Traveling Through Time With Goals
- Kenneth Pecoraro
- 5 hours ago
- 3 min read
This time of year, goals are on a lot of people’s minds.
Whether it’s tied to the calendar, a sense of wanting a “fresh start,” or simply feeling the weight of time passing, many people begin reflecting on where they’ve been and where they hope to go. For clinicians, this creates an opportunity: goal setting is not just a motivational exercise, but a powerful lens for self-awareness, values clarification, and behavior change.
Motivational Video Intro - Traveling Through Time With Goals
The challenge, of course, is that goals can easily become overwhelming, unrealistic, or disconnected from a person’s actual life experience. When goals are treated as isolated future targets, people often lose motivation or feel discouraged before they even begin.
That’s where a timeline-based approach can be especially helpful.
Why a Time-Based Approach to Goals Matters
Goals don’t exist in a vacuum. They are shaped by life stages, experiences, detours, losses, restarts, and successes, many of which people forget to acknowledge. When individuals are asked only to focus on future goals, they often overlook the fact that they have already accomplished many meaningful things along the way.
Looking backward first serves an important purpose:
It highlights resilience and capability
It grounds goal setting in lived experience
It helps people see patterns in what has mattered to them over time
From there, looking forward becomes less abstract and more personal.
Building on a Familiar Concept
Recently, we released a worksheet called Traveling Through Time with Gratitude, which invited participants to reflect on gratitude across different life stages. The response to that activity reinforced something important: when people reflect across time, rather than only on the present moment, the discussion deepens.
Traveling Through Time with Goals uses the same core concept, but applies it to goal-setting instead of gratitude. The result is an activity that balances reflection, motivation, realism, and hope.
How the Worksheet Is Structured
The worksheet is divided into three parts, each serving a different purpose in the change process.
Part 1: Looking Back - Participants reflect on goals they have already achieved across different life stages—from childhood through later adulthood. The focus is not on perfection or completeness, but on recognizing effort, growth, and meaningful accomplishments, big or small.
Part 2: Looking Forward - Goals are explored across a future timeline, starting with today and gradually expanding outward—to the week ahead, the next month, the next year, and beyond. This structure helps bridge short-term, realistic goals with longer-term, values-driven aspirations, including one final reflection on what someone would appreciate having accomplished by the end of their life
Part 3: Optional Fun Goals - The final section lightens the tone with creative, sentence-completion prompts. While intentionally playful, these questions often reveal important themes about identity, priorities, and motivation in a way that feels less pressured and more engaging.
Why This Works Well in Groups
This activity tends to generate strong discussion because it:
Normalizes detours, pauses, and restarts
Encourages realistic goal-setting rather than “all-or-nothing” thinking
Helps participants see connections between past effort and future potential
Balances seriousness with approachability
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