Episode 63: The importance of goal setting.

Andy Psarianos

Hi, I'm Andy Psarianos.

Robin Potter

Hi, I'm Robin Potter.

Adam Gifford

Hi, I'm Adam Gifford.

Andy Psarianos

This is the School of School podcast.

Welcome to the School of School podcasts.

Adam Gifford

Are you an early years teacher struggling with lack of support for lesson planning? Foundations can help. Foundations is the new reception programme from Maths — No Problem!! It's a complete reception package with workbook journals, picture books and online teacher guides all in one place. Visit mathsnoproblem.com today to learn more.

Robin Potter

So welcome to yet another wonderful podcast of School of School. We are so lucky today. We have Katriona Lord-Levins fondly known as Kat, who is joining us.

Andy Psarianos

Hi Kat.

Robin Potter

Yes, say hi to Kat everybody.

Adam Gifford

Kat. How are you?

Robin Potter

Kat, why don't you quickly introduce yourself and let us know a little bit more about you.

Katriona Lord-Levins

Thanks Robin. Yes. So I'm Kat Lord-Levins. I am the Chief Success Officer at Bentley Systems. We're an infrastructure software company.

Robin Potter

Great.

Andy Psarianos

And where are you guys based Kat? You guys are based in the US primarily? It's a global company, right?

Katriona Lord-Levins

We are, we're in Exton in Philadelphia. I'm currently over on the west coast and I'm actually in Arizona right now and we're in about 176 countries with our software.

Adam Gifford

Wow. That's a lot.

Robin Potter

That is incredible. Well, I know we had talked a little bit before recording today that we really did want to talk about goal setting because it is so important from an early age all through adulthood and I wondered if you wanted to start us off. Can you tell us why or how is goal setting so important and what, how we can encourage young people to set goals for themselves?

Katriona Lord-Levins

Yeah. Thanks Robin. Yeah, look, I spend a lot of time in the corporate world with adults, teaching them how to set goals and the importance of goals setting and trust me, the stock market is the biggest measure of goal setting that's out there.

Robin Potter

An achievement.

Katriona Lord-Levins

Yeah, exactly, exactly. Look, it's so important to set goals. It's important for your own being. It's important for the sense of self. Look, we're living in this world right now where everything that we've gone through in the pandemic, the isolation that some people have felt, there's a social problem around depression and all sorts of mental issues that are actually hitting our kids more and more. It's one of the worst outcomes I think of the pandemic is what's happening around the social side for kids in particular and so goal setting actually gives you a sense of purpose. Going out and setting yourself some kind of a north star. Setting yourself something. It could be the most audacious or what we call a moonshot. It could be something that you may never have happen.

It could be a roof shot, which is a little closer to the ground. Picking something gives you a sense of direction. It gives you a sense of purpose and in a time when all of these social problems are going on for our kids, like the mental issues that we have happening within that space as well, I actually think it is the north star for them. It's the grounding force to keep them feeling successful.

Adam Gifford

I often think, I know we've talked previously Kat, but every time we talk, I go back to wearing my teacher hat in the classroom, which I've not done for a while, but I'm still deeply involved in education and I realised that that's something that I think I missed quite a bit when I was a teacher. I always want, after talking, I always want to quickly get back into the classroom to be better but I just wonder how often we are actually asking children to set goals. Just in general. I think that we're often, there might be some sort of task completion, but it's not about their goals and is the task actually completed or is it today we're going to do some writing and we're going to write for an hour and that's a... I think there's a difference between the two and actually I think that the goal setting is something that, when I look back, and I don't think I'd be alone in this, I'm not sure how much we did when we're teaching, for the children.

Andy Psarianos

Mm, well like this maybe a little bit of a philosophical point, but originally when schools were set up, right, and I'm not talking about like ancient schools, I'm talking about what we call schools today. It was largely a response to requiring skilled workers for the industrial revolution right? It was like we needed to train people to have a schedule, to show up for work at a particular time to do piece work, to do assembly line work, to do, you know, so a lot of it was about conformance and a lot of it was about learning to do what you're told, right? Like, of course there was teaching involved as well, but the structure fit the structure of the sort of factory worker, right? As a concept, that's how we saw the world, is how the world was structured in those days or that seemed like it was the future, you know? And it was, and it stayed like that for a long time, but the world has evolved, but the school system is behind right?

