If you have been keeping up with my blogs, I set myself short, medium and long term goals at the beginning of a goal setting program to demonstrate the potential use that goal setting can have. The purpose of doing this was threefold. First, to demonstrate sport psychology in action. Second, to demonstrate the positives and negatives of just one type of sport psychology method. Third, for personal reasons to aid in my climbing performance. If you haven't been keeping up with my blogs, you can read my first installment, A wee bit about me!, and continue reading about my journey on the following installments, Introducing Goal Setting, Setting Short Term Goals, How Psychological Factors Affect Us and Self Talk in Action.
At the beginning of this process, I set myself SMART mid and long term term goals for my training in climbing. The mid way point for my goals has come and it is the perfect opportunity to evaluate and reflect on what has been done so far. It is also an ideal opportunity to set a more structured plan going forward. I would have set a loose plan a couple of months ago at the beginning but by now I will have a pretty good idea of any strengths and weaknesses I have in goal setting. It is also a perfect time to think about any factors that impeded or disturbed my goal setting journey and think about how I would tackle these factors if they come about again upon reaching my long term goals. For example, injury but we will come to that later.
This mid way reflection is an important part of any psychological intervention I put in place for any client of mine. During this phase, time is required to evaluate any practices in place, to determine what went well and what did not go so well and to devise another plan of action for the forthcoming weeks/months in order to reach the long term goals. It is also important during this phase to address the mentality of the client. Perhaps they have lost interest in the goal setting process due to rigorous and structured gaols. Or perhaps they have lost confidence due to previous gaols having not been met. Maybe it is the opposite, goals are too easy and motivation is low due to not feeling challenged. There are a plethora of reasons how mentality can be affected and it is my job to tease these out and make sure the rest of the goal setting journey is not compromised.
Although, the main goal of goal setting is to enhance motivation and focus, this can only be achieved through careful planning, flexibility in approaches, effective evaluation and creativity in interventions. Without any of these processes, goal setting would not achieve its aim.
So reflecting back on my goal setting process, I think back to when I set my goals. I can remember thinking how much work there was to do and feeling a bit stressed (of the good kind). However, I got off to a good start by ticking off one of my four goals just one week into training. At this point, I evaluated my performance and then set myself another goal to keep myself motivated for mid term goals. By doing so, my mental game was constantly challenged.
At the beginning, getting into a routine was fun. I enjoyed my training. Rather than coming in just to climb, I came in with more structure and therefore, more progress to my training. There were some incidences that affected this routine that were out of my hands however: sickness and injury. In these periods, I felt pressure at the thought of my training taken a step back and somewhat deflated. However, by sitting down and re-evaluating short term goals, I made up for my training. There is always a danger, after a period of time off, to push too hard in order to catch up or to push too hard where it was once manageable to do so. Following the SMART acronym certainly helped during this stage. One of the components in SMART is to be Realistic. Taken into account the period of time off, I kept myself in line and made sure I did enough training but not to the point in which it would send me back to injury time off. Being SMART with my short term goals and writing them down put things in perspective for me. Simply ticking a short term goal off my book gave me satisfaction and also diminished any feelings of panic.
If I think of the climber that I have become today, I feel a lot stronger, fitter and more controlled than ever before. I am projecting harder problems, climbing consistently at the grade I set myself and pulling on problems that I would not have necessary have attempted before. If I could do this again, a measure perhaps to gauge my pre and post mental game would have demonstrated just how far I have come. However, as this would have been a self evaluation, I feel that this would have been biased due to my knowledge and background in sport psychology. In general however, self evaluative methods are great in addition to goal setting at demonstrating additional benefits to mental training. My job now is to sit down and spend some time determining the rest of my training in time for the long term proposed date of mid March.
Published 18th January 2016
At the beginning of this process, I set myself SMART mid and long term term goals for my training in climbing. The mid way point for my goals has come and it is the perfect opportunity to evaluate and reflect on what has been done so far. It is also an ideal opportunity to set a more structured plan going forward. I would have set a loose plan a couple of months ago at the beginning but by now I will have a pretty good idea of any strengths and weaknesses I have in goal setting. It is also a perfect time to think about any factors that impeded or disturbed my goal setting journey and think about how I would tackle these factors if they come about again upon reaching my long term goals. For example, injury but we will come to that later.
This mid way reflection is an important part of any psychological intervention I put in place for any client of mine. During this phase, time is required to evaluate any practices in place, to determine what went well and what did not go so well and to devise another plan of action for the forthcoming weeks/months in order to reach the long term goals. It is also important during this phase to address the mentality of the client. Perhaps they have lost interest in the goal setting process due to rigorous and structured gaols. Or perhaps they have lost confidence due to previous gaols having not been met. Maybe it is the opposite, goals are too easy and motivation is low due to not feeling challenged. There are a plethora of reasons how mentality can be affected and it is my job to tease these out and make sure the rest of the goal setting journey is not compromised.
Although, the main goal of goal setting is to enhance motivation and focus, this can only be achieved through careful planning, flexibility in approaches, effective evaluation and creativity in interventions. Without any of these processes, goal setting would not achieve its aim.
So reflecting back on my goal setting process, I think back to when I set my goals. I can remember thinking how much work there was to do and feeling a bit stressed (of the good kind). However, I got off to a good start by ticking off one of my four goals just one week into training. At this point, I evaluated my performance and then set myself another goal to keep myself motivated for mid term goals. By doing so, my mental game was constantly challenged.
At the beginning, getting into a routine was fun. I enjoyed my training. Rather than coming in just to climb, I came in with more structure and therefore, more progress to my training. There were some incidences that affected this routine that were out of my hands however: sickness and injury. In these periods, I felt pressure at the thought of my training taken a step back and somewhat deflated. However, by sitting down and re-evaluating short term goals, I made up for my training. There is always a danger, after a period of time off, to push too hard in order to catch up or to push too hard where it was once manageable to do so. Following the SMART acronym certainly helped during this stage. One of the components in SMART is to be Realistic. Taken into account the period of time off, I kept myself in line and made sure I did enough training but not to the point in which it would send me back to injury time off. Being SMART with my short term goals and writing them down put things in perspective for me. Simply ticking a short term goal off my book gave me satisfaction and also diminished any feelings of panic.
If I think of the climber that I have become today, I feel a lot stronger, fitter and more controlled than ever before. I am projecting harder problems, climbing consistently at the grade I set myself and pulling on problems that I would not have necessary have attempted before. If I could do this again, a measure perhaps to gauge my pre and post mental game would have demonstrated just how far I have come. However, as this would have been a self evaluation, I feel that this would have been biased due to my knowledge and background in sport psychology. In general however, self evaluative methods are great in addition to goal setting at demonstrating additional benefits to mental training. My job now is to sit down and spend some time determining the rest of my training in time for the long term proposed date of mid March.
Published 18th January 2016