What is a Goal and Why Do We Set Them?

Goal Setting 1 – It would be safe to say that no successful athlete achieved what he or she achieved without setting goals throughout their career.

Goal setting is synonymous with success. It would be safe to say that no successful athlete achieved what he or she achieved without setting goals throughout their career.

The setting of many goals is an essential and important process in athletic performance. The inability of some athletes to effectively set goals will have without question retrogressively affected their progress or level of achievement in their chosen sport.

Establishing appropriate, realistic, chronological, challenging and measurable goals is imperative if athletes are going to have a chance of achieving their athletic potential regardless of the sport in which they participate.

This is part 1 of a 5 part series on goals setting by Coach Leigh Nugent.

What Is a Goal?

A goal can be described in a number of ways:
• A desired outcome or the end result of the implementation of a particular process.
• A prediction of a future desired outcome.
• A goal is essentially fiction until it is achieved, then it becomes reality

For most of us in swimming our goals are based on a combination of outcomes that we dream to achieve; as well as outcomes which we fell we are actually capable of achieving. In this there are elements of attainability, unlikely attainability and non-attainability

The secret to effective goal setting is identifying the attainable at its most challenging limit, which will have the effect of bring us within reach of what we may have thought to be the unattainable.

Why Do We Set Goals?

We set goals to provide a clear and structured order to the process of achieving increasingly difficult results, which lead to success or the desired outcome at the conclusion of the process.

To realise the goals that we have set for ourselves we need to focus on the process. The process is the activity or the things that we do to carry us from one stepping stone goal to the next. It is the conduit to achieve our goals; in fact goals have no purpose without the process which links them.