Goal Setting Tips That Work For Teens

This is Going to Be FUN: the Podcast

Episode 27: Goal Setting Tips That Work For Teens

Episode Summary:

Goal-Setting Tips That Work For Teens

January is a time for fresh starts and new goals! In this episode I am sharing all the insider secrets you need to know to get your teens excited about goal-setting.

When you teach your teen these strategies, they learn the importance of goal-setting so they can keep doing amazing things long after they leave the nest. 

Learn four goal-setting strategies that work for teens and questions to ask if you want to help. Plus the 5 things your teens DON'T want you to do when it comes to their goals. 

The Insider Scoop On Goal-Setting for Teens

The other night I was sitting in the hot tub with my teens and we were talking about the process of setting goals. We had a great conversation about the goal-setting strategies that have really worked for them, the challenges they have run into along the way and the kind of support they would appreciate – or not appreciate – from their parents.

And because we are friends, I am letting you in on all the secrets! So today I am sharing some of their insight with you because I think it will help you support your teens as they are setting goals and resolutions for the new year. 

For a little bit of context, my kids are all very different in the way they approach goals, how structured or spontaneous they like to be, and what motivates them.

All of them have participated in a goal-setting program through our church for the last couple of years, where they choose goals that are meaningful to them to help them grow physically, socially, mentally and spiritually.

They have each customized that program to work best for them and have all had a different level of success with it, but all of them have done a great job of setting and achieving their goals.

You Can't Force Your Teen To Set Goals 

The one thing they all agreed on was that you can’t force goals. Pressuring your teens to set goals, or structure their goals in a certain way, or nagging them about their progress is a sure-fire way to make them hate goal-setting and drive a wedge of resentment into your relationship.

So with everything I am going to share make sure you keep it casual and low-key. They are in the driver’s seat and you are just there to help them figure out which way they want to go and avoid the pot-holes in the road. 

4 Strategies to help your teen set goals they will actually want to achieve:

1. Start with a vision of WHO you want to become

Sometimes teens get so focused on right now and what they want to achieve in the next few months or year that they don’t think long term. But having a long term vision of who they want to be will help them make better short term goals that will ultimately create what they want in their life.

That long term vision is also what will keep them going when things get hard. 

Focusing on who they want to be is more effective than focusing on what they want to do. As situations change, they might have to adjust their strategy or pivot how they are doing things, but when they know who they want to become, it is easy to adjust the how and keep moving toward their goal.

Questions to ask your teen

Who do you want to be in 5 years?

What are the attributes and skills you want to have?

Why are these attributes and skills important to you?

Imagine you are the person you want to be in 5 years…what is it like to be you? Tell me all about it (Describe it in detail).

2. Make a plan and break it into small, manageable goals

 Once you have a vision for who you want to be, you can move on to the fun part…deciding how you want to get there!

My house is at the end of a long cul-de-sac and there are two different ways you can access the cul-de-sac. Often when we are driving separate cars, my husband and I take different routes to get home. They take about the same amount of time and you end up at the same destination.

The only thing that is different is the direction you go to get there. That is the same with having a vision of who you want to be. There are lots of different routes you can take to get to where you want to go.

Some might be shorter or longer, some might include scenery you don’t want to miss along the way, but ultimately they get you to the same destination. You just get to pick the route that sounds best to you! 

Explore The Different Options

If your teen wants to get into a certain college, what are the different routes that will get them there? Do they want to focus on a having variety of extracurricular activities? Do they want to work to get the best possible GPA? Are they working toward a certain score on their ACT or SAT? Are they investing time and energy into improving their essay writing skills? Or are they going to include a few different things in their strategy?

If they know that the entrance essays are heavily weighted at the school they want to attend, maybe they need to start writing them early so they have plenty of time to have them edited and do some rewriting.

Or maybe they want to start keeping a journal of the things they are learning from their high school experiences so they have a lot to draw on for the essays. Or maybe they want to take a summer essay writing course.  Any of these paths will help your teen improve their chances of achieving their goal, they just get to decide which ones sound best to them.

Make A Plan For the Option They Choose 

When they figure out which path they want to take, help your teen turn their long-term vision into small baby steps.

We have a tendency to think fewer steps is better, but what really helps us take action is when the steps are simple enough that we know exactly what to do.

If they aren’t true baby steps, our brains have a tendency to get confused about what we should do to avoid taking action. Help your teen break the steps down to the point that they seem too simple. That is the sweet spot! 

Another important part of setting small bite-sized goals is building those activities into your routine. The more you incorporate your plan into your every-day life, the more likely you are to keep making progress.

Questions to ask your teen:

What are 3 different ways you could achieve your goal?

Which one sounds the most enjoyable/fun to you? Why?

How can you incorporate this baby step into your daily/weekly routine?

How can you turn this goal into a game/ make it fun?

3. Write your goal down and track your progress

According to Dr. Gail Matthews, a psychology professor at Dominican University, people who write their goals down are 42% more likely to achieve their goals.

Part of that has to do with our brain chemistry. When you think about a goal, you are using the right hemisphere of your brain to imagine a possibility, but when you right it down, you activate the left hemisphere of your brain to access logic and reasoning. 

The other thing that happens when we write things down, is it causes something to exist outside of us instead of just a dream floating around in our minds.

