Goal setting is a strategy that allows people to focus on a behavior they want to change. When people are anxious, they are often so uncomfortable or distracted that they do not reflect on their personal goals or whether or not they are achieving them. Having worked with clients with anxiety for many years, I appreciate the importance of encouraging people to reflect on their satisfaction level within different areas of their lives and helping them set goals that bring them closer to feeling better.

Assessing one’s satisfaction with areas of their life can be simple. I use a worksheet with my clients (download here) that asks them to fill in their degree of satisfaction with their spiritual life, home life, friendships, etc. There are also blank spaces for them to write in areas I did not list. By filling in the grid, the client reflects on different aspects of life, and displays how satisfied they are feeling about them in a visual manner.

This is a useful therapeutic tool because it begins the process of creating and following through with personal goals. For example, if a person marks down that they are dissatisfied with their level of exercise, the next question is “What would help you feel better about it?” Perhaps the person then identifies joining a gym, meeting with a personal trainer, or finding an exercise partner as ideas that could help them improve their satisfaction with exercise. One of these ideas becomes the behavioral goal, and the person is asked what kind of support, if any, they will need to follow through with the goal. If no other supports are identified, I ask the person to fill out a calendar each day for several weeks with information about how successful they have been with implementing the new behavior (see below).

Once clients have had an opportunity to try adding the new behavior for several weeks, it is important to check in about how the process is going. Are they encountering internal resistance to the new behavior? Are they forgetting to mark their calendars? Have they learned anything important about themselves in this process? If there is resistance, it is almost always because the goal that was set was too challenging (like exercising every day when they have not been active previously) or because it was a goal someone else had for them but in which they were not completely invested.

I encourage you to think about ways to use these tools as you help someone fight against anxiety. School teachers could use them with their individual or collective students to improve satisfaction in the classroom, parents could use them to start family discussions and make changes in overall family functioning, and spouses/friends could use them to identify ways to be more supportive or perhaps ‘back off’ from their efforts to help. In general, these basic skills can be used in many ways to facilitate discussions and to create positive behavioral changes in people’s lives.

Not sure how these skills can be useful to you? Try them yourself first. By gaining personal experience with them, you might begin to realize new ways to use them in your other roles. Here are some examples of behavioral changes a person could try to make to decrease his/her anxiety:

• Add exercise 4-5 times per week to your schedule
• Spend time each day talking directly with friends/family (not including electronic communication)
• Improve sleeping habits (get to bed at the same time each night, wake up at the same time each morning, etc)
• Drink more water
• Make a positive change to your usual nutrition pattern (add more fruit/vegetables, etc)
• Devote 15 minutes per day to practicing relaxation strategies
• Keep a journal
• Decrease consumption of beverages with caffeine

After filling out the satisfaction grid, choose a goal for yourself that will improve how you are feeling in one area of your life. Print out the calendar, and practice marking it off each day with how you are progressing. This creates accountability and makes you more likely to reach your goal.

Good Luck! And please let me know how you do.