1
The High Performance Psychology (HPP) class is designed to provide you with the skills to achieve higher levels of excellence in your chosen pursuit(s). The aim is to achieve a consistent approach and practice of psychological principles
Smart Goals (Mistakes Worth Making, Halden-Brown, p61-74)
Teacher Lecture
I will use the author’s Olympic theme as an example. I am sure you will get the point!!!!!
It's time to get on with the show. Here's where you start to put together your opportunity to achieve higher levels of excellence in terms you've never used before. Once upon a time, your dreams may have been enough to fire your enthusiasm and send you scampering out onto the court, puffing around the track, or practising your musical instrument continuously. But now it's time to face the fact that you'll spend an awful lot of time and energy rushing around in circles—unless you have a plan. This unit will show you how to develop a plan. Having now possibly deciding what success means to you, you will find it easy to list your goals, and it will be a breeze to sort out what you must do to achieve them. This plan will be the new blueprint; it will help you structure and organize yourself to achieve your goals.
Why is it so vital to have a plan? Because only when you have a plan can you see if what you're doing is unplanned. Plans are a map of your future. If you follow the map, you'll stand as good a chance as we know how to muster of getting where you want to go. If you don't follow the map—or you don't have a map to start with—the chances are you'll get very lost. It's rough country out there. Plans often get amended, lost, or even shelved, or someone else's plan sometimes takes over your own. (Tip: If you find this planning business difficult or disheartening, don't skip this material. Decide now to make an easier plan, but promise the world you're going to stick to it.)
Drawing Up Your Grand Plan
Get comfortable. You could be here for some time. You'll need to concentrate on what you're doing. You'll find, and quickly, that there's nothing quite like a good plan. It sorts out what has to be done and when to do it. It lets you chew on the awkward parts before getting in on the action. And this is no ordinary plan. This is the new template of your life. This is your grand plan.
With all the advice in the world, no one is better qualified to draw up your plan than you. You don't even have to get it right because a plan is a working brief that comes up for review the minute it's finished. Regardless of whether you never change one word of it or you scrap it inside the hour, just put your ideas down on paper. Never mind if you make mistakes—at least they'll be yours.
Deciding On Your Goals to achieve higher levels of excellence in your chosen pursuit.
Remember that good goals are smart goals. As you know Smart goals are ...
•Specific
•Measurable
•Achievable
•Realistic
•Timely
Specific
Wanting to be an Olympic athlete is a fabulous dream, but it's not a goal. It's altogether too vague and unfocused. So let's make it more specific by narrowing down your event. Say you're a swimmer. That's fine, but still not specific enough. What is your stroke and your distance? Your goal may now be to become a 400-meter butterfly international champion. Now we're talking! Put a time frame to it (Beijing 2008?), and you're in business. All goals must be accurate and specific. Nonspecific statements are only aims in life. With a little focus, they can become goals.
Write out your specific goals as accurately and with as much detail as you can. Try to make them so clear that even if you explained them to someone who had no knowledge of your pursuit, they would know exactly where you're heading.
Measurable
This is arguably the most important criterion your goals must meet. There's no getting around it—you must specify the actual dimensions of your task. Otherwise you will never know whether you are achieving them. So ask yourself some very straight questions. What standard—particularly—do you want to reach? How fast—exactly—do you want to run? How far—precisely—do you want to throw? You must commit yourself to speeds, distances, heights, weights, or whatever numbers are a part of your pursuit . Without numbers, your goals are still no more than interesting items on your wish list. You will certainly change the measurements of your success as your standard of performance improves, so don't feel you have to meet Olympic standards in the first season. Be sure to measure your efforts in accordance with your current levels of skill and fitness.
Achievable
Your goals need to match your physical, mental, and emotional capabilities. This is a good thing to discuss with your coach since it's not always easy to be objective about your capabilities. There's no use thinking you'll make an international basketball team if you're only 5 feet, 2 inches tall and built like a brick. Top basketball players just don't come in that sort of a package. But weightlifters do...
