Goal Setting Your Way to Success

       One of the best ways to help motivate your team or an athlete is to develop goals for them to achieve. Here are my Top 10 tips to creating goals that are not only attainable, but will lead to increased motivation for your athletes.

1. Make your goals specific, observable, and measurable. Setting a general goal such as improving back handspring technique is great, but how do you measure that? What does improved technique mean? A better written goal would be “focus on keeping elbows straight and arms by ears on 10/10 back handsprings during practice today.” This makes the goal much easier to understand and measure.
2. Use moderately difficult goals. This forces the athlete(s) to work hard to achieve the goal. If a goal is too easy, the athlete(s) will likely just brush it off or they may feel like they don’t need to work too hard to achieve that goal. If a goal is too difficult for them to achieve, they can get frustrated and feel defeated if they do not succeed.
3. Set positive goals as opposed to negative goals. Whenever possible, focus on setting goals in positive terms meaning focusing on a behavior that should be present, rather than those that should be absent. An example of a positive goal would be, “hit the stunt 5 times in a row”, while a negative goal would be, “decrease the number of times the stunt falls”. See the difference? The former focuses on hitting, while the latter focuses on not falling. This can keep the athletes in a positive mindset when trying to achieve the goal. The will focus on “that’s 2 hits in a row!”, rather than “well, we just fell again”.
4. Clearly identify time constraints. Setting a goal for your team or an athlete will mean nothing if you don’t give them a specific date or time to complete the goal by. That can be the end of practice, by a certain competition, or even by the end of the season.
5. Write the goals down and monitor the progress regularly. Goals are ineffective if they are forgotten. A good way to keep up with them is to have a goal journal for the team or athlete so that you can look back at it as the practice or season progresses. Or having a posted goal chart in the gym to track progress.
6. Use both short-term goals and long-term goals. It is great to have a big, overall long-term goal for the end of the season, but how will you get there? Creating smaller short-term goals that build up to that long-term goal will not only break it up into smaller chunks, but as the team or athlete meets each short-term goal, it can increase their motivation to keep reaching for that long-term goal. It helps the athletes feel like they are accomplishing something more often than just having one big goal to work towards.
7. Set practice as well as competition goals. This point kind of goes along with the last step. Having effective practices is critical if the team wants to have successful competitions. The practice, or task-oriented goals, should relate heavily to the competition, or outcome-oriented goals. An example of this would be to create a practice goal of hitting with zero deductions 3 times in a row, while the competition goal would be to hit with zero deductions at the competition.
8. Make sure the athletes are helping to create the goals. It is important for the athletes to feel in control of the goals. If the coaches are setting all of the goals, sometimes they won’t be taken seriously. If the athletes help create them, it often motivates them to achieve them.
9. Identify a goal-achievement strategy. So you’ve created all of these goals with your team or athletes, now how are they going to achieve them? It is just as important to develop a strategy to meet the goals as it is to create them. Say an athlete has big dreams cheering for a particular college, there are several steps that go into reaching that goal. It’s not just making sure they have all the necessary stunting and tumbling skills to make the team, they also have to make sure they have high enough GPA and test scores to get into that school. If a strategy isn’t implemented ahead of time, it could be hard for that athlete to meet all of those expectations on time.
10. Seek support for goals. If a particular athlete is having trouble meeting some of their personal goals that have been set, consider the help of other coaches, teammates, parents, or friends to help ensure that the goal is achieved. Some athletes may handle this better than others, so it is important to take the athlete’s personality into account before getting the help of others.

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