Setting great goals

0:01Student 1:I would break the textbook into chapters and set myself target of pages per day.

0:06Student 2:It's like going to the gym. You can't get a six- pack in three months. You have to build up over time to get it.

0:11Student 3:Always little steps at the time. I'm like a turtle. Let's say I work slowly, but I arrive to the destination.

0:19Krutika Adatia:Hello, I'm Krutika Adatia, and I'm a chartered accountant. I now support accountancy students through their training, and as an educator, I'm regularly up close and personal with some of the common issues people face while studying for and sitting their accountancy exams. So in this series for the ACCA, we're chatting to experts about strategies we can all use when facing some of life's challenges, whether that's booking your first accountancy exam or finding a good work- life balance. This week we're looking at setting goals.

0:51Krutika Adatia:Do smart goals really work? Is it better to focus on the big picture when struggling or getting through day by day? And what techniques could help us reach our aims? This is On Your Marks, because you'll never know until you try. Now I know that the phrase, " How should I set goals," might instantly turn you off. But the thing is, the reason teachers and coaches alike go on about goal setting so much is that it can really work. I remember when I was a student, I often felt overwhelmed with the sheer volume of content we needed to learn for each exam. I was working and studying at the same time, which made it even more difficult because I always felt I didn't have enough hours in the day. It was only when I started setting more manageable goals that I started feeling more in control of my life and my progress in exam preparation. So to talk about how we can all set more realistic and helpful goals today, I've got Sarah D. Rees with me. She's a cognitive behavioural therapist with over 20 years experience working in mental health, who regularly works with clients to help them set and achieve their mental health and personal goals. So, Sarah, do

2:02Krutika Adatia:you like setting goals and do they work for you?

2:05Sarah D. Rees:I absolutely love setting goals and I've had to make them work for me. It's not come naturally. I'm somebody that if I just set myself a goal, I would get overwhelmed and all I saw was the goal, I'd get anxious and I won't be able to achieve it. So I've learned that I need to manage my goals and break them down and focus a little bit more on the strategies and the things I do to arrive at the goal.

2:33Krutika Adatia:Amazing. So what does a good goal look like?

2:36Sarah D. Rees:A really good goal is what we often refer to as smart. It's a smart goal. So SMART stands for specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely. So there's a real clear destination. It's very specific. So an a vague goal might be I want to get fit, whereas a very clear goal might be I want to be able to go to the gym three times a week and I'll know when I'm fit when I can run for half an hour. So it's much more specific and it's measurable as well. And it's realistic. If we set goals that are too unrealistic, we can feel overwhelmed and that can shut us down and reduce our motivation. They say what gets measured gets managed. So we really need to be able to measure our goals and see our progress towards our goals as well.

3:31Krutika Adatia:I like that. So you've given an acronym there and so it's specific, measurable-

3:35Sarah D. Rees:Achievable, realistic, and timely.

3:39Krutika Adatia:Love that. So then I guess a bad goal would be the opposite of that.

3:42Sarah D. Rees:Absolutely. Really vague. A goal is about having a clear destination and knowing exactly what that destination is so that you know when you've arrived at that goal.

3:53Krutika Adatia:So then would you say as a listener to this, their goal might be, " I want to be an accountant"? Is that too broad?

4:01Sarah D. Rees:I think that's a nice goal, but it is too broad. You need to chunk that down. What does being an accountant mean? I guess you've got to do certain exams and reach certain targets and milestones within that. So that might be your overarching goal. And there's lots of little goals underneath that and you take one by one.

4:22Krutika Adatia:Amazing. So having a big goal is great, but trying to break it down into something more manageable like, " Hey, I've got 13 exams to do. Not going to do them all this yet. Let me space those out."

4:32Sarah D. Rees:Absolutely.

4:33Krutika Adatia:So big goal, break it down into smaller goals. Now some people find it easier to achieve their goals and others don't. Why is that?

4:44Sarah D. Rees:Many different reasons. I suppose we are all very different and we have very tricky brains. For some people it might be life experiences, what we've learnt about achieving goals in our past. For some people it's self-talk, how we talk to ourselves can have a big impact. So sometimes I like to think of it as having a supportive inner coach. If we coach ourselves supportively, we can get to our goals a bit easier than somebody that beats ourselves up internally.