Realistic
Your goals need to fit with your lifestyle. Whatever standard of competition you're heading for, it won't happen without the relevant training facilities and coaching expertise. This may mean you need to make serious moves to change your lifestyle. If you really do see yourself as a runner, skater, bowler, musician, artist, or goalie, then now's the time to call your own bluff. Is this someone you really want to be or just something it might be nice to do? Now is the time to also take a long, hard look at your own or your parents’ bank account to see if it's going to be able to take the strain of supporting your habit. Realism always has a dollar sign in there somewhere. There's no use planning a trip to stardom if you don't have the wherewithal to buy the ticket. Of course you could always use someone else's money, but that's tricky if you don't already have the track record to convince them to give it to you. It's something of a Catch 22 situation: You need the money to get that good, but you need to be that good to get the money.
Timely
Your goals need to be reasonably challenging. If they are too difficult for where you are right now, you will lose heart trying to achieve them. If they are too easy, you will lose interest in making them happen.
Now you are ready to draft your goals. You need to set out clearly and succinctly exactly what you want to do. Feel relaxed about that. Most goals can stand some modification.
Long-Term Goals
Following the SMART formula, write down the principal competitions you want to win (such as a national title in your sport) or the main things you want to do (such as represent your state or country) in as much detail as you can. This should include the really important things that you ultimately want to achieve. This, or these, is your long-term goals.
1
SSpecific Measureable
AAchievable
eRealistic
TTimely
SMART Goals
What exactly do you want to do?
How, precisely, are you going to measure this?
Do you have the talent, resources, determination, body, and mind to do this?
Is this goal practical in the context of the rest of your life?
Are your goals relevant to your age, skills, and sports potential?
When do you want to do it?
What performances do you have to beat?
Does your coach agree on this?
Is this possible?
How hungry are you for success?
1
Medium-Term Goals
Continuing to use the SMART formula, work backward from your long-term goals and decide what you will need to achieve, qualify for, get experience in, or get good at to make your long-term goals a possibility. These are your medium-term goals. Now work out your short-term goals.
Short-Term Goals
Still using the SMART formula, turn the possibilities into probabilities by setting out what you need to achieve next week or during your next training session to make it all happen. These are your short-term goals.
You can construct your own time frame as long as you put end dates on all your goals (e.g., I plan to win the club championship next season. Remember to check all your goals to see that they meet the SMART criteria.
You now have a large-scale road map of exactly where you're going, one that tells you down to the hour precisely how to get there. It is your very own, very good grand plan.
When you've done all this for your pursuit, do the same thing for any other significant areas of your life. This might include your education, school, family life, or workplace progress. Then reconcile these different rafts of goals. Are they compatible in terms of time, money, and effort? Are they logistically possible? Asking yourself some of the following questions may help you focus your goals.
•Do I have enough hours in the day to do all this?
•Can I afford my pursuit? If not, what could I do about that?
•Do I have the support (family, coach, etc.) to succeed?
•Does my Olympic (championship) year coincide with my final
college year or other major personal event? If so, how could I
organize this?
•Are there any major drains on my resources (financial, emotional,
physical) that may prohibit my reaching my goals? If so, could I
share those obligations with someone else?
•Can I afford my pursuit? If not, how could I change that?
•Will my job take too many hours out of my training to achieve
my goal? What could I do about that?
•Have I got a plan B? If not, why not?
Drawing Up Your Training Schedule
Here's where we move into making it happen. If you already have a viable training schedule, commit it to paper. If you don't, then draft a new one, preferably with the help of your coach. If you don't have a coach, get serious and find one.
Bear in mind the different facets of your training (endurance, strength, speed, etc.) and make sure that the schedule for each dovetails comfortably into your grand plan. Also consider the standard to which you want to perform. If you're heading for the club finals at the end of it all, then training twice a week will probably suffice. If you have greater goals in mind, however, that just may not do.
