The SAFE Goals for the New Year Walk

Transcript of Helen Sword’s podcast episode SAFE Goals for the New Year

Hello, I'm Helen Sword, this is Helen's Word. Welcome to my podcast series Swordswings for writers in motion. So these half-hour podcasts are intended for you to listen to when you're out and about, on a walk or in the garden or doing stuff around the house or the kitchen, pretty much anything other than sitting at your desk. And so you're not going to be doing writing while you listen to this, but you can be thinking about your writing, imagining your writing and kind of visualizing your writing perhaps. Today I'm going to talk you through the process of setting SAFE goals for the coming year, month, week, whatever you want to set goals for, and to go with the SAFE goals, we will have some RAD goals, radical goals that are maybe a little bit riskier than those SAFE goals.

Now, you may have heard about SMART goals. Often people will talk about setting SMART goals, particularly for businessy work or academic work. It sounds very smart, doesn't it? So smart goals are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-limited. And don't worry about writing down these acronyms if you are out moving around. In the substack podcast post, I will have all of the acronyms that I use so you can go back and look them up. So, specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-limited goals. It does sound very businesslike, doesn't it? So here's an example of a time when you might want to set SMART goals as a writer. You might know Wendy Belcher's book on writing your article in 12 weeks, which I should start by emphasizing that this is not about producing an article from start to finish in 12 weeks. It's about taking a piece of research that you've already done, for example, a dissertation or PhD thesis chapter, and turning it into an article that you can submit to a publisher. So, 12 weeks when you think about producing a piece of writing, maybe I don't know 10,000 words, based on research you've already done, or maybe less, maybe 5,000 words, actually is not overly ambitious. It's quite achievable, and so the idea is that you start with the end goal.

You break down the different bits of work that need to be done to get you there. Well, you've got to research journals and their publication styles and decide where to send it. You've got to take your very long lit review from the PhD chapter and turn it into a few paragraphs in the article. You've got to have a punchy introduction. All these different pieces that you need to do as part of your article. You break those down to 12 weeks, put them in a logical order, and then, even within the week, you might break that down to “Monday I'm going to do this", Tuesday, I'm going to do that”, and voila! What looked like a big, chunky task turns out to be a series of specific tasks that are measurable. You can say “okay, this week I'm going to complete the literature review section of my article.” They are achievable. Hopefully, you're breaking them down into small enough chunks that you can do what you've set out to do in that amount of time.

Which is tricky, by the way, because writers—academic writers, certainly— tend to underestimate the amount of time that they need to get particular pieces of writing done by a factor, I would say, of two or three. That is, you are likely, as a writer, to over-predict what you can write polished writing that you can produce in a given amount of time. So you might say this is going to take me two hours to write and it ends up taking you four or six to get it to a really good quality or more. So if you've said I'm going to do this task and you've only set yourself half or a third of the time you're going to need to do it, then it will not be an achievable goal within that time frame. It's still an achievable goal, but you've got the time-limited part wrong. Relevant to the task simply means that if you have a long-term goal, like finishing a paper, you need to make sure that each of the steps is relevant to getting you there. That seems pretty obvious. So again, SMART goals are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-limited. So you break each thing down to I think this will take me an hour, this will take me three hours, and if you can stick to those smaller smart goals, you can end up with your big goal of getting the paper out the door in time. That's just one example.

So, I have nothing against SMART goals. I'm not here to tell you that you shouldn't use that rubric or that they're a terrible idea, but my experience from decades of working with academic writers, professional writers, and people who write under the gun, who write because they have to, who write because they have deadlines, who write because they won't get the promotion if they don't, all those reasons that cause a lot of anxiety around the writing…What I know is that for many such writers, if you're already under a lot of pressure, being given this idea of these SMART goals that everybody can achieve…And if you can't achieve your SMART goals, well, you're obviously dumb, right? So that's kind of lurking there behind the idea of these SMART goals that smart people use them. And if somehow you don't manage because you've overestimated the amount you can do in the given time, or just because life gets in the way or for whatever reason, it's really easy to end up beating yourself up about it “oh, I didn't meet my smart goals, I must be stupid.”

