2 Planning my next move

Figure 2 What next?

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Two women stick colourful notes and draw arrows on a glass wall.

Figure 2 What next?

Now that you know what you want to do next, you can start to set some goals that will help you to get there.

Another way to consider your goals will be to review the actions you recorded in the reflective boxes in each Summary section – are there any actions you haven’t had time to undertake yet? Could you use those in your goal setting?

You might have decided that a key goal is to find a mentor or a coach, or to become one yourself. If you don’t feel ready to explore mentoring or coaching further at this point, focus on developing your self-awareness as that will form a strong basis for any personal development you might undertake in the future.

Try to make the goals you come up with SMART:

• S = Specific

• M = Measurable

• A = Agreed

• R = Realistic

• T = Time bound

In your Toolkit [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] , you’ll see a Goal Setting tool, which takes you through the SMART process and helps you to write down and plan your goals. If you choose to access this, you’ll notice that R = Relevant, A = Achievable and the acronym has been expanded to SMARTER, adding Engagement and Reward to the list of letters. There are various different interpretations of the SMART tool and you should choose the one that resonates for you.

In this course, we’ve chosen to use 'Agreed’ as you may need to agree your plans with a current manager, particularly if you want to take time for mentoring or coaching during your working day and within your work context. ‘Realistic’ has been chosen as it’s important that your goal is achievable and that you’ve identified and can remove any potential obstacles or constraints, such as financial cost to either yourself or your organisation.

If none of this resonates with you, there are other goals setting tools available, such as HARD (heartfelt, animated, required and difficult) and PACT (purposeful, actionable, continuous and trackable), which we don’t have time to cover in detail here, but that you can easily explore using your preferred search engine.

Swann (2024) suggests that to be effective for the individual in that specific situation, different types of goals should be set in different circumstances. He goes on to explain that setting the wrong goal can be detrimental and lead to feelings of failure, and proposes two important questions to ask yourself:

• Are you already good at the task? – If you already have the ability and resources to pursue the goal, then a specific goal will probably work best. He recommends aiming high!
• Are you new to/still learning a complex task? A learning goal will work better for you instead. For example, focus on identifying a number of strategies that you aim to try out in order to get better at something.

Tables 1 and 2 show one way of breaking down each goal. In Activity 2, you will be able to come back and fill in the last three boxes (outcome, evaluation, next step) after you have completed your planned actions.

You should now have a set of relevant goals, and an action plan for achieving them.

In the next section, you’ll look at some of the useful resources available to help you in your next steps.