Identifying goals can be challenging. Even when we think we know our goals, we will often be surprised by unclear our ambitions really are. Tom Gilbert’s book Human Competence (1978) states that most people, given a goal, can identify multiple ways to achieve it – the real trouble is in identifying the goal to be achieved. This brings to question exactly how do we identify goals and what makes a goal a good one or not? Knowing how to set good goals can help identify current relevant repertoires or a starting point related to the goals and the procedures to achieve the goals. 

 

The first step of the Constructional Approach (Goldiamond, 1974; Layng et al., 2021) is to set descriptive and explicit goals that are agreed upon by the people involved. Having these goals set the path for constructional programming. This presentation will explore critical features of constructional goals and examine the Constructional Questionnaire (Goldiamond, 1974; Layng et al., 2021) and Goal Analysis (Mager, 1972) to learn ways we can guide and shape ourselves or our clients from stating goals that are vague or eliminative to goals that are objective, observable, explicitly specific.