Sports Psychology For Dummies. Leif H. Smith

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      Setting goals that challenge you

In addition to being specific, your goals need to be challenging. They should push you beyond your comfort level and be slightly out of your reach. Setting your goals slightly out of reach, or slightly higher than you originally plan, ensures that you’ll be motivated to chase them and improve along the way.

      If you set goals that are too easy, you’ll become bored, you’ll lose motivation, and you won’t improve. You may feel good for a while — “Wow, I’m good — I’m accomplishing so many things!” — but this feeling won’t last.

      Have you ever noticed how much better you play when you play against athletes who are better than you? Yes, it’s difficult, and your ego may take a bruising, but look how much you improve.

      

At the same time, make sure you aren’t setting unrealistic goals. A goal to become a state champion or make the national team may be challenging and realistic for some, but it may not be realistic for you where you are now. If you set this goal and expect it too soon, you may end up feeling frustrated and losing motivation. You’re getting better — maybe much better — but you won’t see it because you’re focused on a goal that’s beyond your reach.

      

You want to set goals that are challenging enough to motivate you, but not so unrealistic that they discourage you. For example, we both challenge each athlete we work with to set goals slightly above what they think they can achieve. This goes back to the courage to aim high and dream big! Instead of just making the lineup, aim to be a starter. Instead of performing well, work to become all-conference. Higher goals build confidence, and they also push you to think and dream bigger in your pursuit of becoming a better athlete.

      Setting deadlines for each goal

      When you’ve set goals that are specific and challenging, you’ll want to add timelines to each goal. Doing so takes your goals from theory to actual practice — in other words, setting deadlines makes your goals more likely to become reality. Setting deadlines helps you remain focused on your goals, so that they don’t exist simply as dreams — they become real. Examples include an athlete wanting to be able to leg press a certain amount of weight in 30 days or a tennis player wanting to hit 200 first serves with at least 50 percent accuracy going in within two weeks.

      

Setting deadlines for your goals is one of the key factors that separates good athletes from elite ones. If you don’t set deadlines, you’ll likely allow other things to get in the way. Before you know it, the day, week, month, or even year has gone by and the goal is still sitting there unaccomplished.

      

Put your deadlines for accomplishing your goals on a calendar, and review that calendar regularly. You should know, every day, what you’re doing to reach your immediate, short-term, midterm, and long-term goals.

      Working with tiny goals

      Tiny goals are goals that are smaller in scale and easier to achieve. They are an important part of the goal-setting process, because they help build momentum and confidence along the way to those bigger goals that you are hoping to achieve. For instance, if your ultimate goal is to make the varsity high school soccer team, that goal should be made up of much smaller, or tiny, goals:

       Have coach learn your name

       Get to know the other kids on the team

       Practice juggling every day for 5 minutes

       Eat a much more nutritious breakfast every day

       Get to bed before midnight daily

       Stretch more often

       Drink more water

       Buy a new soccer ball

       Watch a motivational sports movie like Rocky

      These tiny goals are deceptive in nature, since they initially appear to be too simple and too easy to achieve. However, therein lies the rub, so to speak: The fact that these goals are non-threatening to your brain (remember, our brains are wired to avoid things that appear to be painful) means that you will be more likely to pursue them. When you are more likely to engage in them, you will be more likely to achieve them, and when you achieve these tiny goals, your confidence will rise!

      Tiny goals are an underestimated method for getting and keeping momentum in your goal-setting plan for this very reason. Small boosts of confidence along the path to your bigger goals improve the odds that you will be successful.

      

Setting small, easily achievable goals allows you to create momentum that you can use to increase your motivation along the way to your bigger goals!

Tracking Your Success in Reaching Your Goals

Make sure that you’re tracking your success in reaching your athletic goals as you go. That way, instead of wondering how you became successful, you’ll have a good idea of which strategies worked, and which strategies didn’t work. You’ll know what you did well, and what was effective. And you’ll know what you didn’t do well, and which tactics were ineffective.

      You must keep track of your athletic skills, your fitness levels and physical strengths and weaknesses, and your mental toughness and abilities. If you don’t track these, how will you know that you’ve reached your goal, or that you’re even heading in the right direction? What if you need to make adjustments along the way? If you don’t follow and track your success, you’ll never know.

      In this section, we show you how to hold yourself accountable to your goals and measure your progress. We also introduce the concept of adjusting your goals, and let you know that doing so is perfectly acceptable.

      Holding yourself accountable

      One of the defining characteristics of great athletes is the ability to hold themselves accountable for their own goals and progress — instead of requiring another teammate, athlete, or coach to hold them accountable. The best athletes place the responsibility for their goals, training, and results directly on their own shoulders. As an athlete, you want to do the same thing. Holding yourself accountable is key. Measuring your progress (see the following section) is one way to do that.

      You can also hold yourself accountable by making your goals, expectations and action plans known to other people you trust, like your coaches, parents, or close teammates — your support network. Then they can help hold you accountable by inquiring about your progress. For more on support networks, see the sidebar entitled “Enlisting a support network.”

      Celebrating your achievements

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