Goal setting is important in any performance-oriented area of life. It is commonly used by sport psychologists to help athletes improve their competitive performance and gain emotional satisfaction from participation in sports. Because of this, sport and exercise psychology has been recognized as a formal subdivision of psychology by the American Psychological Association.
Direction
You can't get where you want to be if you don't know where you're going. The SMART goal-setting system was adapted from research performed by Edwin A. Locke, Professor Emeritus at the University of Maryland School of Business. SMART goals should be "specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound." Using the SMART system will give you a specific road map that will tell you what to do when you get up in the morning and where you are in relationship to your goals.
Feedback
Frequent feedback is crucial if you want to know how you're doing. Effective goals are broken into bite-sized chunks that provide frequent feedback. If you want to improve your vertical jump by 12 inches, for example, you might set your time deadline at one year and break down your goal into 12 1-inch increments per month. In this way, you can obtain the positive feedback of goal achievement once a month instead of once a year. Frequent positive feedback allows you to look forward with motivation.
Self-Confidence
Breaking your goals down into mini-goals does more than just increase your motivation to achieve the next goal. It also allows you to successfully attain goal after goal. The more frequent your recent memories of successful goal attainment are, the more self-confidence you are likely to have, both on and off the playing field. Justified self-confidence will improve both your training and playing performance.
Expectation Management
In order to achieve your goal, you must genuinely believe that it is possible. If you discover that your goal is unrealistically ambitious, you will be unable to properly motivate yourself, according to Margaret Moore, co-director of the McLean/Harvard Medical School Institute of Coaching. If you put time into thinking about whether or not your goals are realistic, you will be able to find the "challenge zone" between the two extremes of easy, "impotent" goals and unrealistically ambitious goals.
Poise
You can achieve poise both on and off the field through effective goal-setting. This means that you will not "choke" under pressure, and you will not become easily disheartened if you do not perform well relative to other competitors. The key to poise is to set performance goals rather than outcome goals, according to the University of New Hampshire Counseling Center. Performance goals are goals over which you have maximum control. "Run the 100-meter dash in 10 seconds or less" is an example of a performance goal, while "win a gold medal" is an outcome goal.
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