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Archive for the ‘Goal setting’ Category

Is Your Team Passionately Pursuing Their Goals?

12 Oct

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I had a parent in my office the other day ask me for an example of an athlete of whom I was proud.  Every example that came to mind were players who worked hard, who ground it out, who left it all on the gym floor when their careers were over.  The athletes who got better every year, who found success—not because they were gifted by God with extraordinary athleticism or skill—but because they worked their butts off.

And why did they work so hard?  Because they were in passionate pursuit of success.   They wanted to be good more than working hard hurt.  In a TEDtalk titled, Why You Will Fail to Have a Great Career, economics professor Larry Smith speaks to college students about why they won’t pursue their passions.

5 reasons our athletes may be sabotaging their success

  1. They don’t pursue their passion.  Let’s say you coach a basketball team and have got three point guards.  You’re a good coach, so you’re honest with them in terms of playing time.  The athlete who’s third on your depth chart has a decision to make:  is being the best point guard on your team worth her time and effort?  Is she passionate about the position and her ability to lead a team?  Will she fight, tooth and nail, to earn playing time and show the coaching staff that she’s worth their trust?  Or will she give up?  The passionate player won’t give up.
  2. Hard work won’t make them great.  We tell our athletes that they’ve got to work hard in order to get good.  So it makes sense that if they work really, really, really hard, they’ll become great, right?  Smith says no.  Without combining hard work with passion, greatness will always allude our players.
  3. Passion isn’t the same as interest.  I think we sometimes make the mistake of assuming that all of our athletes are passionate about our sport, our program, and our team.  I don’t think that’s always the case.  When I was in college, I played with women who were naturally gifted to play volleyball:  they were tall, athletic, and full of fast-twitch muscles.  So they were interested in volleyball because they were good at volleyball…not because they were passionate about volleyball.  That’s a big difference.
  4. Even noble excuses are just excuses.  When a player isn’t truly passionate about their sport, they think up reasons that they aren’t able to continue playing.  I’ve heard them all.  They want to dedicate more time to their studies, they want to perform more community service, they want to participate in a particular internship, they’re transferring to be closer to their boyfriend (the worst!), yada, yada, yada.  Those excuses sound great, and perhaps help them to sleep better at night, but I know the truth.  They just didn’t have the passion and desire required to excel, so they gave up.
  5. They’re afraid to pursue their passions.  Pursuing our passions means that we may fail and that’s scary.


We want those players who face their fears and shamelessly pursue success.  We want a team full of folks who answer, “we want to win it all!” when asked what their goals are for the season.  But saying it and doing it are two different things.  For those who are committed to the hard work of making their passions a reality, success is surely on the horizon.

 
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Posted in Goal setting, Mental game

 

On The Myth Of Instant Success

17 Sep

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“Remarkable careers take a remarkably large amount of training.”

When I saw the title of this article over at Study Hacks, I thought it could stand on its own as significant:  On the Remarkably Long Road to the Remarkable.  Isn’t that true?  We want our athletes and our teams to experience success at a high level, yet it never happens when we think it should.

A few years ago, I had a team that was tremendously talented and they dominated our conference all season only to fall in the championship game to a team they were better than.  It wasn’t their time.  On paper, this team was better than the team which went on to capture the championship the next year.  It was their time…though I don’t know if they’d ever won it all without experiencing the disappointment of losing the year before.  Being remarkable takes time and we’ve got to teach our players to embrace the struggle.

3 ways to teach patience in our players

  1. Set realistic and attainable goals.  If our players’ only goal is to win a national championship, they will experience a lot of disappointment.  They should set some stair step goals that will get them closer to their mission.
  2. Set “reach” goals.  Though every goal they set can’t be easily reached…that wouldn’t be much of a goal.  Their reach goals should require a good bit of time to reach, maybe even more than one season.
  3. Revisit and reassess goals.  Oftentimes, teams will set goals at the beginning of the season and never look at them again.  If their goals don’t drive them to achieve each and every day, they aren’t effective goals.  Players should look at their goals once a week and see where they are and what they need to change about their effort to achieve them.
  4. Constantly evaluate performance.  This one goes along with number three.  Questions they should ask themselves: Am I working hard in every drill?  Am I trying to get better every day?  Am I challenging myself to improve weaknesses?  Do I work to improve my strengths?  Am I a valuable member of this team?  Why?
  5. Celebrate successes along the way.  Like I said at the beginning, if our teams only have one big, huge, gigantic goal…their success is going to be limited.  If we are to believe that becoming a remarkable player and team takes time, we should celebrate when we take a step forward, right?  I know we’re all super-focused grinders, but a little pat on the back should be allowed.


