How Can Clients Be Helped To Set And Accomplish Their Goals With Respect To Care?

RESUME

This lecture will focus on strategies for overcoming defensiveness (e.g., self-affirmation), effective goal setting (e.g., SMART goals), and strategies for translating intentions into action (e.g., monitoring progress and if-then planning).

A SELF-REGULATION PERSPECTIVE

In addition to providing medical insights and solutions, veterinarians are commonly tasked with helping their clients to set and accomplish goals with respect to caring for their animals. These goals can range from the specific (e.g., to remember to give medication twice a day for a week), to the more general (e.g., to help a dog to lose weight). I have previously suggested that research into self-regulation can help to understand the challenges that clients are likely to face (for a review of this idea, see Webb, 2015i ) and why they sometimes fail to act in their animals best interests (see my previous lecture at this conference). This lecture will show how this perspective can be used to help veterinarians to identify ways to help their clients to set and accomplish their goals. ...