Breaking Terminal Goals Into Enabling Goals: A Practical Approach to Enhanced Client Outcomes
Alec Gardner
Independent Board Member Advisor Australian India Trade Corporation | Organisational Development, Executive - Business - Transformational Coaching, Change Management
As a coach, empowering clients to achieve their aspirations is at the heart of your practice. However, the path to success is rarely straightforward. This is where breaking terminal goals into enabling goals can transform coaching outcomes. When properly implemented, this approach not only makes monumental objectives more achievable but also fosters a sense of control, builds confidence, and ensures sustained progress. Whether new to coaching or an experienced practitioner, understanding and applying this methodology can strengthen your impact as a coach.
Defining Terminal and Enabling Goals
Before diving into the methodology, let us establish clarity on what terminal and enabling goals are:
Terminal Goals: These are the ultimate objectives that clients aim to achieve. They are the "big picture" outcomes, often long-term and broad. For instance, a client may express a terminal goal, such as, "I want to grow my business revenue to $1 million annually," or "I want to live a healthier lifestyle." Terminal goals represent the end destination.
Enabling Goals: These are the smaller, actionable steps or sub-goals contributing to realising the terminal goal. They are rooted in the present or near future and provide a logical roadmap. For example, to achieve the terminal goal of growing business revenue, enabling goals include launching a marketing campaign, improving sales skills, or developing a customer retention strategy.
Breaking terminal goals into enabling goals provides clients clarity, reduces overwhelm, highlights measurable progress, and helps maintain motivation over an extended period (Locke & Latham, 2020).
Importance of Breaking Down Goals in Coaching
Goal-setting is a foundational practice in coaching, yet one of the most common challenges clients face is staying on track with their aspirations. Terminal goals, by nature, can feel daunting or unrealistic, leading to procrastination, self-doubt, or even abandonment. By breaking these overarching objectives into actionable enabling goals, clients can:
Increase Motivation: Accomplishing smaller steps fosters a sense of achievement and builds momentum (Zimmerman, 2021).
Enhance Focus: Enabling goals concretise vague ambitions into straightforward, actionable tasks (Grant, 2020).
Improve Accountability: Clients become more aware of what needs to happen and when making coaching engagements more purposeful and structured.
Strengthen Self-Efficacy: Small wins cultivate confidence in one's ability to reach the larger goal (Bandura, 1997).
A Step-by-Step Guide to Breaking Down Goals
Let us walk through a step-by-step process to integrate this method into your coaching practice.
Step 1: Clarify the Terminal Goal
The first step is fully understanding your client’s terminal goal. This involves:
Exploring Aspirations: Ask open-ended questions such as, "What do you truly want to achieve?" and, "Why is this goal important to you?"
Ensuring Specificity: Help clients articulate their objectives as precisely as possible. For example, "I want to be financially secure" can evolve into "I want to generate $10,000 in monthly passive income."
Connecting to Values: Align the client's terminal goal with their core values to ensure it holds genuine meaning. Research shows that value-driven goals are more likely to result in sustained effort and commitment (Sheldon & Elliot, 2020).
Pro Tip: Use visualisation techniques to help clients clearly “see” what their terminal goal looks and feels like once it is achieved. This can enhance emotional connection and commitment.
Step 2: Assess the Gap Between Current Reality and Terminal Goal
Next, work collaboratively with the client to evaluate where they are currently regarding their desired outcome. This requires thoroughly assessing their strengths, weaknesses, resources, and obstacles. Questions to guide this process include:
"What progress have you already made?"
"What challenges do you foresee?"
"What skills or resources do you need to move forward?"
By identifying this gap, you will have a more precise foundation to build enabling goals.
Step 3: Break the Terminal Goal Into Enabling Goals
Breaking the terminal goal into smaller, manageable pieces is the heart of this strategy. This process involves:
Creating Milestones: Divide the terminal goal into key phases or checkpoints. For example, if the terminal goal is running a marathon, milestones include completing a 5K, 10K, and half-marathon.
Setting SMART Goals: Each enabling goal should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound. For instance, an enabling goal could be, “Run four times per week for 30 minutes over the next month.”
Prioritising Tasks: Rank enabling goals in order of importance or sequence. Some tasks need to happen before others. For example, improving cash flow might take precedence over long-term expansion plans for a business owner.
Visualisation Tip: A flowchart or mind map can be a powerful way to illustrate how enabling goals lead to the terminal goal.