When we write our goal down it now exists in a physical form separate from us. Thoughts in our brain can be slippery and don’t always make sense, but in order to put them in writing we have to think about them more clearly and define them more absolutely. 

And while just the act of writing our goals down makes it significantly more likely that we will achieve them, we have an even better chance if we regularly look at our goals and chart our progress toward them.

The progress we are making toward our goals can feel so slow or so small that we might not even realize we are making progress unless we are measuring it. Having a place where you can track your progress and see it often is really helpful.

Our teens will be so much more motivated to keep going if they can see how far they have come from the efforts they are making. 

Questions to ask your teen:

Have you written your goal down?

How do you want to track your progress?

How can I support you in this goal?

Would you like me to check in with you? How often?

  4. Celebrate Successes

 This one was kind of controversial with one of my kids. My son wasn’t sure celebrating successes was a worthwhile use of time because at that point the goal is already achieved, right? But a couple of us were pretty passionate about this one, so it made for some lively debate.

When I talk about celebrating success, I am not just talking about celebrating at the end when you have achieved the goal…you have to be celebrating every step of the way.

And celebration doesn’t have to be a fancy dinner or an expensive gift for yourself…it can be as simple as looking at yourself in the mirror and telling yourself good job. 

As parents of teenagers, this is where we can really shine in our supportive role! One of the big reasons our teens don’t want us to check in on their progress is because it makes them feel like they are behind or they aren’t measuring up.

Celebrate Their Progress

But what if every time we checked in with them, we made it all about celebrating their progress? It would really change the vibe from nagging to encouraging. Teach your teen to acknowledge their effort, their progress and their little wins along the way by celebrating with them. 

Celebrate Their Accomplishments

And when they finally hit their big goal, celebrate some more! Sure, they have already accomplished the goal, so they don’t really need motivation to keep going on this goal, but it was never really about this goal anyway.

We are teaching our kids that setting goals and working toward them is a worthwhile effort and the more rewards they experience from the process, the more excited they will be to do it again and again and again.

Celebrate What They Have Learned 

But what if they fall short? Help them celebrate what they have learned! I love the idea that there is no such thing as failure, just opportunities to learn.

When we teach our teens to look for the learning when they come up short of a goal, we teach them that goals are worth pursuing whether we get the result we were hoping for or not. 

Questions to ask your teen:

Can you believe how far you’ve come?

What have you learned?

What would you have done differently?

How should we celebrate?

Don't Make These Common Goal-Setting Mistakes

As you use these 4 strategies for helping your teen set goals they are excited about, there are a couple of things you will definitely want to avoid.

Don’t nag your teen about their progress.

The more you nag the less they will want to do it. And even if your nagging does get results, it will also create a lot of harm and resentment for your teen in the process. This isn’t your goal, it is theirs so let them do it on their own terms and their own timeline.

If you find yourself wanting to nag them about it, ask yourself why you are so much more committed to their goal than they are and do the work to manage your own emotions about it. If you need help with this, join ENJOY to get personalized help and coaching from me as you work though it.  

Don’t make yourself their accountability partner.

It is not your job to hold your teen accountable to progress on their goals. Think of how annoying it would be if someone found out about a goal you are working on and then started pointing out all the times you are falling short. Not cool.

If your teen asks you to be their accountability partner, you can consider it, but tread carefully and make sure you agree on specific parameters so it doesn’t have a negative impact your relationship.

Don’t make goal-setting so serious and formal.

If it feels like a chore, your teen isn’t going to want to stick with it. Let them have fun with it. One year my daughter set a goal to compliment people more often but she didn’t tell anyone about it. It was her secret all year long, but when I finally found out about it, I was so impressed by how she had rocked her goal!

All year long she had been giving the kindest, most thoughtful compliments and really having fun with it. Had she told us about it, we may have pushed her to set a more challenging goal, but I got texts and calls and emails all year long from teachers, leaders and friends letting me know what an impact her kind words made on them.

Don’t make them set a certain number of goals or set goals in certain categories.

We know that balance is important and we want our kids to be growing in a lot of different areas, but when our kids feel like they have to set goals in different categories, it can feel very restrictive and forced.

Sometimes they are going to be excited about the physical goals and sometimes they are going to want to focus on social goals and that is ok.

I love the idea of considering how you are doing in different areas of your life when you are setting your goals to keep things balanced, but not being required to set goals in all those areas.

Don’t put pressure on them to achieve their goals.

The more pressure our kids feel to achieve their goals, the less they will enjoy the process. When goals are a source of pressure and stress, we often start to hold ourselves back by setting easier goals because we don’t want to fail.

So much learning happens in the process of pursuing goals. Don’t put so much pressure on the results that you miss out on all the benefits of the process.

I hope these strategies are helpful for you as you support your teen in setting goals for the new year and as you set goals yourself. If you have parenting, family or personal goals you want to achieve in the coming year, you need to join us inside of the ENJOY Coaching Community.

Parents of teens face a unique set of challenges that affect every single part of their life, and this community was designed to help you with all of it. We will be working on self-confidence, relationships, filling your parenting toolbox, boundaries, people pleasing, living your purpose, improving your mental and emotional health and so much more this coming year. It is truly the best gift you can give to your family and to yourself! 

Mentioned on the Show:

• Join ENJOY to get instant access to everything you need to raise an emotionally healthy teen and personalized support and coaching from me.  
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