When I first showed up to 2nd Ranger Battalion in 2013 as a brand new private, my squad leader and team leader sat me down for an initial interview and we established a list of goals. They wanted to get to know me a bit better and ensure I had a productive set of ambitions to pursue. The overall intake process felt like a formality, but the goal-setting system my platoon embraced felt genuine, so I tried to really lean into the idea. I’m glad that I did.
In 2017, shortly following my spinal cord injury, I felt wildly ungrounded. My entire physical existence had just upended and every action and decision felt strangely foreign, so I decided to tap back into what I knew. I reached out to the inpatient psychologist and asked her to help me make a list of goals using a similar system to what I had in the military. It worked wonders, and as I checked off the list of goals that I literally taped to the side of my hospital bed, I felt more and more in control and grounded.
Now in 2026, I work as a mentor for other individuals with fresh spinal cord injuries, utilizing the SMART acronym: specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely. I didn’t recognize it back at 2/75, but this was actually the model that my leadership had used in the military. The only difference was they had me set three additional time-based categories: short-term, intermediate-term, and long-term. For my own mentorship, I do the same, which prompted me to develop the goal tracker below.
Goal setting works for many different reasons, but one of the most important aspects is that the goal simply make sense. Using a scenario pertinent to my current life with a disability, would “walking” be a quality SMART goal? Probably not, and let’s dissect why.
“Walking again” is likely a goal for everyone who becomes paralyzed. But it isn’t a very good pursuit to fixate on right away, at least it wasn’t for me. For starters, it isn’t specific enough. In fact, it is far too broad. It would, however, be a very measurable goal. Counting steps is literally a metric built into most wearable smart devices. It would also likely be criterion that a clinician would track during therapy. But how attainable is it? After a spinal cord injury, there are many things that come before walking–stabilizing blood pressure, managing bowel and bladder, sitting balance, gait training, prosthetics, standing frames, etc.–relevant only if you have an incomplete spinal cord injury that allows you some motor function below your level of injury. I do not. So how attainable would “walking again” be for me? This context ties into the realisticness of the goal. How pragmatic would it be for me, a complete and high-level quadriplegic, to devote my very-limited energy on such a broad and distant goal? The last thing to consider is the timeliness of it. For me, “walking again” would require a miracle or a breakthrough in medicine. I’m not saying that neither of these things will happen, but they sure aren’t happening as expeditiously as I’d want. So how long should it be something to focus on? I’ve been injured for nearly a decade, and if all I thought about was “walking again”, I wouldn’t have achieved anything else in the meantime.
Using this example, it is evident how important it is to be introspective with goals. They require a lot of consideration and forethought, because they equally require commitment and energy. If I truly wanted to focus on “walking again”, I would move it into the long-term category and ensure I had the smaller goals established that would help get me there. SMART goals like maintaining my bone density through weight-bearing exercise, maintaining my blood pressure through adequate water intake and medication, stretching my atrophying muscles daily, etc. would help get me to this major goal, if it ever becomes possible.
There is an illustration that often gets passed around that sums up the importance of SMART goals pretty well. I’ve never been able to find the artist for proper attribution, so I won’t share it here on my website, but I will describe it. Imagine climbing a ladder where the rungs are spaced too far apart to reach. That would be like immediately reaching for a long-term goal. Think of the rungs between as the SMART goals. These smaller steps ensure that we can climb the ladder to new heights.
This analogy brings up another important topic for goal setting: adjustment. If we reach that far away rung and stop there, what’s the point of the ladder? Goals should always be fine-tuned so we can keep climbing. As we approach or firmly tackle a pursuit, new ones should be established or modified. Using SMART goals, we avoid complacency altogether while making certain that we don’t get burnt out.
A helpful strategy when brainstorming goals is to start broad. Identifying a long-term goal can be a good starting point to pinpoint subsequent intermediate and short-term goals. For example, as a ranger private one of my long-term goals was to achieve the rank of sergeant. Becoming a noncommissioned officer entails a flurry of related smaller goals, and after working with my squad leader and team leader, my single goal branched into something like this:
A key facet of goal setting is that the goal remains adaptable. I was able to achieve the long-term goal of earning my Sergeant rank, but it looked vastly different after my injury. I had to change my intermediate and short-term goals to get there. In working with my leadership at the Army Warrior Transition Unit, we developed this:
We can see in this example that my long-term goal stayed the same, but I modified my other goals to get there. Reaching this milestone was a humbling way to close out my time in the military, and I don’t think I would have gotten there if I didn’t have SMART goals to follow and mentors to hold me accountable. This is exactly what I try to model as a mentor myself.
Proper goal setting is very effective. Often times, our long-term goals will sneak up on us and new ones will phase in with their retirement. This has occurred in my own life countless times. Some recent achievements that required SMART goals since my injury ranged from graduating college to becoming a father. I set goals for everything, no matter how irrelevant or minute they may seem. Hell, I even set SMART goals as a peer-mentor to better help others track their own goals. It’s an endless cycle, and it should be! That’s exactly how they were designed.
I am grateful for SMART goals and the mentors that taught me how to use them. I hope that I am able to pass on this wisdom and hope that this post has done just that. I appreciate you reading and learning about goal setting with me. Now go set some goals and crush them!