5:14Sarah D. Rees:So how we talk to ourselves is important. I think the support around you at the time and how well your mental health and general resilience is really important. So if you've got lots of cheerleaders around you, supporting you, and a good environment, and all the pillars of health like sleep and exercise, good nutrition, good friendships, they all provide a really good foundation of resilience for people to attain their goals. And I think people need accountability as well.

5:45Krutika Adatia:Amazing. So you've referred to some of the challenges that individuals might face. You mentioned self- criticism or something that might prohibit individuals from achieving their goals. You mentioned resilience. Can you talk a little bit more about the blockers and the challenges that individuals might face when it comes to achieving their goals?

6:03Sarah D. Rees:I know I would say that in my clinic, one of the things that people struggle with most is an inner critic is, I think sometimes until we get awareness of our minds and the pattern of our minds, we're not always fully aware of how critical we can be or how much we're hindering ourselves and holding ourselves back. So we need to get more aware of our minds, and one of the ways of doing that is through having therapy or coaching or self- help things like journaling to really understand the patterns of our mind. And then once we understand our mind, we can start to make choices over what we do.

6:44Krutika Adatia:So can you just tell me a little bit about the inner self- critic and where does that come from for most people?

6:49Sarah D. Rees:It's really interesting, isn't it? I think most of us have an inner self- critic, and where it's come from is going to be different for everybody depending on their experiences. Sometimes if you've had a critic around you, if you've been bullied, we can internalize critics so they become our internal voice. And for some people we might have motivated ourselves through criticism at some point and it might have motivated us. But the problem is that what we find is that it has such a detrimental effect on our resilience and our mental health generally, that over time it doesn't serve as a good tool at all. It's correlated with higher rates of depression and anxiety. So at some point you need to really think and spend time with your mind and think how you are speaking to yourself, how is that serving you and is it really getting you to where you want to be? And what I find in the work I do with people that are high performers or really want to get to their goals, that self- criticism gets them so far and then they really need to evaluate and readjust how they talk to themselves. So it's more like an inner supportive coach

8:05Sarah D. Rees:because we know that when we support ourselves going forward, we lift our mood, we reduce our threat levels. Your mind is very interesting and it can't really tell between imagination and reality. So if I'm saying to myself, " Sarah, you're rubbish. You're never going to do this," my mind will take that quite literally. It's as bad as having somebody at the side of you going, " That's rubbish. Good." So we really need to see how detrimental inner critics can be.

8:34Krutika Adatia:So what specific strategies can help someone really combat this critical voice that they might have inside of them?

8:41Sarah D. Rees:I think firstly, it's becoming really aware of it because with awareness comes choice and the ability to change what we do. And I think many of us, I know one thing I hear in therapy a lot is that people, when they start to get of the patterns of the mind and how they're talking to themselves, they're surprised. They're not aware of how they're talking to themselves. Now you can go to therapy or you can do journaling as well. Some people spend 10 minutes a day just writing out their thoughts. It's really useful for times of stress and anxiety as well because you're processing information. And when you journal every day, you get to learn the patterns of your mind and then you can evaluate how is this useful or is this unuseful and should I change it? The other thing I would say is for people to ask themselves, "

9:30Sarah D. Rees:Is this how I would talk to somebody else?" And if you wouldn't talk to your best friend in this way, consider why, why wouldn't you motivate somebody else in this way? And it's likely that you have an inner wisdom that this wouldn't actually motivate somebody.

9:45Krutika Adatia:And I know, I'm just thinking about some of our listeners today. When it comes to, let's just say, taking an exam, do you have anything specific around dealing with stress and the overwhelm and the pressure that a student might face to actually pass one of their exams?

10:01Sarah D. Rees:We have something in our brain called the amygdala, which is just behind the ear and our threat system is there. It's there for our survival. And what it does is get us to really focus in on what the problem is. So if I have a threat that will I pass the exam? Will I fail the exam? That's all you end up focusing on. Will I fail? Will I fail? And that narrowing of the way we think was useful millions of years ago when there was predators out there and we could be eaten and we'd just focus on what the danger is. But in an exam situation, focusing in on whether I'm going to pass or fail an exam isn't that useful because what you need to be remembering and holding in mind is all the information that you've been studying. So actually it's really important to be getting our stress levels down and we need to recognize that the way stress organizes our mind and that it narrows our thinking and it can distort our thinking as well.

