Leif H. Smith - Sports Psychology For Dummies

Run 2 miles in 12 minutes.

Run the 40-yard dash in less than 5 seconds.

Improve my leg strength.

Practice my post-mistake mental-toughness routine every day in training.

These are sometimes called “performance” goals — where you attach actual statistics to the goal, such as running the 40-yard dash in under 5 seconds.

After you’ve set your short-term goals, your immediate goals take over. Immediate goals are actions you engage in to better the chances of your short-term goals happening. So, if you take the short-term goal of running 2 miles in 12 minutes, the following are examples of immediate goals:

Meet with my strength and conditioning coach once a week.

Time my 2-mile run at the end of every week.

Perform a tempo run (set up by the trainer) four days a week.

Do cross-training four days a week.

When you walk into a grocery store, whether you’ve written down a list of items to buy or you have that list in your mind, it’s specific. It says more than just “food.” You know you need milk, bread, cereal, bananas, and so on. If you do show up at the store without a list, you’ll likely get home from the store, walk in the door, and realize you forgot something you needed.

The same is true for your goals in sports. The more specific you can be when you set your goals, the better your chances of achieving them. Clear and specific goals allow you to have laser-like focus in your pursuit of greatness. They leave little to chance or imagination, allowing you to channel your energy accordingly.

Here are some examples of specific and nonspecific goals:

When you say that you want to “play hard,” what exactly does that mean? How are you going to measure it? Playing hard could be turned into a specific goal, but as it stands, it’s broad, ambiguous, and lacking in clear direction.

Specific goals are better because they increase your motivation and focus — you know exactly what you’re going after. You know what you’re working toward, and your mind will have an easier time stayed tuned into that. It is also important to set these goals before practice, optimally a week before. Then you know what you are going to do exactly. If you do not know your goals for practice, it is easy to become unfocused and underperform.

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.

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.

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!