Goal Setting | Part 1
Being able to set goals as a student athlete is vital to your improvement. Think of this as a rocket ship aiming for the moon - without a guiding path to help it land successfully, how will it ever make it? Similarly, if you have no trajectory for helping yourself achieve the heights you want to achieve, where would you find yourself? Goals are important because they add that extra motivation, the purpose, and the end state that we need when we’re working for something. In this two-parter, we’ll be covering goal setting and how you can do it most effectively to get where you want to be.
Know Why You’re Doing It
Before you even step foot on a playing field or a classroom, ask yourself this question: Why am I here today?
Sometimes the question is hard to answer. Hopefully, you know the answer for yourself, and this will let you work even harder towards whatever you want. However, once you’ve figured out that answer, where do you go from there? This step is even harder for most people because even if they want to be incredible in one aspect of their lives, they don’t know how to.
This is where goals come in.
Being able to know why you set goals allows you the stepping stones for self-improvement. The individual milestones that you reach not only exist as proof of how far you’ve made it on your journey but they also will remain to remind you that you still have something left to achieve. This means that you’ll be able to measure your progress along the way, and always be able to readjust or fine-tune your plan so it can work best for you in whatever your endeavor is. The next step is knowing how to find a way for setting those goals, and this follows a specifically structured approach.
The Top-Down Approach
After you’ve decided why you want to set your own goals, (and that reason better be strong), then you need to know how to look at them, sort them, and tackle them one by one.
The approach that has given us and others the most success is the “Top-Down” style of goal setting. Basically what this means is: you set an overarching goal at the beginning, something that you want to achieve at the highest level possible. After that, you break it down as many times and as many levels deep in a tree-like fashion so that you can create smaller goals that will contribute to your larger one.
As you can see, the small goals at the foot of this tree are the “baby steps”, whereas the overarching thing you want to achieve is the grand prize. What we’ve shown is a really rough example but can be broken down even further for your own specific needs. Once you start looking at your achievements like this, it’ll be easier to make progress and keep track of it as well.
Consistency is Key
You know why you’re setting goals. You know how you should be looking at them. But now what?
Every YouTube vlogger or Tik Tok fitness trainer is going to send you this same message no matter where you go. The unfortunate part is, they’re not wrong. When it comes to something you want, you CANNOT give an amazing work ethic one week and then give up after it starts getting harder or more mundane. The true secret to success that any person will tell you, whether they’re an athlete or not, is how consistent they remained. It doesn’t matter if you’re building the next Google, or if you’re simply trying to cut some weight for a competition. A consistent program will lead to consistent milestones for yourself, and eventually success.
In your case, this applies to professional athletes who dedicate their lives to perfecting their craft. If you fall in this bucket, or even if you’re an aspiring collegiate athlete, then you need to understand that nothing is given for free. The path to this lifestyle is riddled with obstacles, and only if you consistently work toward your own goals on a daily, weekly, or even monthly basis, will you actually achieve something worthwhile.