10:59Sarah D. Rees:So if I'm feeling anxious, I'm going to have more anxious thoughts. If I feel unprepared for an exam, it doesn't necessarily mean that I am unprepared. That can just be anxiety. So our thoughts match our emotions sometimes and we need to be aware of that because when you're aware of it, you can pull yourself away from it a little bit as well. And also, if we're under stress a lot of the time, then we need to be doing things that pushes into what's called the soothing system, the ability to relax, to calm down, to regulate our emotional systems so that they're balanced.

11:35Krutika Adatia:That's great. And so you mentioned stress and anxiety. How are they alike and how are they different in terms of what's happening inside our own minds and bodies, and how students can then perhaps deal with managing those as well?

11:49Sarah D. Rees:Yeah. Some stress is good and it can feel like excitement and it can be really motivating for us as well. So it can be helpful in us getting towards our goals. We don't want goals that are too easy to reach because there's not as enough drive or motivation. So causing some stress is helpful, and we're built to have stress and it's a good release of a cortisol in the body. So stress is just feeling a little bit overloaded or pushed to your limits or getting there.

12:22Sarah D. Rees:Anxiety's quite different in that. When you feel anxious, it's a response to a fear or a threat, and then your physiology kicks in because we are outdated for the worlds we live in a little bit. So our bodies react as though the same way they did millions of years ago when our predators were out to kill us. And when there is a threat, we release adrenaline and cortisol into our body that increases our blood pressure, and that organizes your mind then to narrow in and gets a little bit distorted as well to just focus on what the threat is. So it has a big physiological response, but really knowing that and getting in tune with, because some people might not know how they experience stress and how that differs from anxiety. But if we tune in a little bit more to our bodies and notice when stress turns into anxiety, so maybe you feel warm all the time, you're not sleeping, got heart palpitations, dry mouth, tingling fingers, some people feel dizzy or a bit faint, then you can think, " Okay. My blood pressure's gone up, my body's responding to a threat." And you can work to calm your physiology down because sometimes it's not

13:37Sarah D. Rees:working on our thoughts. It's more important to work on our physiology and settle our body down.

13:42Krutika Adatia:Oh, that's really interesting. So trying to think about how you can calm your body. So actually just touching on that, what strategies or recommendations would you provide for students that are dealing with these sorts of emotions when it comes to working towards an exam or studying for an exam?

13:58Sarah D. Rees:Yeah. I do think calm body equals a calm mind. There's lots out there now, like mindfulness for example, it's very fashionable because it's very effective. We know that if you've never done any mindfulness and you've started today and you're quite stressed and been anxious for some time, and we did a brain scan today and in eight weeks time, you could see the differences within your brain, your amygdala, the threat system in your brain, actually settles down. You're calmer, it thickens your prefrontal cortex, which is where you do a lot of your logical thinking and rational thinking. So it's really good for memory and concentration. So when we are calm, our physiology is calm, our thinking is better, memory is better, which is great for studying and exams.

14:47Sarah D. Rees:Concentration is better as well. So sometimes if you're feeling really anxious, you might be tempted to work harder. And that's what many people do. They ramp up their studying, and actually they need to get the balance. And you really need to see that you need to have a good level of calmness and stability in your body to take on new information.

15:08Krutika Adatia:Well, that really resonates because I know when I was a student, I would just end up, when I'm feeling anxious and I've got all these exams to revise for, I'd want to cram more and I'd want to study more. And what you are saying actually is that you need to allow your body and your mind the opportunity to calm itself down. So what things do you do to typically, Sarah, when you are trying to calm yourself down? Let's say you've had a busy day in the clinic, are there certain things that you would advise that even our students can do?