So I've developed another set of goals as a kind of antidote to that productivity-pumping kind of ethos. I call them SAFE goals Simple, Attainable, Forgiving and, dare I say, Easy. Or maybe Enjoyable for that E. So let's think about SAFE goals in terms of something that you might set for your year, for your month, for your day. Something simpler probably than writing an entire article in a set of time, but it might be something as simple as saying I am going to do everything I can to make writing more enjoyable. That's a relatively clear-cut, simple goal, maybe not so easy to achieve, maybe not an easy goal, but it's simple, it's attainable. Well, I would hope. I would hope. Maybe that one seems unattainable to you. It's forgiving in that if you don't achieve the goal, you don't have to go and beat yourself up over it. You can say, “oh, that's interesting, let's try that again, a different way.” And easy means it's something that you actually have a chance of doing. That's going to be enjoyable, precisely because you can say, “oh yeah, I did that, I did that.” So what's an example of a simple, attainable, forgiving and easy goal? A SAFE goal?

For example, in January of 2024, if you're listening to this before then I am going to be running through my substack newsletter, Helen's Word, a 30 days of Writing with Pleasure sequence. I almost called it a challenge. We could call it a challenge, but your challenge is simply to come to your writing every day and devote 25 minutes, but you could make it less or more. You're going to come to your writing every day and devote that amount of time to finding ways to bring more pleasure to your writing, and the things you might do could be as simple as putting evasive flowers on your desk to beautify your surroundings and to lift your mood, something that you're going to look at during the day. That's going to make you feel better about your surroundings, about yourself and thus about your writing. That's pretty Simple, certainly Attainable, because it doesn't have to be evasive flowers if that's not something near you. You can find a drawing by a child or even put something up on your computer screen that makes you smile.

Anybody can find something to add to their environment, to bring them pleasure. And it's a Forgiving goal. That is, if you realize that even though you tried, you're still feeling anxious, you're still feeling unhappy with yourself as a writer, any of those negative thoughts you can go “Well, but I tried, I'm trying, I'll try again tomorrow.” You can forgive yourself for not having met the goal of changing your entire orientation towards writing in a day. That's not going to happen, and it's Easy in the sense that it's easy to make that one change to your environment.

So if you would like to set yourself a SAFE goal for the month of January, I would say one very actionable step is simply to sign up. You have to opt into it through my sub-stack website in the settings section. You can opt into your 30 days of Writing with Pleasure. And another actionable step I would suggest is that, if you haven't already been part of the AcWriMoments 30 Days of Writing series that Margie Thomas and I ran in November, you might want to go sign up for it now because we're going to be doing a monthly writing prompt. So, again, friendly, nurturing writing prompts to help you through your year. So SAFE goals I like because they're about positive emotions, they're not about beating you up, and the way I would recommend that you go about setting those goals is that you shift from the language of attainment or achievement to the language of effort and intention and growth and learning and change. So what do I mean by that?

Well, I used to line manage a number of academics in my role as the director of a higher education research center. So I had people in faculty positions who reported to me, and I had to do an annual review with each of them. They had to come in and tell me what they'd done for the year and then what they had planned for the year ahead, and there was a whole template they had to complete and all that. And here are examples of the kinds of goals that people would sometimes set. They'd say “next year, I really want to get this prestigious grant that I've applied for before and didn't get.” “I want to finish this writing project, I want to get this article out” or “I want to finish this book.” Maybe, if we're talking more at the everyday level, changing their behavior, they might say “I'm gonna sit down and every day I'm gonna write 1500 words or 500 words” or whatever. And of course there are lots of writing challenges that operate that way AcWriMo or NaNoWriMo, these ones where you're gonna write a thousand words a day for 30 days or 10 days or whatever it is. Or they might say this year I want to publish however many articles.

The thing about all of those goals the grant, the completion of a project, the word count per day, the publication goals is that none of those are entirely within your control and therefore they're all goals that you risk not meeting. You don't know if you're gonna get that grant. You can try for it, you can do everything, but to say that your goal is to get the grant is like saying my goal is to get an Olympic medal. You know that may be something you're working towards, but ultimately, if you don't get it, it's not because you failed. It's because, in the case of a grant, the judges and the peer reviewers chose someone else. That doesn't mean yours was no good. It means it was very competitive. So, it's the same thing with publishing something.