For those of us who have ever fallen short and been disappointed, I truly believe it’s that very disappointment which fuels our desire to continually strive for that elusive goal.  It’s hard for us as coaches, because we want success so badly for our players.  It comes in its own time, though, and when the team is ready and has prepared for it.

 
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Posted in Coaching philosophy, Goal setting

 

How To Stay Motivated

12 Mar

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When I first started coaching, I would go and chat with one of the veteran coaches in the office…just to soak up whatever knowledge he was willing to share with me.  He’d been coaching for over thirty years and I was in year two.  Quite honestly, I wondered how he stayed so fired up about the profession.  But he was…there was a glint in his eye that I’m sure hadn’t lost its luster in the entire thirty years he’d been on the sideline.

Of course, whenever I asked that very question, he would brush me off with a (not altogether untrue) joke.  “If you’re not scared to death of losing”, he’d say with a smirk, “then you’re in the wrong profession.”

While I’m sure some measure of his motivation came from fear of failure, I’d guess the bulk of it came from tried and true ways to stay motivated.  Inc.com had a great article about this, 14 Easy Ways to Get Insanely Motivated, it’s a quick read…check it out.

14 ways to stay motivated

Condition your mind.  Staying positive is huge.  We’ve got plenty of opponents who are trying to defeat us…let’s not defeat ourselves too!

Condition your body.  Staying healthy, eating right, working out…those are hard to do when we’re in season.  But we’ve got to try our best to take care of ourselves so that we can be available and energetic for our teams.

Avoid negative people.  If our heart sinks a little when we see someone coming, perhaps they’re negative.  Or if during lunch, we spend the entire time trying to pick someone else up (and they’re still grumpy), we might have to cut our losses and limit our time with those Negative Nellies.

Seek out the similarly motivated.  These are the people we can bounce ideas off of and they keep us fired up about what we do.

Have plans, but remain flexible.  We may think we know how we’re going to accomplish our goals, but staying flexible will keep us from getting down when things don’t work out how we thought they would.

Act with a higher purpose.  What’s your coaching philosophy?  If we do things that go against our philosophy, it will be pretty hard to be motivated.

Take responsibility for your own results.  How can we stay motivated if our success (or failure) is outside of our control?  When things are within our control, we feel that we have power over the situation.  And when we feel we have power, we can stay motivated.

Stretch past your limits on a daily basis.  For me, it’s been committing to reading and writing about my profession every day.  What will it be for you?

Don’t wait for perfection, do it now!  Perfection is unattainable, so if that’s what we’re waiting for…we’re going to be waiting for a long time.

Celebrate your failures.  When we see failure as a necessary step to success, we’re more willing to own our failures…and hopefully learn from them.

Don’t take success too seriously.  Sport is fickle.  We can beat the best team in conference one night and be feeling on top of the world…only to lose to a bottom dweller the next time out.

Avoid weak goals.  Weak goals start with “I’ll try to” or “I hope to”.  Strong goals begin with “I will”.  They are specific and have a deadline to them.

Treat inaction as the only real failure.  My motto: less talk, more do.

Think before you speak.  Don’t become the Negative Nelson that everyone else is avoiding in the office.  Stay positive, stay upbeat, stay motivated.

Not many professions have to live out their successes and failures in the public eye like athletics, which can make it hard to stay motivated sometimes.  Use these tips to get and stay motivated to guide your team to success.

 
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Posted in Coaching career, Goal setting

 

4 Lessons Our Athletes Need In Order To Measure Their Success

20 Feb

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“Bloom where you’re planted” and lots of other clichés (“when life hands you lemons, make lemonade”) are created to help people deal with the fact they’re not where they want to be in life.

Now I’m not naïve enough to think that every student-athlete that I coach has dreamed of attending my institution since they were little tykes.  I know that most, if not all, of them would love to play at Big Time State University if they could.  They’d get all sorts of gear, they’d be on television every weekend, they’d be big-timers.

You might be in another situation.  Maybe a player thought they’d make Varsity and only made JV, or they thought they’d make the “1” team and ended up on the “2”…whatever it is, we’ve got to get them fired up about moving forward rather than looking back.

