In our last blog post, we talked about overcoming hurdles in our goals. Goal setting is a technique often used within performance psychology settings, and for excellent reasons. These goals can act as signposts for our journey through life; it allows us to see what direction we are going. There is a plethora of literature showing the positive impacts of goal setting. But, sometimes we miss our goals and that can demotivate us. Nonetheless, it may provide us with an opportunity to help us develop self-awareness around some of our thoughts and feelings about our goals.
At times we all fall off track, and we should not judge others or ourselves in doing so, as judging does not change the past, or lead to any long term change beyond feeling worse. This is often harder said than done, especially for ourselves. Nevertheless, these situations need to be seen as learning opportunities where we get a chance to grow, not failures to be dwelled upon because we may have missed the outcome.
I sometimes see athletes fail to hit a goal and quickly move on and set another, they dont judge themselves which is helpful. But the problem here is again; they still miss the opportunity for learning. They miss the chance to see why they missed their goal or identify particular behaviours that they use as coping mechanisms. This can be tough, as it may bring up uncomfortable emotions, but it will help them understand what behaviours are moving them away from their values, or how to ensure they get closer to their goals next time.
So here are some questions to ask yourself if you do miss a process orientated goal:
Is there often an uncomfortable feeling when I need to complete this task?
What is the behaviour that moves me away from achieving this goal?
How does it impact my overall long term and short term journey through sport and life?
Let's have a look at this in a real example:
Example
Actionable goal: Turn up to training 20 minutes early to complete acceleration drills as my strength and conditioning coach set out.
Is there often an uncomfortable feeling when I need to complete this task?
Sometimes get a feeling, is it worth it? Will it make a difference to my actual performance? Am I getting faster? Am I lazy or weak-minded?
What is the behaviour that moves me away from completing this goal?
Start procrastinating in the car to training and start to become anxious. End up getting to training and kicking the ball around, which isn't moving me in the direction I want to go in sport - not a productive activity to development.
How does it impact my overall long term and short term journey through sport and life?
Short-term = When I kick the ball around, I may have slight feelings of guilt but find it reduces anxiety in my head about whether I should do my acceleration drills.
Long-term = Don't get faster, and performance doesn't improve as I want—feelings of weakness and frustration that failed to hit my process-driven goal.
So, what have we achieved through this exercise? Self-awareness. Developing self-awareness is one of the first critical steps in creating your performance mindset. Over time through this reflection technique, we start to notice the thoughts and feelings that come into our heads and our current emotional coping strategies that may be stopping us from living our values through sport. We can then start to look at ways through these difficult emotions rather than around them. In doing so, we can then move ourselves to our next performance level.
This technique is adapted from the Coping Strategies Diary presented within Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life (Hayes, 2005).
Comments