15:35Sarah D. Rees:I talk about something called our stress anchors, and I recommend that people have about five stress anchors that they do because we're all very individual and playing football would not calm me down, it would stress me out, and I just want to get away from the ball. But yoga is great for me, seeing friends. I do do mindfulness because you just can't ignore the evidence around it. And I've got dogs, so definitely going on a dog walk. So I have five things... And reading fiction books as well because I always found, especially if you're studying or you're busy with work, my ability to read fiction goes out the window. So I really work on that, work on the ability of my mind go into a frivolous place, not always being serious and concentrating hard. So having five stress anchors, things that you do that regulate you... I've just started going to the sauna as well, and that is something that I can go in a stinking bad mood and 10 minutes later come arrive back home and like, "Okay. I feel okay." I can't... And I'm sure cold water does it, but I'm not up for that.

16:39Krutika Adatia:Oh, that's amazing. You've actually given some great examples there. So I'm just thinking about someone listening to this that perhaps can't sit there and meditate or have an app like Headspace on. You are suggesting things like walking and going to the sauna. So that's great. You're really giving a broad spectrum of things that you can do.

16:56Sarah D. Rees:And I think many people struggle with mindfulness, but the thing to remember is the more you struggle with it, the more benefit you're going to get from it. It just means that you're doing it with a busier mind as well. The other thing to remember is that when we are working really hard for our goals, that temptation to work and overwork is very prominent, but athletes wanting to win a gold medal, they have to learn that they need their rest days because if they don't have their rest days, then they're going to get injured. And our mental health is exactly the same. It can be tempted to go on and on and on, and that can be good, easy to do in short bursts, but in long extended periods of time... and from what I know about accountants, they do some training for a very long time, that's just not sustainable.

17:41Krutika Adatia:And so how important is it that once we have a goal that we achieve to also celebrate it, right?

17:46Sarah D. Rees:Completely.

17:47Krutika Adatia:Because obviously you mentioned the accountancy journey is quite long. There's typically around 13 exams depending on what stage of the journey you start at. So how important is celebrating success as well when you achieve a goal?

17:58Sarah D. Rees:It's hugely important. It can be really hard to do as well. I know I say this, and maybe I'm not always good at recognizing those small achievements, but you need to get into the habit. And one of the reasons you need to get into the habit is because when you give yourself a reward, it hits the dopamine system in your brain, which is your motivational system. It's in a part of the brain called the nucleus accumbens, and we need to keep giving our brain little hits of dopamine, which keeps you motivation going. If you don't give your brain that motivation and those hits of rewards, it can be harder to keep going and striving forward.

18:34Sarah D. Rees:So hugely important. So new shoes and bags and all that stuff.

18:39Krutika Adatia:Sounds great.

18:40Sarah D. Rees:But actually in my day- to- day clinic, we can't be going out spending and shopping and doing shopping every single day. So what really motivates me, what I've done sometimes is I've got two jars, one filled with marbles, one's empty, and every time I tick something off my to- do list, I move one marble from one jar into the other and try and fill up the other jar. And that really motivates me. It's like having little shots of rewards. The other thing is, if I'm doing a task where I've got to maybe read for 30 minutes or get through so many emails in a certain amount of time, I'll set my timer on my phone and I'll try and beat the timer as well. So little tips like that.

19:18Krutika Adatia:So really just wrapping up then, what would be three strategies that you could summarize for setting a good goal?

19:26Sarah D. Rees:I think going back to the acronym that we started with, making sure that your goals are smart. We know that if you write down your goals, that you are 33% more likely to achieve them, and that's been found in the research. So write them out. I think get accountability. Have an accountability partner, that's been shown to be very, very valuable, and support yourself on the journey as well. Watch out how you're talking to yourself and think, " Would you motivate somebody else in this way?" If we talk to ourselves how we talk to others, we'd all do much better.

20:00Krutika Adatia:Love that advice. Especially talking to yourself and the way you talk to others. I think that's something I could probably improve on for sure.

20:07Sarah D. Rees:We could all do. Yeah, absolutely.

20:07Krutika Adatia:Thank you so much, Sarah, for joining me today.

20:11Sarah D. Rees:Thank you for having me.

20:13Krutika Adatia:That's it from this episode of On Your Marks. For more information about ACCA exams, you can go to www. accaglobal.com/ exams. See you next time. I'm Krutika Adatia, and this has been On Your Marks.