SMART Goals: Helping You Achieve Success

People always tell me they have goals that they want to accomplish in their performance domain, but have a hard time achieving their goals. There are many reasons for people not achieving their goals, some look to far down the road at their end goals, others do not know how to set up successful goals, some set unrealistic goals, and some just need others to help them stay focus on their goals. This blog is going to teach one method of goal setting that I do with my athletes. I am going to teach you how to set SMART goals. This is a very common method that people use to set goals.

SMART stands for: Specific (do not make broad goals, be narrow, be detailed); Measurable (be able to track your goals and “see” that they are being achieved); Adjustable (you cannot control life, things happen, be ready for the unpredictable, be willing to adjust to things, don’t stress!); Realistic (be honest with yourself, baby steps, if you shoot to high, you might become discouraged and unhappy); Timely (usually I set this for my athletes and I would say 3 months is a good time for setting long term goals; sometimes if you set to far in the future, you lose sight of your goals; and in 3 months if you have not fully achieved your end goal, that is okay).

Also when you set SMART goals you want to set up your goals in 3 steps. You first set up outcome goals (end goals); from there you set the most important goals (in my opinion). You will set performance goals (week to week) and process goals (daily). If you want to achieve success in 3 months, you must be willing to make yourself 1% better each day to achieve that end goal. You need to ask yourself what will I do and how will I do it? What will I do each day and each week to make sure I am getting one step closer to my end goal. When working with athletes, after we set up their outcome goal and go through the performance and process goals, I will take the outcome goals and never show it to my athletes until 3 months has passed. This allows them to only focus on their smaller goals. If they can always see their end goals, they might become discouraged, but if they focus on the smaller goals they have a better chance of succeeding and they will improve in performance. I promise! For more detail about goal setting, contact me today and set up a meeting.