What drives you? What fuels you to compete? Deep down, what about performing in your sport is important to you? These are the kinds of questions that get you in touch with a deeper sense of why you do what you do, or your motivation.
We might consider your motivation as being composed of three elements: your vision, your values, and your passion.
If motivation were an engine, it would be fueled equally by each of these three chambers, so understanding what they are, and what they are to you, is vital to building a foundation for your motivation in the short, intermediate, and long term.
Let’s look at them one by one.
Vision
Your vision is essentially your largest, most long-term goal as an athlete. Your vision is your dream, your ambition for your life and career. When people ask what you want from your life, or what you want to be when you grow up, they’re asking for your vision. So, how would you like your career as an athlete to shake out?
Common vision statements include:
– I want to be a professional athlete.
– I want to spend my life testing myself physically and mentally.
– I want to be a positive role model in my community or among my peers.
What’s your vision?
Values
Your performance values are the principles you want to live by and how you want to behave on an ongoing basis. They are an extension of your vision, as they define not what you want to achieve, but how you want to achieve it.
Values are like a compass: they help guide, motivate, and steer your path in a direction that is meaningful to you. Living a value-filled life will bring experiences of joy, vitality, and richness to your world, even when unfortunate or unpleasant events occur. In sport, it is exceptionally important to commit to acting in ways consistent with your values and vision, as doing so will give your performances purpose and direction, and help you maintain your motivation even in times of adversity.
While most athletes have no problem articulating their vision, performance values can be a bit more difficult to spot. To get started, try the “retirement day” exercise.
Imagine the day you hang up your cleats and reflect back on your athletic career. On that final day, what do you hope people will remember about you? What contributions do you hope to have made? What do you hope people will say about you? And on the flipside of that coin, what do you hope people will not say about you? What qualities in yourself or others do you find intolerable (e.g. lateness, insincerity, laziness)?
Your answers to these questions reflect what you value. If you wrote that being passive really bothers you, this might mean that you value assertiveness. Or if you hope that people will say you were courageous and persevered, this might show that you value strength or conviction.
Take a moment and complete this exercise yourself. Once you’ve found your values, note them prominently in your training journal or playbook. Make them a theme in your training, your practices, your pre-performance routines. Bring them with you into team meetings and your interactions with your coaches and teammates. These are your ideals. Let them guide you. Act accordingly.
Passion
Your passion is the energy you derive from behaving in accordance with your values. If your values are your compass or guiding principles, your passion is the vigor you feel when you’re moving in the right direction.
Understanding your passion for competing in your sport can enhance resilience and protect against burnout during a season or over a career. Passion is closely associated with the term grit, defined by noted psychologist Angela Duckworth as “passion and perseverance for long-term goals.” This is important, as possessing that passion and perseverance has been found to be a stronger indicator of success than IQ or even talent. Over time, as you grow and change within your sport, your passion may grow and change with you. Taking time to periodically reflect on the passions you have for your sport will help you maintain better motivation and strengthen your resolve when working toward your goals.
SUMMARY: Being aware of your passions and roadblocks will provide you with a roadmap of what you need to hold on to (what motivates you) and what you might need to resolve (whatever is de-motivating you) to maintain your motivation levels. Clearly stating your passions is a great way to keep what matters most in plain view. It can be easy to fall into a cycle of focusing on the negative factors that are detracting from your motivation, especially during times when you might be experiencing a dip in your performance. Coming back to your passions and what makes your sport worthwhile is a useful tool to fight fatigue and burnout, and to give yourself a jolt when you’re feeling flat or unmotivated.
Take time to thoughtfully complete the “Values” and “Passion” worksheets. Keep them in a visible place so you can easily revisit and intentionally practice the values-based behaviors you have identified.
We all have goals, some of them large (I want to win the state championship), some of them small (I want to come in first in this practice drill), so goal setting is familiar to all of us. Yet a great number of athletes don’t set goals very well. At their most optimal, goals should serve three primary objectives:
- They should serve and align with your values.
- They should motivate you to work harder.
- They should make your training more intentional, more efficient, and more effective.
