Leif H. Smith - Sports Psychology For Dummies

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!

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.

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.”

It is so important that you celebrate the achievement of your goals, no matter how small or tiny. The author of Tiny Habits, BJ Fogg, discusses how he celebrated flossing one tooth when he was having a difficult time with motivation. He literally described how he danced and sang when he accomplished this very tiny goal. We are taught to criticize ourselves harshly when we do not reach our goals and that is not helpful. What is extremely beneficial, however, is creating the habit of celebrating small and tiny successes. It creates such powerfully positive and motivating mindsets.

A good support network is worth its weight in gold. A support network:

Ensures accountability

Keeps your ego in check

Surrounds you with friends when things aren’t going your way

Allows you access to diverse opinions

Make sure that you build a support network to help you along the path of achieving your goals. Your support network should include a diverse group of four or five people, and could be made up of friends, family, current and former coaches, partners or spouses, medical doctors, chiropractors, nutritionists, sports psychologists, or teachers. The key is to enlist people whose values are similar to yours and whose support you’ll need along the way. Be sure to include at least one person who’s comfortable being controversial and contrary — you need someone who can tell you no from time to time.

No one accomplishes their goals and reaches high levels of success on their own.

How will you know when you’ve achieved your goals? That may seem like a simple question, but it isn’t always. Goals need to be measurable. For example, you can easily measure a goal such as “I want to lead the team in tackles this season,” but it’s more difficult to measure a goal such as “I want to improve my confidence.”

For every goal you set, you need a method of measurement. That way, when someone asks you whether you’ve achieved your goal for the season (or, better yet, when you ask yourself whether you’ve achieved your goal), you’ll be able to answer yes or no and have the data to back it up.

If you don’t measure your goals, you’re plodding along a path without any course or direction in your journey. When you measure your progress, you get to see and feel success, make adjustments, and enable yourself to reach your goals more efficiently.

Don’t limit yourself to goals that are easily measurable. You can set mental goals and measure your progress just as well. Throughout this book, we suggest rating yourself on a scale of 1 to 5, and tracking your progress in a performance journal throughout the season. You can read more about this in Parts 2and 3.

We frequently establish “mental and emotional statistics” for our athletes. For example, after every practice or game, athletes can rate their levels of confidence, motivation, effort, positive attitude, and ability to handle pressure. Athletes who track and monitor their mental progress on a consistent basis simply get better faster!

Todd has developed two different journals and adapted at times the journals to working with teams and helped coaches and athletes create their own “mental stat” sheets for after practices and games. In these journals or individual mental stat sheets, Todd has players rate on a scale of 1-5 mental and emotional stats such as “Confidence” and “Poise” and “Attitude” and “Effort.” He also then creates a small space to jot additional more specific notes, but each sheet is only one page and when placed in a journal format, easily fits in a player’s athletic bag. It is simple and straight-forward to complete and only take a couple of minutes, but it makes certain that athletes and coaches are reminded to rate themselves on the mental stats in the journal that all athletes need to be aware, and then many times some specific ones to an individual athlete or team.

The athletes who journal get better at a faster rate and therefore perform better more quickly. This also makes the process more fun and also allows for you to compete at higher levels if you so desire.

Think of your goals as living, breathing organisms — they can change as needed. Occasionally, you’ll set a goal and then go out and achieve it sooner than you anticipated, or you may encounter obstacles (such as injuries or bad weather) that force you to adjust your goals.

Successful athletes adjust their goals when they need to, and they don’t apologize for it. They realize that they aren’t perfect and that life and the season or off-season can be unpredictable. You need flexibility, not rigidity. Athletes who have rigid muscles do not perform as well, just as athletes with rigid mindsets do not accomplish their goals as quickly or as frequently.