Step 4: Develop Action Plans and Metrics
With enabling goals in place, it is time to define specific actions and success metrics. Here, focus on:
Daily and Weekly Actions: Help clients determine specific steps they need to take regularly. For example, "Write two blog posts per week" could be an action tied to an enabling goal of launching a content marketing strategy.
Tracking Progress: Establish benchmarks or indicators of success. For example, increasing website traffic by 10% might be a metric that reflects progress toward a marketing-related enabling goal.
Step 5: Support Accountability and Reflection
Accountability is critical to ensuring follow-through. As a coach, create a system where clients check in regularly on their enabling goals. Use approaches such as:
Weekly Reviews: Evaluate what is working, what is not, and what adjustments are necessary.
Celebrating Wins: Acknowledge and celebrate progress on enabling goals. This reinforces positive behaviour and motivates further effort (Zimmerman, 2021).
Reflecting on Setbacks: When clients encounter challenges, help them identify causes and brainstorm solutions.
Practical Application: A Case Study
Consider a coaching client, Sarah, whose terminal goal is to "Become a certified public speaker and deliver a keynote speech within one year." During the initial discussion, Sarah expressed feeling overwhelmed. Together, the coach and Sarah break this goal into enabling steps:
With each enabling goal, Sarah knows exactly what to do and by when. Regular coaching sessions track her progress, troubleshoot obstacles, and celebrate milestones like completing the certification course. By the end of the year, Sarah had achieved her terminal goal with confidence.
Psychological Aspects of Goal-Setting in Coaching
Understanding the psychological principles behind goal-setting can enhance this process in your practice. Key insights include:
Chunking for Cognitive Efficiency: Breaking down goals aligns with how the human brain processes information. Smaller steps are more manageable for clients to conceptualise and execute (Kukla, 2021).
Overcoming the “Goal Gradient Effect”: Research suggests that individuals are more motivated by proximity to achieving a goal. Enabling goals are incremental checkpoints that maintain momentum (Hennecke & Miele, 2021).
Building Self-Efficacy: Success with enabling goals reinforces beliefs about one’s ability to succeed at larger tasks, significantly contributing to overall performance (Bandura, 1997).
Common Challenges and How to Address Them
While this approach offers many benefits, there are potential challenges that coaches may encounter, such as:
Client Resistance to Smaller Goals: Some clients may view enabling goals as too “small” or insignificant. Address this by emphasising how these steps build confidence and lead to the bigger picture.
Overloading Clients: Too many enabling goals can easily overwhelm clients. To prevent this, focus on one to three key enabling goals at a time.
Adjusting Goals Midway: Life circumstances or market dynamics may change. Be flexible and co-create revised goals with your client to stay aligned with their ultimate aspirations.
Conclusion: A Transformative Coaching Tool
Breaking terminal goals into enabling goals is a robust methodology that empowers clients to take actionable steps toward achieving their dreams. By providing structure, fostering motivation, and celebrating progress, this approach transforms the coaching experience from overwhelming to attainable.
Encourage clients to view enabling goals not as detours but as essential building blocks toward their ultimate destinations. As a coach, adopting this method can deepen your impact, ensuring clients leave each session with clarity and confidence in their ability to succeed. Whether your clients aspire to personal growth, professional success, or lifestyle transformation, breaking goals into actionable steps can make their vision a reality.
References
Bandura, A. (1997). Self-efficacy: The exercise of control. New York: Freeman.
Grant, A. M. (2020). The power of goal-focused coaching: Developing clarity and motivation. Coaching: An International Journal of Theory, Research and Practice, 13(2), 152–159. DOI:10.1080/17521882.2020.1757766
Hennecke, M., & Miele, D. B. (2021). The psychology of goal gradients: How proximity to goal achievement affects motivation. Journal of Applied Psychology, 106(5), 799–815. DOI:10.1037/apl0000781
Kukla, A. (2021). Cognitive strategies in goal planning: The chunking effect. The Behavior Analyst Today, 22(2), 134–142. DOI:10.1037/bat0000112
Locke, E. A., & Latham, G. P. (2020). Building a practically useful theory of goal setting and task performance. American Psychologist, 48(9), 705–717. DOI:10.1037/amp0000357
Sheldon, K. M., & Elliot, A. J. (2020). Goal striving, need satisfaction, and well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78(1), 67–81. DOI:10.1037/0022-3514.78.1.67
Zimmerman, B. J. (2021). Self-regulated learning and goal achievement: Theoretical and empirical intersections. Annual Review of Psychology, 72(1), 580–612. DOI:10.1146/annurev-psych-101220-115849