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 and coaches are reminded to rate themselves on the mental stats in the journal that all athletes need to be aware, and then many times some specific ones to an individual athlete or team.
The athletes who journal get better at a faster rate and therefore perform better more quickly. This also makes the process more fun and also allows for you to compete at higher levels if you so desire.
Giving yourself permission to adjust your goals
Think of your goals as living, breathing organisms — they can change as needed. Occasionally, you’ll set a goal and then go out and achieve it sooner than you anticipated, or you may encounter obstacles (such as injuries or bad weather) that force you to adjust your goals.
Successful athletes adjust their goals when they need to, and they don’t apologize for it. They realize that they aren’t perfect and that life and the season or off-season can be unpredictable. You need flexibility, not rigidity. Athletes who have rigid muscles do not perform as well, just as athletes with rigid mindsets do not accomplish their goals as quickly or as frequently.
Realizing that perfection doesn’t exist
As you move along the path of achieving your goals that you set out for yourself, it is important to understand that perfection isn’t something you should be striving for. After all, it doesn’t, and won’t ever, exist! Humans are imperfect beings, and they make mistakes, wrong choices, and fail to achieve their goals on a daily basis. Don’t even entertain the idea that you can achieve perfection in your goal-setting program. As stated, you will need to make some adjustments along the way and that is to be expected! Make sure you allow space for the ups and downs along the path to your ultimate dreams and goals. Allow space for failure, which is part of the process, and allow space for adjustments. Do your best to banish the idea of perfection from your mind, since it is something that you can’t achieve anyway.
Athletes who do accept and even expect failure and mistakes at times are the ones who maintain higher levels of motivation in the long-term. How many times do people give up immediately after failing? Thinking about New Year’s resolutions. Many people set goals to get in shape and lose weight. Once they go off their diets or miss the gym a couple of times, they give up. They stop going to the gym or start eating sweets and other unhealthy foods. This is part of the reason that gyms are crowded in January and February and then become almost empty by April — people give up because they tried to be too perfect in achieving their goals.
SIDESTEPPING COMMON GOAL-SETTING MISTAKES
Goal setting isn’t easy. In fact, we’ve seen many athletes make the same mistakes when setting goals. Following are some of the most common mistakes — avoid them when you set your own goals:
Setting too many goals: Athletes and coaches tend to set far too many goals, which results in their accomplishing none of them. All the goals you set may be motivating, and make sense, but too many at one time confuses the
