For most people with cancer, it just isn't possible to suddenly feel like they did once upon a time. Some other people understand the futility of wishing for a time that is past, but they fail to recognize the hope that the future holds. Thus, they set few if any goals for themselves, except getting up in the morning and getting through the day. As you read this article, keep in mind that the best preparation for a better life in the future is to focus on healing as quickly and thoroughly as possible. If you are undergoing cancer treatments or have just completed them, healing may require investing a great deal of time and energy into simple tasks such as rebuilding your physical strength and endurance. In the field of rehabilitation, we spend a fair amount of time setting goals for the people we treat. Often we set goals in conjunction with the therapists (physical and occupational) with whom we work. We emphasize goal-setting for several reasons. First, we want to know as objectively as possible how a patient is progressing. Is what we are doing helping the person recover? Second, setting goals helps to motivate patients; they understand more about how healing works and what reasonable expectations are. Third, insurance companies require that we set goals and document progress before they will pay for their client to continue with treatment.
Although rehabilitation specialists spend a lot of time thinking about physical healing and how goals can help someone to progress, you might not have considered the matter at all. Nevertheless, setting goals is a fairly straightforward process and one that can offer you insight about how to best help yourself. Keep these three steps in mind when you set your goals:
Set short-term and long-term goals. Consider goals that you want to accomplish in the near future and others that will take a bit longer. The short-term goals should be things that you can accomplish over the next 6 to 12 weeks, and the long-term goals should be things that you can accomplish over the next 6 to 12 months.
Set realistic goals. Although it is possible and even sometimes necessary to modify your goals as you move forward, the ideal is to begin with goals that are realistic. Michael Jordan can't go back in time and play basketball the same way he once did, but for many cancer survivors it is entirely possible to become once again as active as they were in the past, or even more active. For example, let's say that before you were diagnosed, you ran two miles a day. Perhaps now you aren't able to run at all, but you can walk a mile. Should your goal be to run two miles a day as you did in the past, or should you begin with a more realistic goal that you can accomplish over the next few months? Perhaps both would be good goals. The short-term goal could be to work up to running one mile on most days of the week at the three-month mark, and the long-term goal could be to run three miles at least four times a week by a year from now.
Write down your goals. For most people, putting their goals on paper in a somewhat formal manner helps to give them focus and inspiration. After all, the purpose of a goal is to have a direction to follow and an expected result. If your goals are realistic and you are able to accomplish them in the near future, then that inspiration is renewed. The process of setting and achieving goals becomes the mechanism by which you can continue to heal emotionally and physically. As you set goals for yourself, you'll need to take into account what has happened to you and where you are physically and emotionally right now. Goals that focus too much on trying to recapture what you had in the past are not as useful as those that are geared toward helping you in the future. And setting goals for yourself that are likely not achievable will just discourage you. Instead, choose goals that force you to work a bit, but that you are pretty sure you can accomplish. I have learned a great deal about setting goals not only from colleagues in my profession, but also from people in the business world.
Businessmen and businesswomen are terrific at developing marketing and strategic plans that are filled with specific goals. When I interviewed Jay Lipe, who is CEO of Emerge Marketing and the author of The Marketing Toolkit for Growing Business, he suggested a mnemonic- the A-R-T of setting goals. Goals need to be
Many of my patients are savvy in the business and finance professions, and I have learned much from them about translating business concepts into rehabilitation objectives. For example, one patient is an amazing man who lived through a paralyzing bout with polio as a child and then successfully battled both lung and prostate cancer. He has been generous in supporting the center where I work and has taught me by his example how to gracefully live through significant adversity. He has also given me some very practical advice on how to set goals. Thus, the following advice on goal-setting is drawn from many sources, including my rehabilitation training and my contacts in the business world. Begin by setting goals in three specific categories: (1) goals that specifi cally target improvement in physical health; (2) goals related to improving your emotional health; and (3) goals that focus on improving your support system. This step is fairly straightforward, especially if you don't have too many goals and they are not overly complicated. To begin to heal physically, set between 10 and 14 goals: 5–7 short-term goals and 5–7 long-term goals. More than that gets a bit cumbersome. In the first category (improving your physical health), set a goal for each of the three most important parts of physical healing: nutrition, exercise, and rest or sleep. Improvements in these three areas are sure to facilitate your recovery.
Step 3 of goal-setting, as I mentioned, is to write down your goals. But what if you just don't want to go through the process of writing things down? No problem. Although committing your goals to paper does help you remember them and may help achieve them, if you don't want to write them, then you shouldn't. Instead, just take a moment and think of six goals-one short-term and one long-term goal for each category (physical health, emotional health, and support system). Having something in mind will help you to reach the next step. If you are a person who likes to put your thoughts into writing, go ahead and record your goals. It will help you focus on and remember your goals. Also, in a few weeks or months, you can look back and see how far you have come.
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