Are you setting the right type of goals?
What are your goals?
If you are an athlete, you have probably had that question posed to you at some point. You might get tired of hearing it asked, but it is a legitimate question. What goals do you have for yourself? And are you setting the right type of goals?
Did you know that goal setting isn’t just a way to state what you want to accomplish, it is a strategy that can help improve your performance? That’s right. It isn’t as simple as saying, “I want to get better at my sport,” or “I want to play in college.” Those are definitely goals, but my implementing it into your complete sport performance plan as a strategy, you will be much more likely to see the results you are looking for.
If you have goals in mind, make sure you are setting the right type of goals. There are three types of goals to consider: Outcome goals, performance goals, and process goals. All are important to your success, and each should be part of the process.
Outcome goals
Outcome goals are goals that focus on the outcome. Sounds pretty straight forward, right? I would argue these are good for some people and not so good for others. It depends on what your intent is.
For example, if your goal is to reduce your 200-meter sprint time, getting faster to clock a better time would be the outcome. That is a great goal. Outcome goals, however, aren’t always great for competition. Setting a goal to win a race is also a good goal, but it isn’t always reasonable. You can’t control what your competition does. You could run the best race of your life and still not win simply because the sprinter in the lane next to you was faster. That isn’t your fault. After all, you got a PR in the race. Unfortunately, you were prevented from accomplishing your outcome goal because of circumstances out of your control.
Process goals
Process goals are important when working toward change or when training to accomplish an outcome goal. Using the example of the 200-meter sprinter, the goal was to improve the race time. The question becomes, how are you going to accomplish that? What are you going to do to improve?
As a process goal, you can set a goal of strength training two days per week to get stronger and more explosive, and working on your sprint technique three days per week. Adding these two components to your play is part of the process in accomplishing your overall goal.
Performance goals
The third type of goal is a performance goal. Think of this as a personal competition goal. The outcome goal was to improve your 200-meter sprint time. The related performance goal is reducing your time by two seconds.
By now, all of this should be coming together. If a realistic outcome goal is established, process and performance goals can be added to the strategy to assist in accomplishing the overall goal.
Throughout this process, it is also important to make sure each step in the strategy is SMARTS. By being SMARTS, your goals become specific, measurable, action-oriented, realistic, timely, and sustainable.
It is good to set goals, but planning, preparing, and following up at each stage of the process will lead to a much better experience, and improve your chances of being successful.