What does it mean to set targets?
Targets help you to concentrate on the things that are important in your life.
Setting yourself targets helps you to stay motivated, be more focussed, counteract stress and ultimately take charge of and steer your own life. You know better than anyone that life with sickle cell disease can often be pretty exhausting. In particular, certain painful symptoms can sap much of your strength and energy, leaving you feeling tired and weak in your everyday life.1,2
Maintaining daily routines can feel like hard work.2 If you are lacking strength and motivation in your daily life, it may help to set yourself small targets and pace yourself.
You can use targets to define what you want to achieve. What's more, setting yourself targets can make you feel that you have taken back control of your life. Having several small targets that can also be achieved in the short term can give you an additional sense of achievement in your everyday life.
If you are living with pain, you might find that you tend to do a lot when you're feeling good and not so much when you're not feeling good,3 e.g., taking long walks on good days but not leaving the house on bad days.
Although this might feel right in the moment, too much physical activity may put too great a strain on your body and worsen your symptoms,4 while doing nothing may leave you feeling frustrated, making it hard to motivate yourself again once you're feeling better.
What targets can you set for yourself?
Setting yourself a target can be compared to selecting a holiday destination, while achieving your target is comparable to planning your journey.
Incidentally, you can set yourself targets for every area of your life – it is not restricted to the management of your disease.
Let's look at an example together: perhaps you would like to get fitter. In this case, for example, you could make a note of how you would know when you have achieved this target. Next comes the planning stage. How can I achieve this target? You might plan to do 15 minutes of yoga three times a week for eight weeks.
A different example: perhaps you would like to have more contact with your friends. In order to achieve this, you might decide to meet or call your friends once a week on a set day.
But, as you would expect, the main focus here is on the targets you can set for yourself to help manage your disease. Perhaps you would like to take fewer pain medicines. The first step in this case might be to familiarise yourself with the available alternatives.
The best thing would be to talk to your treatment team about how you can reduce the amount of medicines you take and what other options are available to help relieve your pain.
Your treatment team is best placed to explain which targets are important in terms of sickle cell disease and therefore also important for you. The team can also offer you the support you may need to achieve these targets.
Setting targets you can achieve 3
We have probably all set a target at some point in our lives. Just think about the New Year's resolutions that many people set each year. But these resolutions often fall by the wayside after just a few weeks. This is normal and part of human nature, as we often lack the motivation to stick with it. But why is that? It's simple – we fall back into old patterns, we forget about the positive effects we were hoping to achieve, or we were simply too ambitious when setting our target. This is why it can help to split targets into individual steps to achieve small but motivating wins on a continuous basis.
An approach known as the SMART method can help you to achieve
Find our target setting plan here.
Specific
The target must be specific and clearly defined.
Specific:
I would like to ride my bike twice a week for 20 minutes.
Measurable
You must be able to measure the target and the steps involved in achieving it.
Measurable:
I would like to ride my bike twice a week for 20 minutes and will achieve this by riding my bike for 2 mins longer each week.
Achievable
The target should be realistic and within your abilities.
Achievable:
I would like to do a bike ride with my friends in August and will ride my bike twice a week for 20 minutes in order to achieve this.
Relevant
It should be clear what specific benefits you can gain from achieving the target.
Relevant
I would like to ride my bike twice a week for 20 minutes.
Time-bound
You should set yourself a deadline for achieving the target.
Time-bound:
I would like to do a bike ride with my friends in August and will ride my bike twice a week for 20 minutes in order to achieve this.
To summarise, the process for setting targets might look like this:
Step 1: Think about what is important to you.
Step 2: Think about what specific things you would like to achieve.
Step 3: Split the path to your large target into multiple small intermediate steps, which are easy to achieve.*
Step 4: Stick to your plan!
Step 5: Adapt your target to your needs from time to time.
* When thinking about achievable intermediate steps, no step is too small. The important thing is that you are progressing towards your target – regardless of the speed.
For example, if your target is to do a bike ride with friends, and you are going to ride your bike twice a week for 20 minutes in order to achieve this, your intermediate steps might look like this:
- Get the bike out of the cellar
- Check whether it needs repairs
- Take it to the bike shop for repairs (if necessary)
- In the first week, ride the bike for 5 minutes at least once
- In the second week, ride the bike twice for 5 minutes
- Increase the time spent riding the bike by at least 2 minutes each week until you have reached 20 minutes after 8 weeks.
Support from your treatment team
If you have targets related to your treatment, you should talk to your treatment team about them. They will help you determine which targets are realistic and how you can achieve them.
The team can support you with other targets too. For example, if you want to get fitter, they can tell you how to slowly increase your training without risking your health.
Targets can help you to manage your life with sickle cell disease more effectively. You may want to confide in your friends or family members about your plans. They can support you with words of encouragement and celebrate your successes with you.
- Set yourself targets that are easy to achieve, especially at first. These initial successes will motivate you to keep going.
- Make a to-do list so you can check off each item.
- Don't make targets that can be too easily influenced by external factors that you cannot control (e.g., the weather or other people).
- Tell the people around you about your targets and progress.
- Give yourself a little reward when you take one step closer to reaching your target.
- Review your targets on a regular basis and change them if they are no longer in line with your wishes or your situation.
For more information on targets, visit our resource hub.
- Top tips for self-management
- Your wellbeing diary
- Set targets that work for you
- Get the most out of your medical appointments
