Are your goals SMART or DUMB?

Yes it's true, there are DUMB goals. I'm not talking "negative intelligence" dumb, nor even simply ineffective or non-functional goals (as way too many are), I mean actually DUMB goals. And they're pretty smart.

SMART goals originated from the logic of the business model are are even taught to military and Emergency Services personnel to manage critical life threatening events. DUMB goals come at it from, not surprising, the opposite perspective. They come from more aspirational and etherical. More from the creative or artistic side.

DUMB stands for Dream-driven, Uplifting, Method-friendly, and Behavior-driven.

• Dream-driven: These goals are aspirational, and dream driven. They are built off of your desires and passions and use the power of your creative energies and ambition to achieve success.

• Uplifting: These goals inspire you to climb higher. They uplift you with vision and motivate you to keep moving forward to success.

• Method-friendly: These are more process driven than outcome driven. They rely on use of certain, preferably existing and well known systems and processes to assist in getting them done. Although new methods could be added or explored.

• Behavior-driven: As with "Method" above they are designed to be built upon set behaviors as a major impetus towards achievement. They rely on your existing behaviors to be the main support for getting these done. Although new behaviors could be explored.

So the big difference with DUMB goal setting is it is dream based. It relies on imagination and fantasy to make it happen. It draws up your existing positive emotions to the surface and may actually create new ones where few, or none, existed. It easily does this as these are unabashedly fantasy driven without rigid parameters.

Conversely you could easily say they are not based in reality, have no rigid parameters to drive or measure result by, and don't even define what you even attempting to achieve. All true. So why would you ever use a DUMB goal?

Best reason is in the Healing Arts and personal growth the most crucial step is to motivate the person to buy into change and stay on track. Aspirational dream based goals often work far better than rigid logical ones.

• Burnout - brain is already overloaded. what good is MORE details?

• Creative blocks - Take out the logic, add more aspiration!

• Sexual trauma (a large majority of my practice) - They can not cope with details, rigid plans or benchmarks. Let them open the door to healing by creating positive visions and dreams.

So counter-intuitively, there are times where it is better to be DUMB than SMART.

More on this next week.