If you're submitting to a journal that only takes 10% of submissions, to say “my goal is to publish in this journal” means that you've got about a 90% chance of setting yourself up for not achieving that goal, through no actual fault of your own but because you have no actual influence over the peer review process. And you can write an excellent article that is not the one that is chosen for a wide variety of reasons, even something like getting a project finished. Well, if it's a complex project and it depends on other people and external circumstances and funding, to say that you're gonna finish that project when it's contingent on all kinds of things outside of your control can be setting yourself up for, I don't want to use the word failure, but for not meeting the goal, and even the one of “I'm gonna write a thousand words a day.” Some people really thrive on that kind of challenge and they can do it every day and they see measurable progress and that's fantastic, that's great. I would not tell you not to do a challenge like that if it motivates you. But maybe you're like me and you're really slow and when you're only a hundred words in, you're already going back and wanting to revise it and change it, and that is your way of working. Then you could have this goal of a thousand words a day and not be meeting it and be beating up on yourself, even though you are making very real, measurable progress on your writing.

So the kinds of goals that I prefer and that I would always encourage people to set don't have to do with the completion of specific tasks. They have to do with the effort put into them. So your goal can be that you are going to work on something or make progress on something, rather than that you're necessarily going to finish it. This doesn't mean you can't concurrently do those SMART goals and break things down to the best way to get it done in 12 weeks and do your absolute best to finish. But it's an attainable goal to say “I'm going to arrange my calendar so that I can write every day for one hour in the morning.”

Things might get in the way of it, but at least that's somewhat in your control. Most of the time. It's much harder to control how much you will actually do or get done in that hour, how many words you'll write. It might be a good word day or a bad one. It's very hard, as I've said, to directly influence things like acceptance rates for grants and for journals. So a SAFE goal and easy goal is one that says “I'm going to turn up every day and do some writing”, and then you can add on to that what kind of writing you intend to do and why you're doing this particular kind today and what it's building towards. That's all great, but your actual goal for the day is I'm going to show up and write for this amount of time or in this way, with this attention.

And if you're doing 30 days of Writing with Pleasure, one of the things you're consciously doing is thinking about your emotions around writing and trying to tweak them, trying to shift them towards pleasure. So those are the SAFE goals, and one way to create a safe environment is by working within what I like to call the SPACE of writing or the SPACE of pleasure. This is the acronym (SPACE) that has influenced the name of my WriteSPACE community, which looks at the Social, Physical, Aesthetic, Creative and Emotional dimensions of writing. So if you're working in a space where other people are there to support you, where you're physically comfortable, intending to your body's needs, where there's some kind of aesthetic enjoyment happening, whether because you're very focused on your own craft of writing or because you're writing in a beautiful environment or both of those things, a creative kind of environment where you feel like you can try new things, you can be pushing yourself, you can be enjoying your writing. And then a writing where you're supported also in having positive emotions about writing, which is more likely if all of those other things the social, physical, aesthetic, creative dimensions are in place. So SAFE goals and, for that matter, SMART goals, are more likely to be achievable or to pull you forward if you're in a nurturing, writeSPACE, a place where there's plenty of air and light and time and space, as per the title of my book on how successful academics write. We need these things. We need clear air to breathe, both literally and metaphorically, I would argue. But we don't always need to be in a comfortable space, a safe space. We can also have some RAD goals — Risky, Ambitious, Daring — and those RAD goals are going to work best when you're in that space of safety where you're supported in making those riskier moves and where there's a safety net to catch you.

So let me give you an example of how that works. As an academic leader trying to help the people I worked with to move ahead in their careers, I would ask them every year, as part of the performance review “what's a risk that you're planning to take this year with your research, with your teaching, your writing, anything else, and how can I support you in taking that risk?” So I'll give you a few examples. Let's say that we've identified that this person has been publishing only in sort of middle-tier journals and that to get a promotion to a higher rank, they really need to be targeting some higher-level, international journals, but they've been afraid to do that because it takes longer, the success rate's a lot lower, they're afraid of the rejection and they're afraid that they'll come back to their performance review next year and they won't have published the article, whereas if they send it to that safer, easier journal, it might already be out by now. That would be an example where I can say “look, I think it's time for you to take that risk. Let's record this in your report that I'm supporting you on taking the risk. So if you come back next year and it was a slow review process and at the end of it you got rejected and had to send it somewhere else. You won't be penalized for it. In fact, if anything, you'll be supported and praised for having made an effort to kind of shift things and of course, if it does get accepted, fantastic. Then you have a success to celebrate.”