So we're still, in a way, trying, so school, a lot of school is about conformance and it's about hitting marks and measures that we've put in place that are around largely conformance. Can you remember all these random facts? If so, you do well. Can you perform all these steps in the right order to get the correct result? If so, you will do well, right? And there's still a lot of that. It's not all we do in the education system, but there's still an awful lot of that in the education system. But when we look at the modern economy and the modern world, we don't need so many people like that because they're being replaced by mechanised robots and they're being replaced by artificial intelligence and computers. It's like the old, I know we've talked about this before, but there used to be a job called a calculator, right? And a calculator was, did exactly what your calculator that comes for free on your iPhone did, right? You added numbers, multiplied them and did all that stuff because we didn't have calculators or computers.

Not many people employed with that job title these days right? So, that's just a really simplistic example of how those skills have been replaced by other skill, by mechanised or electronic devices. So in new world, you have to be able to operate at a completely different level, right? Like, of course you need to have some skills, you need to be able to know how to multiply numbers and add and so you can make good decisions and at least do some calculations in your head, but any... Point where it gets to a level of complexity, that gets very quickly replaced by machines right? So what are these new skills in the new world? And how does goal setting fit into that? How does an individual, because, oh, how am I... I'm not sure I'm explaining this very well, but we need people to take more ownership about their destination and their lives because we're not there telling them what to do at this level that we used to. How do we deal with that in schools? How do we deal with that in just in society in general, right?

Katriona Lord-Levins

Yeah, no, it's, you know, Andy it's so spot on. There's two pieces to goal setting. One of them is contributing to society without a doubt and building a skill set to contribute to society. The other one is to contributing to the growth of yourself as a homo sapien. So what are you doing inside of your brain? How are you evolving? How are you managing? How can you cope? I mean, we, more and more, I keep... I go back to the mental issues that are happening that are plaguing some of our younger generation today because of the involvement on these tools that they get into the, they get sucked into their Insta world and goal setting gives you, I go back to that sense of purpose, but it actually is developing you and there's a couple of tricks that we did and I know, Adam, you said that it's not so prevalent perhaps in the classroom.

It's not all that prevalent everywhere. I mean, corporations are not all that prevalent either. They'll do goals at a higher level, but I want to bring goals down so every individual feels a sense of responsibility and a sense of achievement from what they do day-to-day and that's what I try to do in my corporate world. And we have, so we run a customer success organisation. We work with our customers to ensure that they are successful in what they're doing, reaching their business goals, but what I also have is what we call a colleague success plan and so I have every single individual in our 700 plus people that we would have on customer success, write an annual goal for themselves and it's got three flavours to it. It's what are you going to do for you? What are you going to do for your next level management? So you think about in the classroom, what are you going to do for yourself? What do you want to achieve for your teacher or give back to your teacher or somehow achieve something and what are you going to do for society?

So it's the three layers of self, the level above you, and then the world in general and I think having kids learn how to set small goals and they can be tiny, but they're achievable and they're celebrated when you hit them, gives you this sense of achievement and you keep building from there.

Adam Gifford

I think it makes complete sense. I think it's lovely and simple. I think that I'm imagining all the children that I've taught and I think that they'd love it and I think that, because I always, it gets somewhat staggered when things like this are said, because it just makes sense, right? It just makes sense, but it doesn't make sense when, well, no, I suppose it wasn't a conscious thought. I suppose that's the thing is that we see things like this and I think there's still that shift of, or still that mindset of, I know what's best. So I'll set the goals for you because I'm the expert in the room and so I'll do that for each of you and I'll be a great teacher because of that and it's just, I don't know, yeah, what you said just makes complete sense.