4 tips we can give our athletes to refocus their goals and have measurable success

  1. Don’t make general plans.  Saying, “I want to start” or “I want our team to win conference” isn’t a specific goal.  Instead of vague, “I just want to help the team” type goals, let’s focus them on figuring out how they can get better every day.  I know of some coaches who have their athletes fill out a goal sheet at the end of each practice.  They set a mini goal and then write down whether or not they accomplished that goal.
  2. Award incremental positives.  Goals are hard enough to accomplish without waiting until you’re standing on the championship podium!  If the player has been able to string a bunch of great games together, be sure to give her a pat on the back.  If she wins a smaller award, like all-tournament team, be sure to make it a big deal.  Being good is hard, being good over a long period of time is a lot harder…celebrate small victories.
  3. Read.  So many times, our athletes are only focused on reading for classwork…it’s rare for them to read for fun during the school year.  That’s why I read a book with my team each year.  Reading it as a team helps each person to carry the load of the book, because they sign up for chapters and are then responsible for teaching their teammates the content.  Picking books that will make them better leaders, players, or help them overcome a mental barrier has been critical to helping my athletes be successful.
  4. Don’t wait for something to happen to you.  A few years ago, there was a book that made the “Law of Attraction” popular.  The Law said that if you thought about something enough and had enough positive thoughts about it…whatever the thing was that you really wanted would come to fruition.  Those of us who live in the real world understand that good things don’t just happen, we’ve got to hustle for them.  It’s a great lesson to teach our athletes.  If they want amazing things to happen in their lives, hard work and success have a reciprocal relationship.


The idea for this post came to me after reading A Checklist for Measuring Your Success on Huffington Post.  As the clichés have a fun way of telling us, we have the ability to take life’s disappointments and turn them into opportunities.

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Posted in Goal setting, Mental game

 

Goal Setting: 7 Things Successful Coaches Do Differently

06 Feb

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Goals are usually things we talk about in relation to our players, but they’re also powerful for our own careers.  As usual, the wonderful Harvard Business Review has a great article on their blog, this one’s called Nine Things Successful People Do Differently.  That piqued my interest because I sure would like to be successful!

7 things we can do to make sure we accomplish our goals

  1. Seize the moment to act on your goals.  Let’s say your goal is to workout everyday of a particular month.  It’s a personal challenge that you’ve set up for yourself, because you understand that working out is good for you…it’s just that time always gets away from you.  If you’re going to complete your challenge, you can’t sleep in everyday and go home to watch television every night.  Carpe diem and get it in!
  2. Know exactly how far you have to go.  Here’s another scenario: you’ve got a player who you think should be an all-conference player.  She’s not there yet, in fact, she’s totally under the radar with the other coaches in your conference.  Figure out what your player needs in order to be the best in your conference…and then convince her to put the work in.  Understanding where she is and where she needs to go will be a great life lesson for her!
  3. Be a realistic optimist.  Wanting something isn’t enough.  Wanting to be successful isn’t enough.  Having positive self-talk isn’t enough.  Those are all good things, but they won’t make things happen.  While we want to stay focused on our goal and believe that we will accomplish it…successful coaches always assess where they are in terms of being able to check that goal off of the list.
  4. Focus on getting better, rather than being good.  A lot of times, people ask me how I have time to write this blog.  I always say the same thing: I’m trying to get better.  Writing this blog and speaking at different places forces me to learn more about working with people, different coaching techniques, and how to communicate effectively…all things that I believe will make me a better coach.
  5. Have grit.  According to the article, “grit is a willingness to commit to long-term goals”.  Even when we’ve totally crashed and burned.  Even when it looks like success isn’t in the cards.  Toddlers are gritty when they’re learning to walk.  They don’t fall down once and say, “oh well, guess I’ll just crawl everywhere.”  Nope.  They get up…again and again until they master walking.
  6. Build your willpower muscle.  Willpower is something we can practice, it isn’t just something we have.  Going back to our first example of the month-long challenge to workout every day for a month, that is a good test of our willpower.  You’ll probably feel great the first week or two, maybe even a little proud of yourself.  But those last couple of weeks might be a grind where you’re dragging yourself to the gym.  That’s building willpower.
  7. Focus on what you will do, not what you won’t do.  We’ve all heard people say that if you tell someone, “don’t think about a pink elephant in a tutu”, then the first thing that’s going to pop into their mind is a pink elephant in a tutu.  It’s the same thing with us.  If we say, “whatever you do, don’t yell at that player”, it’s going to be all you can think about.  You may not yell, but you won’t be focused on the task at hand.  Instead, let’s say what we will do.


These seven steps may take a bit of time to accomplish, but we’ve got time and we’ve got the drive to put the work in.  If our goals are important enough, we’ll do what it takes to accomplish them.

