Goal Setting: Why Don’t We Define the Treetops?

Goal setting has always played a big role in my time as an educator. I had it firmly embedded in my practice before it became a core feature of classroom teaching. This was in part because I was a specialist physical education teacher for much of this time. I strongly believed that having some projects that incorporated goal setting was fundamental to students’ lifelong participation in health and fitness.

The dreaded Beep Test - well, I admit, I used it! I tried to get rid of it, but the way I used it was so popular that I even had some parents write to the school requesting that I implement this project with their younger children. The flip side? Not one parent or school complaint about my usage of the Beep Test in over 10 years of teaching Physical Education. It was all in the ‘how’.

I’d start the year by showing the students the jobs that still require the Beep Test as an entry requirement. The Navy requires 6.1 in Australia, which is a very achievable score, even for younger children (on a modified length track). I can still remember all the Australian jobs that require the Beep Test, all the way up to 10.1 for the Army Special Forces.

Most professional sporting teams don’t use the Beep Test as a measure of fitness anymore, choosing measurements with more specificity to the rigours of the game itself. However, it was used extensively well into the 2000s. I managed to find an old West Coast Eagles post from around 2006 that stated players were required to achieve 14.5 to be deemed fit enough to play. So I chucked that score in as a challenge to those students with the aerobic endurance of a horse – and a few got there!

This played another purpose: it taught children that maintaining a level of fitness was not just good for their health; it opened further job possibilities for their futures.

We’d retest mid-year and at the end of the year so students could track their improvement. A core concept I embedded in this practice was that students focused on their own self-improvement and did not attach their progress or worth to comparisons with the outcomes of others. The students loved aiming for these job scores. Even when students were finished, they became really excited about those still running and getting close to the highest targets.

I created a proforma for students to track their scores and their improvements… and set goals to work towards. This proforma became a painful task for me over many years; I could never quite get it right. I researched and researched for years for something out there that could work for this issue that had become bleedingly obvious.

I tried SMART goals and OKRs and searched for anything and everything else, but nothing really worked for these Beep Test goals that students set themselves.

When setting a Beep Test goal, even after clearly seeing their outcome after the first test, most students would set their end-of-year goal extremely high. Motivation was up, and the students were not to be persuaded in any way that they could not achieve these lofty goals they had set themselves.

And who was I to tell them they couldn’t?

Although some of these goals would require a pretty strict health and fitness program, that was not the intention of the project. It was quite clear to me that the enthusiasm would drop, which it often did, and this goal would fall out of reach.

This created an extra issue. Once students realised they were not going to achieve their goals, for some this almost induced a feeling of shame or frustration that turned them away from wanting to participate in the project altogether.

No matter how often I tried to explain what ‘achievable’ meant, the students believed their goals were achievable no matter how high they set them, and I was not going to be the one to say that a lofty goal was too high or impossible. That’s a sure-fire way to kill motivation and ambition right from the start.

Then… it clicked.

Outcome goals, like a fitness outcome, are highly uncontrollable. There are many reasons why we may or may not achieve our goals. Many Western texts will tell you that if we do not achieve our goals, it’s all down to our lack of willpower, as though our habits and routines designed to reach this goal happen in a vacuum and are void of the impacts of the extremes we continually experience in our lives.

This is just factually untrue.

Sometimes life just gets in the way for a while.

As the old adage goes: “Aim for the stars, because if you miss you’ll land in the treetops.”

I’ve become convinced that so many of us give up on our goals because we do not define the treetops as well as the stars. We tie our self-worth and happiness to only one possible outcome, and anything less than this feels like failure, not progress. This is not how outcomes, or life for that matter, work.

I started to introduce language into my classes that put outcome goals on a continuum, which is often the result of our endeavours. I had students define their ‘Minimum for Fulfilment’, which I always stated could just be one level above where they are today - that’s still progress.

And then the ‘Dream’ goal, where they could still define that lofty goal that everyone loves to set for themselves.

This revolutionised the whole project. Students still felt a sense of pride even if they didn’t achieve their lofty goal, because pride was attached to the minimum outcome as well as the Dream.

Students felt positive about then setting another goal, to continue moving up that outcome continuum. We should all take pride in our improvements, no matter how small.

As the Tao Te Ching states:

“Lay plans for the accomplishment of the difficult before it becomes difficult; make something big by starting with it when small.

Difficult things in the world must needs have their beginnings in the easy; big things must needs have their beginnings in the small.” -  Lao Tzu, Verse 63

Working with thousands of students in many different contexts over my life has highlighted many flaws with the way we are taught to set goals. This has led me to the creation of 'The H.A.B.I.T House Framework'.

© 2026 Bryce Ingham - The Habit House Framework. All rights reserved.