And so I know that there's a greater skill set. I was about to say, very implementable. I understand that there'll be more and there's a skill set that underpins that, it's not just as simple as asking three questions and write them down on a piece of paper, you know, to make it valued but it just makes sense. You must have, you must know of a lot of... Well people outside of your organisation that are using this, that are, you know...?

Katriona Lord-Levins

I mean, different corporations are doing different things, not to that granular level I haven't heard, and they often set goals that they never look back on or they're self-serving to some degree as opposed to the multifaceted. I think when you have a multi-layered one, you are not, you're developing a lot more skills so I'm sure it's happening. It's got to be happening. I don't hear it as prevalent as it should be.

Robin Potter

Sounds like something we need to incorporate. What do you think, Andy?

Andy Psarianos

Sure. Yeah, you can run-

Robin Potter

Yeah.

Andy Psarianos

... the programme. Robin.

Robin Potter

I can run the programme.

Andy Psarianos

You don't have enough to do, right?

Robin Potter

Sure, absolutely but you know, just one comment about the, I think the setting of tiny goals, you know? Especially with kids, that's very achievable and those small little wins, then for them, to encourage them to then set a little bit of a bigger goal, you know, and then maybe a bigger one and a longer term one, I think that's where you need to start. And just these...

Katriona Lord-Levins

But equally Robin, equally, if they have a moonshot, so moonshot-

Robin Potter

Mm.

Katriona Lord-Levins

... is that getting a man on the moon, remember? Back to when, probably some people will remember, back to when John F. Kennedy said he was going to put a man on the moon and people were what?

Adam Gifford

Yeah.

Katriona Lord-Levins

But it mobilises, it mobilises attention. If a kid says, "I want to be a doctor when I grow up" and that's a moonshot out there, that could be a goal of sorts. If they break it down in some way to, and they change their minds every day, but they could start to develop skills or start to, well, here's, that's your goal, okay, so what are you going to do? What are you going to do this year for yourself, for those... what, how does this impact? And you chip away at things and you get skills along the way and so you can capitalise on a passion. If there's a big passion out there for something, use that too but you know, for those that don't, not everybody has that big passion, find those smaller things to measure against.

Andy Psarianos

Okay. I'm going to twist this around a little bit. So I think, I'm looking at the people here and we're all highly successful, top of the game, kind of, you know, we've all done really well, right? And this is not to brag or anything, but we're... But we're not... If you take a cross section of society, this is not a good representation, right? I guess, is what I'm trying to say. What is the obstacle? What is stopping people from doing this? And because that's what we got to tackle, right? And I've been trying to think a little bit about what some of these obstacles are and especially in children, because I think we need to focus this a little bit on children and I see that there's a real difficult, I don't know if this has always existed because I certainly can't remember when I was a kid, what my mindset was about stuff.

And I didn't think about this kind of stuff a lot as a kid, there seems to be a real difficulty with decision making, like decision making seems to be something that a lot of children struggle with, right? And it's not just children, it's adults as well. A great experiment is, next time you go to a restaurant with a bunch of people, now that the pandemic's kind of hopefully behind us for good, but hey, who knows, it might swing back again, go to a restaurant with a bunch of people and just observe how long it takes people to make a decision on the menu, right? It's interesting because some people are paralysed by menus, right? And other people go in and go, "Yeah, I'll have the cob salad" or whatever, right? Boom, right? That's for me. Other people will spend 10 minutes looking at the menu and be none the wiser and start asking everybody else what they're doing and what they're ordering and then put it down and then pick it up again.

Just observe, because I like to observe people at that level and I know that sounds a bit creepy, but that's kind of, that will tell you a lot of things, like how difficult even a decision like that is for some people, right? Now ask them to make a major life decision like setting a goal because a lot of people think that the problem with goal setting is that it's a high stakes decision. If I say I'm going to do this, that means I have to do it and that's a commitment and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah and then they'll, you know, is that an obstacle that we need to work with, right? And how do we get around that?

Katriona Lord-Levins

So a couple of things there. With kids, so you know, you say about kids and how do we get the obstacle for kids? Has anyone ever asked a kid? Like what can you...? What do you want to do? What would you be able to do? What would you set a goal? I think a lot of kids are told. A lot of kids are being told, they're being scheduled. They're being scheduled...