 
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Goals: Hard Work, Faith, And Patience Required

30 Jan

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As I was putting my different review posts together, I realized that I haven’t written about goal setting all that much.  I think part of the reason is because goals are in that weird zone between tangible and intangible.  They’re certainly concrete and the thing that keeps the engines of our teams chugging along…thus the tangible.  But they’re not something you can grab hold of…we can’t teach goal achievement.  Thus the intangible.  Goals are in the no man’s land of my blog, but I have written a bit about goals…hope you like what you see!

5 posts to guide you and your team through the goal setting process

Basics
Teams are all about goals.  We have personal goals, short-term goals, and long-term goals.  But before we get into how to actually accomplish your goals, let’s go back to the beginning and check out what you need to accomplish your goals.  I’m not talking about follow-through and desire and motivation…much more basic than that.  I’m talking about the day after your season is over and you’re already looking forward to the following season…what will you need?  Here’s A Quick Way Your Team Can Accomplish Goals

Define
As a manager of people (and that’s what we are, right?), do you know how to lead your team through the goal setting process?  Every team has an interesting mix of individual and corporate goals…and managing those is an interesting process in itself!  We’ve got to come up with, define, and try to accomplish goals that are months away from fruition…that’s no easy task.  12 Step Program: Follow These Steps To Accomplish Your Goals

Motivate
I’ve watched parts of the movie Hoosiers with my teams before and the results are always good.  I haven’t used it as a “fire up to beat the big team”, because I worry that I’ll get them too riled up for one game.  But it’s great for an “us against the world” kind of thing.  And that mantra works whether your team isn’t very good and no one expects much from you or you’re expected to win it all.  The beauty in the movie is that it truly is a team that makes it happen.  Hickory’s new coach has a shady past, one of the player’s dad is a drunk, and their best player quits in the middle of the season.  Not exactly how you’d write up a successful season…but they are.  Together.  Effective Use Of Films For Goal Setting

Review
At the beginning of the season, the sky’s the limit.  But after a few weeks and some competition, the team starts to see where they stand…and that’s when it’s time to take a step back and give your team a hard look.  I don’t care whether or not your team is undefeated or hasn’t recorded its first win yet, every coach must give their team a once over.  We have an obligation to look at our teams with a mix of optimistic realism.  Let’s look at three areas where the discipline to confront reality is necessary.  3 Steps To Accomplish Your Goals…No Matter What

SMARTER
If you typed “goal setting” into an internet search engine, you’d get over sixty eight million results in less than a second.  Life is all about goals.  Whether it is to graduate from college within a certain time period, to get married by a particular benchmark, or even earn your first million dollars at a specific age…life truly is all about setting, achieving, and resetting goals.  I think can be a great gift that we give to our student-athletes which they’ll use in both their professional and personal lives for years to come.  G Is For Goals: Setting Attainable, Challenging, and Assessible Goals

As Charles C. Noble said, “you must have long term goals to keep you from being frustrated by short term failures.”  I think we all understand that we’ll fail a whole bunch on our way to whatever success we’re aiming for…goals will keep us focused on the big picture.

 
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The 5 I’s Of Greatness

21 Nov

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Please join me for a fun series.  My mission, and I’ve chosen to accept it, is to write a post based on each letter of the alphabet.  The English major inside of me is very excited about this project…and my inner nerd is even more fired up!  Keep checking back as I tackle the intangibles of sport…from A to Z.

Is greatness a nurture or nature thing?  Meaning, can we teach greatness…or is it something that we’re born with?  According to Daniel Coyle, author of The Talent Code, we can teach it.  I’d highly recommend you read the book, it’s a little sciency, but a very good read…I wrote about it here.

Without further ado, here are five things which are essential to teams in order to be great.

