Sports Psychology For Dummies. Leif H. Smith
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!
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.
Tracking Your Success in Reaching Your 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.
Holding yourself accountable
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.”
Celebrating your achievements
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.
Measuring your goals
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.
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