Goal setting is something that is almost universal in the sport of swimming. A coach sits down with an athlete and the athlete gets to say what is they want to accomplish. Perhaps they will discuss how to get there, how to measure progress along the way. There are more advanced ways to set goals, but more or less this is the process as I’ve seen it in most places.
I have to confess that as an athlete I didn’t always take goal setting seriously. Perhaps it was a by product of just being young and dumb, or my natural distrust for authority, or both. I can remember a particular time when at age 15 I completely blew off a goal setting exercise, after my coach promised that the paper was “just for me” and that he wouldn’t look at it.
He did look at it, and on a six hour car ride back from a meet in Montreal we had to have an awkward conversation about it. Yes, this was also in the days when your swim coach could drive you alone from a travel swim meet (or any swim meet).
While we’re all having a good laugh at another tale of ignorant youth, ask yourself this. Do you have a formal goal setting process? I do, kind of. Far from what it should be. Sometimes things are so obviously staring us in the face that we can’t see them. How is it that goals are so universally accepted as part of the process for young athletes and then we largely abandon them thereafter?
Instead of breaking down how I organize a goal setting process, I’m going to make an argument for why to set goals in the first place. Because, I think before you learn how to set goals, you should actually want to set goals. If you don’t see the point in the first place, if you’re just faking the an attitude around goal setting until you make it, you’re destined to fail.
Knowing what you Want
You might be surprised to find out how many people have no idea what it is they want. Usually this is manifested by incessant complaining. Complaining is all well and good, and I’ll write another blog sometime about how to turn complaints into what you want. But if you’re mostly or only complaining, you’re only talking about what it is you DON’T want. And the opposite of what you don’t want is not necessarily what you want.
For example. Many club coaches may complain about parents barraging them with e-mails. Ask them if they don’t want to have any conversations with parents. Show me somebody who says yes to that question and I’ll show you somebody who doesn’t understand the job. If you’re a club swimming coach in America, parents are your customers. You may not like the way they communicate with you, but you want them to communicate with you.
Knowing what you want gives you a destination, and a destination gives you direction. Imagine getting in your car and setting your phone to navigate you to “NOT” Philadelphia. There would be no direction.
Figuring out how to get there
There’s a bit of nuance to the next facet of goal setting. Often when it’s applied with young athletes, I think there’s an assumption that it is important to get athletes to communicate a process so they commit to some actionable steps.
What I find more interesting is to probe athletes on what they believe will get them there. It’s pretty easy to tell when athletes are reciting back to you what they want to hear and when they are actually stating what it is they believe. I once coached an athlete, who in response to me asking her what actions might lead to the outcomes she wanted, would finish each statement with a question mark. So it would go something like this:
Athlete: “I’d like to swim a 1:06 in the 100 butterfly”
Me: Tell me one thing you can do that will make that more likely
Athlete: Have 100% practice attendance?
Again, faking will greatly decrease the likelihood of anyone being successful. So an athlete that is simply telling you what you want to hear is very unlikely to either do those things or get the effective benefit from doing those things. Getting people to believe something that you want to believe is much harder than getting them to repeat you, but it’s worth understanding as a coach where you stand. Are you believed or are they patronizing you?
Acknowledging progress
One of the things that makes goal setting all the more important as you grow older is that likely there is more space, not less, between you setting a goal and actually achieving it. You athletes can often set a goal and achieve it within a matter of months. Often the places we want to get to as adults are going to be the results of years (if not decades) of progress.
You know what is perhaps the single most demotivating thought you can have? Is one that focuses on how long you have to go to reach a goal. Let’s say your goal for the purposes of analogy is to walk 100 miles. After 10 miles, you still have 90 miles to go. That’s a long way!
As your goals get longer and more drawn out, it becomes essential to provide a counterweight to constant rumination on how far you have left to go. I would say it’s fascinating how people resist this if I myself wasn’t so spectacularly skilled not acknowledging my own process.
This is a deeper layer of belief. You’ve decided that you have a set of directions to get where you want to go. Now do you believe that if you just do them once you will get there? Or do you believe that reaching the destination is an accumulation of perhaps thousands of efforts. How will you figure out if your efforts are making progress?
Not deciding how to mark progress is deciding that you won’t acknowledge progress. And I have to tell you, if you don’t have a system for acknowledging progress, then your chances of staying in the game long enough to achieve long term goals approaches zero very quickly.
Beyond achievement
Finally, as we grow beyond youth goal setting actually broadens. I know many people yearn for the simplicity of youth. I don’t find myself in that place, maybe because I found being a teenager pretty miserable.
For many though, the simplicity of just focusing on your grades, your swim times and whether or not you have a date to the dance is alluring.
“Adulting” rarely grants us the opportunity to be so simply focused. If you can acknowledge that it can actually be a boon. If your goal setting is focused on one area of achievement that achievement becomes a winner take all situation.
As an adult you actually have an opportunity to diversify your investment. In my life, beyond my professional aspirations I have goals for my body, my own athletic performance, my relationship with my wife and with my kids. I have goals for maintaining and building friendships I’ve had for decades.
That means that in moments where I’m “failing” in one area, I have the opportunity to be successful in others. Whether or not I achieve precisely what I want to do in one area is not make or break for my entire psyche.
We would do well to consider the same for youth athletes. Is it really so awesome that they focus their goal setting so narrowly? Is it helping them psychologically?
Goal Setting is For everyone
I want to push people, particularly coaches, to go beyond the “goal setting for thee but not for me” mentality. While it’s true that there are many good reasons for athletes to set goals, these reasons are all the more true for the “adults” in the room. Goal setting becomes more important as we go on in life, not less.
Are you looking to up your coaching game? Then now is the perfect time to line up working on it in the New Year. I’m currently running a sale on coaching packages with 20% off. Write me for a free consultation!