  1. Initiative.  The first thing great teams conquer is fear of failure…because they know that failure is a step to success.  As John Wooden said, “If you’re afraid of failure, you will never do the things you are capable of doing.”   I often tell my team that they never would have learned to walk when they were toddlers without initiative.  Those little kids aren’t worried about falling over again and again, failure doesn’t bother them.  They don’t focus on the failure, but rather the goal in front of them.
  2. Intentness.  Great people don’t give up.  They set goals and pursue them relentlessly.  They are determined to pursue their goal…they understand that they may not reach the goal.  Yet they push on.  They are persistent in consistently practicing to the peak of their performance…they are tough.
  3. Identifiable.  Greatness can’t be disguised, it can’t be hidden, and it can’t be mistaken for something else.  It could be the player whose words can motivate and inspire her teammates to do what they didn’t think they could.  Or it could be the player who keeps working hard even though they are physically and mentally exhausted.  Or it could even be the player who has earned the respect of her teammates…even though she doesn’t get tons of playing time.
  4. Inspiration.  Great teams inspire one another to perform at their best level…they want to be the best, not for personal glory, but for the success of the team.  The coaching staff gets after it with recruiting, practice planning, and scouting their opponents.  Meanwhile, the players study video to make themselves better and learn their opponent’s tendencies…not to mention inspiring one another to push themselves just a little bit harder than the day before.
  5. Imaginative.  Great coaches, players, and teams can see success before it happens.  Success is not a surprise to great teams, but rather something they’ve played over and over again in the tape that runs in their heads.  Great teams visualize their success in vivid detail and then go about the work of making it happen.


There is something empowering about knowing that you are in control of your greatness and it should be exciting to your team as well.  Greatness isn’t something you’re born with…it’s something you can learn over time.

 
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Posted in Coaching philosophy, Goal setting

 

G Is For Goals: Setting Attainable, Challenging, and Assessible Goals

16 Nov

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Please join me for a fun series.  My mission, and I’ve chosen to accept it, is to write a post based on each letter of the alphabet.  The English major inside of me is very excited about this project…and my inner nerd is even more fired up!  Keep checking back as I tackle the intangibles of sport…from A to Z.

If you typed “goal setting” into an internet search engine, you’d get over sixty eight million results in less than a second.  Life is all about goals.  Whether it is to graduate from college within a certain time period, to get married by a particular benchmark, or even earn your first million dollars at a specific age…life truly is all about setting, achieving, and resetting goals.  I think can be a great gift that we give to our student-athletes which they’ll use in both their professional and personal lives for years to come.

Here’s a 3 step process to successfully set goals

Attainable.  I’m sure a lot of you have heard of S.M.A.R.T. goals.  The letters stand for specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-based.  These are the criteria that all of our goals should have.  Setting goals without having a process to assess whether or not the goals have been met isn’t productive.  And isn’t that the whole purpose of goals…to make us more productive?  While researching this post,  I found out that someone has already thought of that and came up with S.M.A.R.T.E.R. goals, with the E standing for evaluate and the R standing for reevaluate.

Challenging.  I typically have my team leaders run the goal setting session.  A few of the guiding principles are: everyone contributes to the conversation, the goal has to require “the team” to accomplish, and it has to be measurable.  Those rules apply whether they’ve got three goals or twenty.  I’m sure you’re reading that and thinking that’s not very challenging…I’d disagree!  Getting a team of opinionated individuals to all voice their opinion, agree on what “challenging” is, understand the difference between personal and team goals, and make the goal measurable is a task in itself.

Assessible.  Our college has been pretty focused on assessment lately.  If your institution is anything like mine, a common phrase is, “oh, we already do that” when asked.  Are you recruiting a diverse student body? Oh, we already do that.  Are you putting the students first? Oh, we already do that.  Whatever the question, the answer is always: oh, we already do that.  The big dogs on campus answered quite simply, “that’s awesome…prove it!”.  Hence the assessments.  I can say I’m the queen of England, but no one is going to believe me unless I’ve got some concrete evidence.  Setting measurable goals will make assessing their viability much easier.

Athletes and coaches are goal driven by nature.  Let’s be sure to inform our athletes about the goal setting process so that it’s a skill that they’re able to use after their time with us is finished.

 
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3 Criteria For Goals That Will Truly Motivate Your Team

30 Sep

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I’m sure all of us are looking for ways to inspire our athletes to achieve their highest potential.  And I’m sure all of us agree that goal setting is an integral part to any successful season.  Based on his TEDtalk, Why We Do What We Do, Tony Robbins gives us a “map” to properly motivating our teams.  First, we have to give each individual a role on the team.  Then we have to find out how to meet their emotional needs.  Finally, we give them the tools to make their team experience positive.  Read on to find out how!

3 things coaches should understand in order to motivate our teams

Three questions.  Robbins says that every decision we make (Will I go all out in practice?  Will I try something new and risk looking bad until I master the skill?) requires us to answer three questions.  He calls them the Three Decisions of Destiny.  The first question is “What am I going to focus on?”.  Let’s use “will I go all out in practice?” as our sample.  We have to get our players to focus on how their effort will benefit their team and help the team get closer to accomplishing their goals.  So rather than focusing on the pain they feel in working hard, their attention is on doing their part for the team.  The second question is “What does it mean?”.  Going all out in practice means verbally supporting one’s teammates, giving complete physical effort, and being willing to do whatever they’re asked by the coach.  The third and final question is “What am I going to do?”.  To make sure they go all out each practice, they will eat healthily, get plenty of sleep, and remain focused on their sport during practice times.