To accomplish these objectives, our goals need to be unified and structured. Without a large, overarching goal, our day-to-day tasks have no purpose, and without that day-to-day grind–from getting adequate sleep and nutrition, to practicing and training with intention and vigor– our larger goals, whether they be to earn All-Conference, win the state tournament, or win the Super Bowl, aren’t possible. So the key to creating useful goals is starting with your super-objective– your ultimate goal– and working downward to the week-to-week, day-to-day or minute-to-minute tasks that will get you there.
Our goals should be divided into three types:
1. Outcome Goals
2. Performance Goals
3. Process Goals
Each of these types of goals serves its own unique purpose, so let’s move through them one by one.
Outcome Goals
Our outcome goals are our large, overarching goals for a defined interval of time. You might have many outcome goals, but each of those goals will likely require its own structure and have its own unique demands, so we recommend that you make your outcome goals singular, and if you have more than one, create a unique goal structure for each of them.
Outcome goals require a process, or a sequence of achievements, to reach. If our desired outcome was simply to leave the house in the morning, we’d need first to get out of bed, to climb the stairs, and to open the door. So outcome goals set into motion a natural sequence of smaller actions and events that we can anticipate and tackle one-by-one, step-by-step, until we’re where we want to be. These smaller actions and events are our structural goals– specifically, they are our performance and process goals– and we’ll discuss them next.
Outcome goals also do an exceptional job of clarifying which tasks are essential to our ultimate goals, and which are inessential. This can help us weed through the trash and the distractions, and can save us from our own perfectionism.
We often think that achieving our outcome goals requires perfection or near-perfection, when in fact, all that they require is that we hit the right structural goals. So once we define our outcome goal, anything that doesn’t directly relate to our achieving it should be de-prioritized or be removed from our focus window. A shooting guard whose outcome goal is a state championship might feel that a 50% field goal percentage is an ideal target, but if that is less important to her outcome goal than distributing the ball, it should receive less of her time and attention than her number of assists.
Takeaways: Least Controllable
It’s important to remember that the bigger the outcome goal, the more variables it will likely include. As a general rule, outcome goals are the least controllable of all the goals we set for ourselves. They are essential to our drive and direction– they are our targeted destination, so aim big! but they often depend on a number of factors outside of our control. We can play hard, play smart, play at our best and still not control the outcome of our competitions. They’re determined by more than our will and our readiness to win. If winning were as easy as leaving the house in the morning, we likely wouldn’t play.
Performance Goals
As their title suggests, performance goals are milestones we set for our own individual performances that will help us achieve our outcome goals. We can set these goals in our training (e.g. setting weight room goals) and for our competitions. A quarterback whose outcome goal is to win the state championship may decide that a 67% completion rate, or throwing twice as many touchdowns as interceptions, would increase his chances of getting there. These would be his performance goals.
Takeaways: Limited Controllability
Because performance goals relate to our own performances, and not the outcomes of those performances, they are more within our control than outcome goals. However, they still depend on variables outside our control.
Our hypothetical quarterback, for instance, is depending on his receivers to catch balls and to make plays. Coaching, teammate and opponent play, game situations, weather conditions, and the like will all have an impact on his performance. So, while performance goals are an integral component of our goal setting, like outcome goals, it’s important to account for their relative uncontrollability.
Process Goals
Process goals are the routine, controllable tasks you can complete with regularity that will enhance your daily performance, and accelerate your long-term performance objectives. Simply put, process goals are where the rubber meets the road, and represent the step-by-step process of achieving your outcome goal. Because process goals are entirely within your control and relate directly to your ability to meet your performance and outcome goals, the majority of goals you create should be process goals.
Examples of process goals include:
– Weight training for 90 minutes four days per week
– Getting eight hours of sleep each night
– Eating four nutrient-rich meals per day
– Getting to practice 10 minutes early to prepare yourself mentally and physically
– Completing 10 minutes of imagery per day
– And yes, completing one module of the Premier Mindset Program each week.
Advantages: Controllable
While the ambitions of process goals may be modest, meeting these goals on a daily basis is going to increase your confidence and motivation, and move you incrementally closer to your ultimate outcome goal.
An added advantage of process goals is that they are easily modified, so you can make training adjustments as your improve. These are your building blocks, so make constructive process goals and commit to them.
