Sports Psychology For Dummies. Leif H. Smith
let go of mistakes and recover from poor performance.
Short-term goals
Your short-term goals are ones that take one to six months and directly feed into your midterm goals. The accomplishment of the short-term goals is necessary for the success of the midterm goals. For example, if your midterm goal is to be the best-conditioned athlete on the field, you could set the following short-term goals:
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.
Immediate goals
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.
Making your goals specific
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:
| Nonspecific Goals | Specific Goals |
|---|---|
| Get fit. | Run 2 miles in 12 minutes. |
| Serve well. | Have a first-service percentage of 60 percent. |
| Play hard. | Make three tackles per game. |
| Let go of my mistakes. | Follow my post-mistake routine in games. |
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.
Setting goals that challenge you
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.
Setting deadlines for each goal
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.
Working with tiny goals
Tiny goals are goals that are smaller in scale and easier to achieve. They are an important part of the