6 human needs.  We all are motivated by these six emotions/needs/beliefs…it’s the coach’s job to find out what button to push for each student-athlete.  The 1st need is certainty.  There are some things that our players need to know without a doubt: For example, the coach is knowledgeable, fair, and caring.  The 2nd need is uncertainty.  I know that seems to contradict the first, but I don’t think it does.  While some things should be set in stone, others like playing time and the starting lineup shouldn’t be certain…otherwise our starters will become complacent and the non-starters will be apathetic.  The 3rd need is critical significance.  Our teams should have a compelling reason for coming to the gym every day…and it’s our job to give it to them.  The 4th need is connection and love.  We all want to feel like we belong to something special and that there are folks out there who care about us.  The 5th need is growth.  If a player feels that they weren’t given the opportunity to get better (with skill, with leadership, with self-awareness), why come to practice every day?  The 6th need is the ability to contribute beyond ourselves.  Whether it’s team community service, sacrificing personal goals to help the team win a significant victory, or challenging your seniors to leave their mark on the team…we’ve got to give our players the ability to make a difference.

Becoming influential.  So we’re still using our sample question, “will I go all out in practice?”, as the example for this goal setting technique.  In this final step of the motivation process, we help our athletes create a positive situation for themselves.  We should ask them what their target is…meaning what do they hope to accomplish by going all out in practice (respect from peers, etc.)?  Next is to find out what their belief system is…will they stoop to gossiping and backbiting a teammate in order to get to “connection and love”?  Finally, we have to find out what fuels each athlete.  Robbins says that each of us has a dominant human need (certainty, critical significance, etc.) and the player’s goal has to feed that need.

Check out the video if you get a chance and see if you can put your own sports spin on things…it’s well worth the watch!

 
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Posted in Goal setting, Team roles, TEDtalk

 

Believing And Achieving: How Groups Accomplish Goals

25 Jul

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It’s almost a cliché for a coach to talk about setting goals.  It’s how we’re wired.  We want people to be successful…and how can you be successful if you don’t have a goal in mind, right?  Helping people achieve things that they did not know they were capable of is one of the many reasons that I love coaching.  Since I’ve taken it upon myself to bestow July with the tag of “I Love Coaching” month, goal setting fits in very nicely.

The easiest 4-step process for goal setting ever!

#1:  Set the goal. In my post, Effective Use Of Films For Goal Setting, I talk about using the movie Hoosiers to help your team aim high with their goals.  It’s frustrating for me to sit down with an athlete and ask them what their goals are and they shrug their shoulders.  If they don’t know what they want to do, then my impact on their life will be minimal at best.  Just slightly better than the shoulder shrug is when they tell me that they want to win.  Of course we all want to win and more than likely they’re just saying what they think I want to hear…but winning is an outcome.  It’s the result of a process.  That’s when I have to refocus them on the things about the process that are within their control.

#2:  Go after the goal. Our athletes need three things in order to accomplish their goals.  They need a task…that’s the goal.  They need a support system because none of us can do things alone, we like to think we can, but we can’t.  Luckily, our players are linked up to a ready-made support system—their team.  The last thing they need is a reason to play, a stake in the game, a “push” to achieve that goal.  I wrote about these things in my post, Here’s A Quick Way Your Team Can Accomplish Goals.

#3:  Achieve the goal. Teams are all about goals and achieving them…but it’s a process and it is much easier said than done.  I wrote in my post, The 5 Stages Of Accomplishment, that goals will probably be a bit overwhelming at first, then scary, then seemingly impossible before they get to the point of actually reaching the summit.

#4:  Set a new goal. And because we can never be satisfied, achieving a goal just starts the whole process all over again with a  new and more difficult challenge.

Setting goals sometimes makes folks nervous, because now their success or failure can be measured.  It’s our job as the coach to give them the tools that they need in order to set goals that aren’t too lofty, yet not too low.  In A High Stakes Game:  The Goal Is Just The Beginning, I talked about the process of making sure a goal is appropriate for each person…check it out!  I think it’s a great way to think through the goal setting process.

 
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Posted in Coaching philosophy, Goal setting

 
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