S.M.A.R.T. Goal Setting
One way to make sure that your process goals are effective is to follow the SMART model, and make your goals specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound.
S pecific goals clearly and simply identify the action you need to complete.
M easurable goals tangibly define what needs to be completed (e.g. how far, how long, how fast you need to run).
A ttainable goals can be reasonably accomplished with enough effort and conviction.
R elevant goals are directly related to achieving your outcome goal.
T ime-Bound goals create deadlines for themselves. Goals with deadlines are more likely to be achieved than those without defined time frames.
Goal Setting Pyramid
To make the relationship between your outcome, performance and process goals clearer, it can be helpful to use a goal pyramid, like the one above. Atop the pyramid is your outcome goal, as this is your ultimate objective, beneath it are your performance goals, and at its foundation are your process goals, as these are the foundational goals upon which your larger goals will rest.
Notice that the surface area of each set of goals decreases as we move up the pyramid. This is consistent with the number of goals we should be setting within each of these categories. The greatest number of goals we set should be process goals; we want to set relatively fewer performance goals, and ideally, limit your outcome goals to one (as noted above, you may set multiple outcome goals for a season, but each will likely require its own unique set of performance and process goals, and should therefore have its own pyramid). Another rule of thumb is that as we move up the pyramid, our goals become less and less controllable.
On the worksheet below, try filling out your own goal pyramid. Make it relevant to your current environment. If you’re in the offseason, create some offseason goals for yourself, or audition a few possible outcome goals for your upcoming season that you could get a jump on early. If you’re midseason, it’s never too late to set an outcome goal if you haven’t already. Wherever you might be positioned in your season or offseason, build outward from your outcome goal and create relevant performance and process goals that will help you achieve it.
When you’ve finished your pyramid, print and display it in a prominent place– your locker, your bathroom mirror, inside your playbook– any place where your likely to see it early and throughout the day. Allow it to serve not only as a reminder of your daily process goals, but the ultimate destination where they will be taking you. Also, tell someone about it. Tell a teammate, a friend or family member about your process and outcome goals. You’ll find that they’ll not only support you, which can be motivation-boosting, but hold you accountable, which is equally helpful. Declaration of our goals has been proven to increase the likelihood that our goals are achieved.
Goal Setting in Action
Now let’s put some of these practices into motion.? Create five process goals for yourself. You can use the process goals from your goal pyramid, or the unique worksheet we’ve provided for you below. These goals should be directly related to an outcome goal, and should be goals that are immediately achievable. Any five daily or weekly tasks that will bring you closer to your ultimate goal will suffice. Once you’ve done so, move on to your next step below the link.
Goal Setting Exercise Worksheet
Now mark a date on your calendar seven days from today. Beginning now, and for the next seven days, you’re going to make an effort to achieve each of your five process goals. If your process goals are daily goals (e.g. eat four nutrient-dense meals per day, complete 10 minutes of imagery exercises per day, etc) then the successful completion of those goals means you’ve hit them every day. If your goals are weekly goals (e.g. weight train for 90 minutes four times per week), then measure your results at the end of the seven days.
Come back when your week wraps, and we’ll debrief. Good luck, and we’ll see you then.
DEBRIEF:
If you hit all of your goals, click HERE.
If you missed on one or more of your goals, click HERE.
CONTINUING YOUR GOAL SETTING
As you move forward with your mental training and goal setting, it can be beneficial to continue tracking your progress with daily and weekly check-ins. We encourage you to use the worksheet below to record your goals, credit your progress, and note any special considerations– good or bad– that may have helped or hurt your progress each week. Doing so will organically steer you toward settings and behaviors which enhance your goal achievement, and allow you to identify potentially problematic patterns before they gain traction. Worksheets like these are a natural fit for documenting your process goals, but can also be modified to monitor and track performance goals over time (such as the amount of weight you’re lifting, your performance in speed drills, or your relevant statistics in competitions).
Complete the “Goal Setting Check-In” Worksheet at the end of each day. Follow the instructions provided on the worksheet to track your progress.
Contributors: Videography by Neal Burke. Music by Klankbeeld.? Music used with permission from http://www.freesound.org/