Fine-Tuning Your Training
Your training schedule is not set in concrete, and you may well want to amend it later. A good one is one that works for you. This means that by achieving your short-term goals, you progress toward your medium-and long-term goals. The pace must match both you and your lifestyle. As a teenage who is still in school, you will have a different training schedule than a sport veteran with a family to support and a job to hold down.
Good periodization is the key here. You need to generate workable, progressive micro- and macrocycles of training set carefully against your competition calendar and squarely in the context of your "other" life. Be sure to integrate the different aspects of your training associated with your particular pursuit, such as strength, speed, and so on. Establish where you currently sit on the pursuit-life continuum. Consider the consequences of moving along that continuum to the heavy end of sport involvement. It's a very different life out there. Almost certainly there will be other people in your life to consider, and the impact of your moves on their lifestyle may not be to their liking.
Your Very Own, Very Good Plan B
Write a list of alternative ways to make your goals happen if every one of your current ideas were to run aground. This is a good exercise in thinking outside the box. You need to be as strong and as flexible as sprung steel. There's nothing like having options to make you feel you can change the world after all.
Mistakes on an Upper
Of course, you'll draft the perfect preparation plan in which everything runs according to plan, your coach doesn't leave town, there's no time out for injury, and your motivation never falters. It's easy to think that disasters only happen to somebody else.
Think again!!!! This is the real world we live in. Build in some contingency plans, some "what ifs," some plan Bs. What if you do not make the team, or injury puts you out for a long time? Although positive thinking is all the rage, you need to keep an eye on the reality factor. Believing in your own affirmations is one thing, but believing your own publicity is quite another, so remember that the world is not yet at your feet. You may need to accommodate that, at least for the time being.
Mistakes on a Downer
These kinds of mistakes are more painful. They're the ones you didn't plan for at all. The world is no longer at your feet—it's on your shoulders. You're over committed, backed yourself into a corner, and created an image you can't live up to. How do we do these things! Somehow your life jumped the tracks when you weren't looking. Now the task of the day is to get it back on the rails.
This starts with a careful, if slightly wary, look at your goals. Somewhere along the line they didn't stand up to the test. The trick is finding out where. It's the questions that matter. Ask yourself, is this possible? Am I being realistic? When you're not reaching your goals, it's time to reassess what's happening. Smart people reassess anyway. Supersmart people will be doing this with their coach, family, teacher, councillors, etc.. These sources may find it easier to look in the mirror if there's another face in there too.
Coaches Note
Everyone wants to coach a champion. Be careful, however, that you pick the right horse before you place your bet. Making sure the horse himself really wants to win is not always easy to do.
Goals and all the planning associated with them are in very personal territory. So goals, by definition, are very personal. Be sure that you respect that. At no time should you try to impose your expectations on your athletes, nor should you try to influence them to adopt unfulfilled goals of your own.Their goals call up their effort for their glory. That's the way it should stay.
Of those you coach some will not set goals as high as yours. Some will be underachievers. Although such athletes' goals may be difficult to reconcile with your own appraisal of what you think they could do, their goals represent no less of a challenge to them than some of the more public prizes. If you're tempted to urge them to bigger and brighter things, back off! You don't live in their head, and you don't know how it feels inside their world. In taking on a more modest challenge rather than throwing themselves at something they were never really in the frame to achieve, it could be that they are being more realistic than you are.
Summary
You are now convinced of the need to plan. You have learned, or have been reminded, that your goals need to be SMART:
•Specific
•Measurable
•Achievable
•Realistic
•Timely
You also need
•long-term goals,
•medium-term goals,
•short-term goals, and
•a good plan B.
You are also convinced that you need attitude. Attitude can be learned, copied, mimicked, or invented. Attitude is the difference between success and triumph. Success has a shelf life; triumph is eternal.