Setting goals is one of the important steps of individual planning. Even in our own lives, we set goals and think about how to achieve them. At least that's how I do it myself. On the other hand, I have the experience that life usually unfolds in its own way and not according to my plans and ideas. So I perceive that it is useful to think about your goals, but at the same time it is necessary to let life have a free hand and not cling to your goals convulsively. In principle, life cannot be planned and that's a good thing. If it were possible, we would lose many surprises and challenges, many different experiences. In a perfectly planned life, we might end up dying of boredom.
When planning a social service, we should realize that we are not planning the client's life, but that we are only planning the course of the social service. However, if it is a residential service in which the client spends a large part of his life, life planning and service planning may begin to intertwine. And it should apply here: it is important to think about goals for the future. However, if the goals and their fulfillment are the main focus, the client may miss out on many useful things that individual planning can offer.
During interviews with dozens of social service workers on courses dedicated to individual planning, I very often come across the fact that finding the "right" goal for workers becomes the most important thing they focus on in individual planning. Whoever has the goal wins. Finding a goal is a nightmare that always returns after a few months, because when the goal is "fulfilled", another suitable goal must be found again. In short, the search for a goal and its fulfillment is often overestimated and misunderstood in individual planning. Too much focus on the area of goals can lead the entire process of individual planning to a dead end. Planning then deals less with things that are important to the client and is too influenced by the worker's ideas.
The goal is in the future. It is a certain idea of something that is not yet, but could be. However, the mutual contact between worker and client takes place now, in the present. The more we can concentrate on what is happening right now, here and now, the deeper and livelier our contact with the client can be. Individual planning should lead precisely to deepening the relationship between the worker and the client. If we focus too much on the future, on goals, on what should be different than it is, it may happen that the quality and depth of our contact with the client will be weakened.
I would dare to say that the main purpose of individual planning is not setting goals and their subsequent fulfillment. The meaning of individual planning is certainly broader and everyone can perceive it a little differently. I consider it important that individual planning allows us to get to know the person we work with better. Know his needs, desires and wishes. To understand what his world looks like. To know what this person perceives as important, what he needs to be satisfied. It is therefore about deepening the relationship with this person, about better understanding and knowledge of his needs. Based on this understanding, the worker can start thinking about how to support a person, how to cooperate with him, how to help him achieve what is important to him.
Individual planning therefore begins with the phase of recognition and mapping. Together with the client, we are looking for answers to the questions indicated above. The result of mapping is usually called a personal profile, in which this important information is summarized. Only at this moment, with a personal profile in hand, can we start thinking about setting a certain goal for the future together with the client. We rely primarily on what is important from the client's point of view. Of course, we also take into account the opinions of other people from the client's surroundings. However, if we do not have a good map of what the client perceives as important and what their real needs are, it is almost impossible to set a meaningful goal and provide social service for the client in a useful way. In practice, however, it often happens that the stages of mapping, examining the client's needs and compiling a personal profile are skipped. In this case, planning begins with the worker sitting with a pencil in hand over a form and thinking about a personal goal. Or he asks the client what his personal goal is. However, the client usually does not understand this question and will say anything to have peace of mind. Or he declares that he wants nothing and has no goal. Therefore, starting with this question of individual planning is very unfortunate.
Managers, entrepreneurs, athletes and other performance-oriented people think in terms of goals and their fulfillment. An ordinary person, especially a social service user, usually does not understand his life as a project. It does not set managerially precise long-term and short-term goals and does not regularly evaluate the success of their fulfillment. Inspirations from the field of management are clear in individual planning (the goal should be SMART, it should be a challenge, exact fulfillment criteria must be established, etc.). However, we should perceive when inspiration from management can become limiting when working in social services. I consider excessive emphasis on setting goals and their fulfillment to be one of these limitations.
