What do you want from coaching? Setting four goals before you start

Good coaching goals are few in number, specific, and genuinely your own. A simple way to start is to choose up to four, and for each one write down why it matters to you, how you'll measure it, and when you'd like to have achieved it. Research on goal commitment shows that a challenging goal you really care about tends to carry you forward, while a challenging goal you're lukewarm about usually gets dropped, and writing down the "why" is a gentle way of finding out which kind you've got.

Why do so many people start coaching without knowing what they want?

It often goes something like this. You've known for a while that something needs to change, so you finally book a coach, or download an app, and the very first question is "what would you like to work on?" And at that exact moment your mind goes completely blank, in much the same way it does when someone asks you to name your favourite film.

Or you say something big and heartfelt but a little bit fuzzy, such as "confidence", or "balance", or "working out what to do with my career". All of those are perfectly fair things to want, and they're often the real reason people seek help in the first place.

The difficulty is that they're feelings, and it's very hard to measure the progress of a feeling. So three sessions in, you may find yourself wondering whether anything is actually working, and that doubt can take the wind out of your sails just when you need it most.

What makes a coaching goal useful?

Edwin Locke and Gary Latham spent decades studying goals, and their research keeps coming back to the same finding: commitment is what makes a difficult goal worth having. A demanding goal you're committed to tends to lift your performance, while a demanding goal you only half care about usually gets put to one side and forgotten.

Kennon Sheldon and Andrew Elliot took this a step further in 1999. They found that goals which fit your own values and interests, which they called self-concordant goals, attracted more sustained effort and were more likely to be reached than goals pursued out of guilt or pressure from someone else.

So the most important part of a coaching goal is the reason behind it. Writing that reason down is a small test you can give yourself, and if the reason turns out to be thin, it may be that this is somebody else's goal you've borrowed without quite noticing. That's a very useful thing to discover early, and it frees you up to put your energy into the goals that truly belong to you.

How does My Coaching Goals work in PiViva?

My Coaching Goals is the lightest goal tool in PiViva, and it's designed for your first proper sitting on the platform, with a cup of tea and a bit of quiet. You set up to four goals, and for each one you write:

• why it matters to you,
• how you'll measure it,
• and a date.

That's all there is to it. Each goal then appears on your Goals page, so your actions, habits and weekly planning can all hang off it from then on, and nothing you write sits on its own.

The measure matters just as much as the reason. If you can't say how you'd know a goal was done, what you have so far is really a wish, and wishes are lovely but hard to work towards. "Feel more confident at work" becomes something you can see, such as "speak up in at least one meeting a week" or "ask for the project I want by June".

Four is a deliberate number. If you set twelve, you'll find that you end up working properly on none of them, whereas four gives you enough to cover what matters and few enough to give each one real attention.

What if you're working with a coach?

Then My Coaching Goals is the perfect first thing to share.

When you share it with a coach from the PiViva Coach Directory, they can see what you want, why it matters to you and how you'll measure it before you've even met. That means your first session can start on the goals themselves, and you won't spend the first hour going over background. You choose what to share, and you can stop sharing at any time.

If you're working on your own for now, Viv can use your goals as context whenever you want to think something through. And when one of your four needs more room, you can open it up properly in Goal Setting. Knowing what you want from coaching is half the battle, and once it's written down, you'll find it much easier to notice, week by week, that things really are starting to change.