An example in terms of risk in writing might be to try something that you haven't dared to do because you thought you'd get rejected. So maybe to have a kind of catchy title or to use a controlling metaphor or to use first-person pronouns in a discipline where that's not conventional. And if you've seen my WriteSPACE special event with David Goyes on writing and risk-taking, all of this will be very familiar to you. What David told us was that when he took these risks, he ended up having a lot more success than he expected, a lot more papers accepted, and a lot of praise for his writing. But there was a bit of pushback here and there, and of course, the fear of pushback could have stopped him from doing those things.

Another kind of risk might be with teaching. You want to introduce some teaching innovation, but you know that students often push back against things that are new and different and again I, as the chair of the department, could say “why don't you try it. We'll monitor it closely. We'll give you two or three years so you can really beat it down. So even if there's a bit of pushback from students, we accept that as part of the risk.” So it's supported risk-taking.

So if you wanted to come up with a RAD risk for your year, it could be, as I said, something as small as “when I submit this journal article, I'm going to put the title I really want, rather than the one that I think the peer reviewers are going to expect me to have.” What's the worst thing that could happen? You're probably not going to get put in prison or killed for taking that kind of risk. Actually, it's not that big of a risk. You might get some pushback, you might get told you should change it or you might find that they love it and it opens a whole new door to a different way of writing, and that very often happens. But you want to have a backup plan, and the best backup plan to have for any kind of risky maneuver is to have your cheering squad, have someone on your side. So whether you have a writing group or a partner or a friend from graduate school or whatever it may be, somebody to whom you can say “here's what I'm planning to do. Can we talk through how I might respond if I do get pushback, or can I call you if that happens?”

I have a lovely story I heard once from a woman who said that she and her husband were both academics and what they would do was they didn't take each other out to dinner if one of them got a paper accepted. They took each other out to dinner if one of them got a paper rejected. So in other words, if I submitted a paper and then got a rejection notice, my spouse would have to take me out to dinner. And it's a brilliant plan because, first of all, it just sort of cheers you up that somebody cares about you and does that. It also actually supports risk-taking. If you send the paper out and it gets accepted, fantastic, you've got another publication. If you send it out and it gets rejected, well, you get taken out for dinner. But maybe you also get a conversation with your partner who says, “okay, let's talk through where you're going to send it next,” or “let's have a look at the peer reviews together, because maybe they're not quite as dire as you think they are.” Having that other person there supporting you in your risk taking actually starts to make it not so scary and something quite life-affirming, because risk is what leads to growth and change and moving forward.

So just to sum up, SMART goals are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-limited, and absolutely fine. But you might want to pair them or substitute them for SAFE goals—simple, attainable, forgiving, easy. As in, “today I'm going to sit down at my desk and focus on my writing for half an hour.” Better yet, “I'm going to try to bring some pleasure to my writing for half an hour and then see what happens.” See what happens trying to achieve these goals within the WriteSPACE, the social, physical, aesthetic, creative and emotional dimensions of writing, all working in your favor, all part of this larger environment of support. But then we've got the RAD goals there too—risky, ambitious, daring, maybe also delicious. And they're supported when you're in that safe space.

So I hope, as you're writing, you're able to maybe even visualize what that safe space might look like, feel like for you, who might be there with you, how they can be walking along beside you to help you enable your risks and to help you feel safe and to help you move along on your writing journey. So I'd love to hear your questions or ideas, things that you'd like to listen to or think about when you're a writer in motion. So please, please, please, let me know in the comments or elsewhere. I'd love to know how this podcast went for you. I'm talking into a void. I'd love to feel like I'm part of a conversation that goes two ways, multiple ways.
So thanks for joining me on this Swordswing through the idea of goal setting in a safe space, and I look forward to chatting with you again very soon.

Helen