Andy Psarianos

You're going to play volleyball on Wednesday and on Saturday-

Katriona Lord-Levins

That's it.

Andy Psarianos

... it's football.

Katriona Lord-Levins

That's it, that's it and back to your menu one which you would say, okay, might be hard for them to find a decision. And I think-

Andy Psarianos

That's usually not kids by the way. That's usually adults.

Katriona Lord-Levins

No, I know that's not, and I know that's not kids, but it's... It comes from kids and I'll tell you the, people need to start... By starting to write down goals, you run into those obstacles and you ask yourself the why and you start to unravel the reasons why things are difficult. Why is it difficult to make a decision? Because you are afraid you want to please everybody at the table, you want to please this person or that person, or you start to unravel and get to the core of what makes you less independent around this and I think goal setting helps you get there because you have to write down that commitment. You have to figure out how do I distil this down to something simple, something simple and measurable. How do I get there?

Andy Psarianos

Mm.

Katriona Lord-Levins

And I think it's a really good set of questions you start to ask yourself as to how do I get there?

Adam Gifford

But I think one of obstacles Andy, is I think that again, just thinking about my time in schools, is children can see when it's a scam, right? They can see when it's the flavour of the week. So right, everyone today, we're going to be writing our goals and we'll look at them in three months and then six months later, it's kind of like they find it because today's the day that we clean our desks and there is my goal, there's a crumpled heap at the bottom and they just think, so what's this all about? It's another thing that Mr. Gifford said, and he gets us to do these things and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah and it doesn't even eventually... So I think that what I find is that it's got to be valid and it's got to be... We've got to see the benefits in it because I think that sometimes there's a danger with, I don't know, like things around self assessment or, there's-

Andy Psarianos

Yeah.

Adam Gifford

... a whole load of things in education that we kind of do because someone's told us that it's a good thing so we kind of do it but then the follow up part that actually legitimises it, that's the part where it falls down and then the association and my experience is that's a negative thing because all it does is it leads that and I think that's what we need to be very careful of because I think some of the things that you're talking about, they'll be utterly precious. Like really, really precious, means a hell of a lot and I remember having this conversation with parents that they say, "Oh, my child's talking about this and it's only a small thing" and I'm like, "No to your child, it's the world, eh?"

Robin Potter

Yeah.

Adam Gifford

"So never forget that. It might be small to you, but for them, it is everything." So I just think it's got to be, we need to treat these things with the care they deserve and when we're asking for these things, if people are willing to share it and set these goals, then the least they deserve is that we commit alongside them, I suppose, is what I'm trying to say.

Katriona Lord-Levins

Can I just make one last point on that is, can you imagine, Adam, can you imagine if that child either once every three months or once every whatever cycle works, gets the opportunity to sit down with that teacher for five minutes to discuss their goal and if that's a regular cadence of something where they're getting some time, some focus and the importance of that goal is brought back to them. Can you imagine the change that that would have? And I know that it's a lot to put on teachers, but to actually have someone focus on you and ask you how you're making it, that's how we get it done. It isn't just about writing it after the cadence of accountability around it as well.

Adam Gifford

But I think, just to add to that, I was in a very fortunate position of working with some children that weren't, I wasn't their class teacher, but I was doing some intervention work just on and off so I had to set those regular. What I realised is that for both parties, for me, sitting there five minutes, which is nothing eh? Don't ever tell me, anyone in a classroom, that you can't get five minutes with a child, of course you can. You can make that happen, but my God it's worth it and I think that's a really important thing is, that yes, massively important, Kat and lovely. Lovely that relationship building in terms of learning, wonderful, but also for us to be better teachers and-

Katriona Lord-Levins

Yeah.

Adam Gifford

... learners ourselves.

Katriona Lord-Levins

Yeah.

Adam Gifford

I think that's really important.

Robin Potter

Yeah.

Andy Psarianos

Making that connection. Yeah. Making that... Wow. Lots to think about huh?

Thank you for joining us on School of School podcast.