hold themselves to account to complete that element of the work that they’re doing and review. And it’s not about being a hostage to fortune. It’s about recognizing that, yes, let’s set a deadline for the completion of this particular job, this particular element, and let’s see if I have completed it or not.

Gabe Howard: Dr. White, there was something in the book that I think I understand, but I’m not quite sure. And I wanted to take this opportunity to ask you about it. You said be strong on intention, light on attachment. And and that sounds really philosophical. And that’s I’m a guy that’s drawn to things that sound really philosophical. But at the same time I was like, well, but what exactly does that mean?

Dr. Ross White: Sure. Thank you for asking that, because it was an element of the book that I felt was really important. So strong intention, light attachment. So what does that mean? Well, be strong in your intention to achieve a goal, right? Be strong in that intention. Strive for it. Work for it. Be flexible in how you work for it. But yeah, work for it. And be light in attaching to this idea that there is one particular way that that goal can be achieved because that breeds rigidity. That leads us down that road of blind persistence as opposed to adaptability and being adaptive that I mentioned earlier. So be strong in your intention to achieve your goal and be light in getting attached to there being one particular way of doing that. Because I think sometimes when we try to achieve our goals and things don’t work out, we can easily feel that sense of defeat and despair and despondency, and that can be a difficult place to end up. And I argue that when it comes to our sense of purpose, no defeat is final because it matters too much for you not to continue to commit to trying to achieve it. So be strong in your intention. Be light in your attachment to there being one particular way of doing it.

Gabe Howard: Dr. White, thank you so much. Your book, “The Tree That Bends: How a flexible mind can help you thrive,” is available now. Thank you so much for being here. Where can folks find you online?

Dr. Ross White: They can find me at www.RossGWhite.com also www.Strive2Thrive.co.uk. Follow me on Instagram @rossgwhite. I’m on X at the same address @RossGWhite. And I’m also on Bluesky. And listen, Gabe, I’d love to connect with people who are interested in these topics. So I encourage people to reach out, and hopefully people might be motivated to read a little more by getting their hands on a copy of the “The Tree That Bends: How a flexible mind can help you thrive.” That’s available as a hard copy, right? Hardback, but it’s also available on Audible and Spotify as an audiobook, and it’s available on Kindle too. So hopefully there’s a format there for for everyone.

Gabe Howard: Awesome. Thank you so much for being here.

Dr. Ross White: Pleasure. Thanks for the invite.

Gabe Howard: And I want to give a great big thank you to all of our listeners. My name is Gabe Howard, and I’m an award-winning public speaker who could be available for your next event. I also wrote the book “Mental Illness Is an Asshole and Other Observations,” which you can get on Amazon. However, you can grab a signed copy with free show swag, or learn more about me, just by heading over to my website, gabehoward.com. Wherever you downloaded this episode, please follow or subscribe to the show. It is absolutely free and you don’t want to miss a thing. And listen up, can you do me a favor? Share the show. Share your favorite episode on social media. Share this episode on social media. Send somebody an email. Send somebody a text message. Mention it in a support group. Sharing the show with the people you know is how we’re going to grow. I will see everybody next time on Inside Mental Health.

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