It often happens that we map out many important things and needs in the personal profile, but then in the individual plan we focus on only one of them, which becomes the goal. For example, we will find out that it is important for Mr. Karl that no one rushes him, that he has enough privacy and does not have to participate in many joint activities, and that he can meet regularly with his girlfriend who lives in another house. We also find out that this person prefers to take a shower rather than take a bath, that he doesn't like rice, but loves potatoes, and that he gets upset when other people don't understand him because of bad pronunciation.
We now have several options for further planning. In the worst case, a goal that is not at all related to what is really important to Mr. Karl suddenly appears in the individual plan like a bolt from the blue. For example, "improved cleaning in the room". We can immediately see that this is rather a wish of the worker than Mr. Karl's goal.
Another much better option is to choose one important thing to focus on and which will become the goal. For example, meeting a girlfriend. The goal may be that Mr. Karel will have the opportunity to meet his girlfriend at least once a day (if he does not have this opportunity now). The goal can also be to practice independent movement, so that Mr. Karel can visit his girlfriend by himself, without the help of a worker. But if we were to focus only on this goal in the individual plan, what would happen to other important things from the personal profile? There is a danger that some workers will rush Mr. Karel, they will "motivate" him to joint activities that he is not interested in, and that Mr. Karel will have to eat rice three times a week, which he does not like at all.
Therefore, in an individual plan, we should not focus only on one or two goals and leave the rest of the things aside. An individual plan should include a much broader whole. The planning team should consult on how to do it so that no one rushes Mr. Karel. How to do it so that he can stay at home in his room when others go for a walk. How to ensure that less rice and more potatoes appear on his menu. How to improve communication with the environment. It would certainly be pointless to formulate all these things as goals and list the individual steps to them on a pre-given form. It is important above all that the team (together with Mr. Karl) discuss these matters, to arrive at a concrete solution and that this solution is briefly written down in the individual plan. For example: "None of the workers will encourage Mr. Karel to participate in activities that he has clearly expressed that he is not interested in". From these examples, we can see that focusing on a set of larger and smaller things that are important from the client's point of view can be more beneficial than devoting attention and effort to only one isolated goal.
There are periods in every person's life when we have some important goal that we are working to achieve. But there are also periods when we don't have such a goal, we focus on smaller things or simply enjoy the fact that we are doing well. It also depends on the living situation. For example, discussing her long-term goals with a 103-year-old senior citizen would probably be somewhat strange. The social service user should not be forced to constantly develop and constantly improve in something. Learning new things and skills takes place in certain cycles. A period of intensive learning, when we are fully in action, must be followed by a period of integration, of apparent calm, when the newly acquired skill is more deeply consolidated. Therefore, if no significant and meaningful goal can be found in the contact with the client, it does not mean that the process of individual planning is going badly. This usually means that the client is doing well during this period. If he did poorly, the goal would probably be to solve an unsatisfactory situation.
If the client is doing well and has no significant goal at the moment, we can pay more attention to the quality processing of the personal profile and the mapping of the client's needs. We can also try to use the "stay well plan" method - see diagram. It is one of the many techniques used in human-centered planning (see http://helensandersonassociates.co.uk for more). First, we focus on mapping and describing the things that make the client do well. We also think about things that could threaten this good feeling of life. In the end, we determine specific steps or areas that we must focus on when providing the service, so that the client's good feeling is preserved for as long as possible. In some cases, the use of this simple technique can be much more beneficial for the client than trying to come up with and fulfill some, at the moment, perhaps somewhat redundant, goal at all costs.
Author: Mgr. Jiří Sobek M.Sc. Jiří Sobek works as the director of the educational agency Adpontes, which offers individual planning courses directly in social service facilities. The courses are led by experienced experts from practice, focusing on people with mental disabilities and seniors. You can get more information about this effective and financially advantageous form of education at www.adpontes.cz or on tel.: 723 176 746.
This article was published in issue 9/2010 of the professional magazine Sociální služby. More information can be obtained from the websites http://www.socialnisluzby.eu and http://www.apsscr.cz.