When I completed my PhD in 2023, the overwhelming feeling was one of relief. After almost eight years, it was done. But once that initial weight was lifted, it was quickly followed by a more uncomfortable question: what actually happens to this research now?

Like many PhD students, I’d tried to publish along the way. I knew my work might reach other academics and, hopefully, a handful of practitioners. But the reality is that most people don’t go searching through academic journals for answers to practice-based problems. By the time the viva is over, you’re often out of energy, time, and resources and the work risks sitting on a shelf, rather than making the impact you hoped for.

That’s why a meeting I attended in October 2025 turned out to be so significant.

During the final years of my PhD, I was lucky to work with an international group of researchers and practitioners who share a genuine passion for goal-based practice with young people. Many of them are based in Canada, where the group had secured funding to scope the existing literature on goal-based work and bring together experts from around the world to develop a set of shared practice principles.

As part of that project, they organised a two-day consensus meeting in Nova Scotia, and I was invited to attend and present my own research.

It’s hard to overstate how surreal that felt. I’d never been invited to a meeting like that before, never mind one overseas, with expenses covered. It was very much a “pinch me” moment, mixed in with a lot of imposter syndrome.

The meeting itself brought together researchers and practitioners who work with young people in different contexts, all with a shared interest in how goals are used in practice. Over two days, we shared research findings, experiences from the field, and just as importantly challenged each other’s assumptions.

What made the discussions so valuable was the atmosphere in the room. There was a shared belief that working with goals can be incredibly powerful, but also a willingness to sit with disagreement about how this should be done well. Conversations repeatedly came back to the same core themes:

  • ensuring young people have real autonomy in defining their goals and rating their own progress
  • being considerate and acknowledging of power dynamics between adult practitioners and young clients
  • and agreeing, collaboratively, on what a goal actually means, so everyone involved is working towards the same endpoint

The outcome of that meeting is a set of practice principles for goal-based work with young people, which will (hopefully!) be published later this year. I’m really excited to see how they take shape and to be able to share them more widely.

For me, the meeting marked a turning point. It was the first time I could clearly see how my PhD research connects to real-world practice not as a finished product gathering dust in a university library, but as something that can actively shape how people work with young people. And that has made all the difference.

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