Week 2: Training Programme - Goal Setting

Post title: Training Programme: Goal Setting
Week no. 2
Date: 28/03/14

Aim of week: to develop your goal setting skills in order to improve motivation, to increase confidence, reduce anxiety and your levels of stress.

Why I’ve chosen goal setting for you.

Hi performer X, this week we are going to be working on goal setting, this is because in the questionnaires that you filled out, you scored 0 out of 12 on the ACSI meaning that you aren’t setting goals for yourself therefore your confidence and motivation aren’t increasing and you are less likely to improve in dance. Goal setting is where you set yourself a specific goal, something that you want to achieve and try to give yourself a specific time you want to achieve your goal by, by setting a specific time this will motivate you more to try and achieve it. By setting yourself goals, this will increase your confidence which is something we said we had to address, as in the CSAI-2 questionnaire and the performance profile your self-confidence score was very low and by setting yourself goals it will increase your self-confidence because when you achieve them you will feel good about yourself and how you have achieved it therefore resulting in an increase in self-confidence.

What goal setting involves:

Goal setting is: setting targets for yourself to achieve and within a specific duration of time which will help you with your performance now and in the future.  

When setting goals, there are three different time phrases you can set them for, short term, medium term and long term.

Short term goal setting: a short term goal is set to for a short period of time, from one day to one month. This short term goal is what you want to achieve quickly within a few training sessions. For example, perfecting a certain jump or leap.

Medium term goal setting: this is between short term and long term goal setting. For medium goal setting duration of one to three months is around how long it would take to achieve your medium term goal.

Long term goal setting: a long term goal is something can affect your performance from three months for up to several years or if you set want until you retire from your sport. E.g. shouldering your leg, if a dancer can shoulder their leg then it means that they have a good range of flexibility within their hips therefore being able to do more advanced moves/tricks when performing.

A lot of short term goals that you set normally result into long term goals because once you have achieve this short term goal then you want to continue it and not lose it, i.e. a leap therefore you keep practicing this resulting it in being a long term goal.

There are three types of goals that you can use to help with the goal setting process and staying motivated to keep practicing them. The three types are: outcome, performance and process.

Outcome goal: an outcome goal focuses on the result of an event, e.g. beating a certain opponent in a competition that always seems to beat you. However, this isn’t always what happens because it just depends on what happens on the day as on the day of the competition the opponent that you want to be may be on top form whereas you may not be or vice versa and therefore this can reduce the advantages of goal setting I discussed earlier, they can be quite destructive/ negative.

Performance goal: this is a short term goal were you set yourself a goal e.g. improving your split leap and this will help you with your performance  and also achieve the outcome because it means you have a wider range of movement in the hip therefore you can do more leaps when choreographing for a performance. This type of goal setting is better than outcome goal setting because you can control this more than outcome and it is more individual to you.

Process goal: a process goal is the actions that an individual must make to perform well, e.g. go to training three to four times a week instead of one to two times a week to improve your general dancing technique and level or whether you are going to go for them extra two sessions a week to focus on something very specific, e.g. shouldering the leg.  

When setting goals, the best way to ensure that you set a good, specific and realistic goal is to use SMART or SMARTER targets.

Specific – set a specific / narrow target for yourself that you want to achieve e.g. I want to be able to shoulder my leg well and hold it for at least three seconds. This target is specific because it is saying what you want to achieve but it isn’t just saying that you want to perfect a leap it is saying what specific leap you want to achieve.

Measurable – this heading is how you are going to measure the specific target that you have set. So for shouldering the leg, we would measure how high the leg is/how far away from the shoulder the leg is in the first week then in week six we would measure it again to whether or not there has been any improvement.

Achievable – this heading is to ensure that the specific target you have set is achievable and it isn’t something that is impossible to achieve. If the target isn’t achievable then there is no point in continuing any further with it and this can increase anxiety and reduce confidence.

Realistic – this heading is to ensure that the target is realistic, (very similar to achievable), is the target that you have set for yourself realistic, can it be achieved.

Time – this heading is so that you can set yourself a time frame to achieve the specific target that you have set for yourself.

This is what you would use to help yourself write a SMART target, if you wanted to write a SMARTER target then you would use the same as above but just add the following headings:

Excitable – this heading is to ensure that the target you have set and the training that you are going to do is excitable and that the training isn’t going to be the same boring routine week in week out as this will result in you becoming demotivated and not completing the goal that you have set out to achieve.

Record – this heading is telling you to record down what you have done within each training session and whether or not you feel that you are closer to achieving your goal. It also prevents the athlete from back tracking on their goal.

Exercises for Athlete to Complete

Below, are two targets that I would like you to achieve, one is a long term target that is just getting you used to goal setting and how it works and the other is a short term one which I would like you to complete for next week.   

1. A Long Term Goal Setting Plan     

This is the long term goal that I would like to set for you and this is to improve flexibility by being able to achieve the splits on at least two sides.

You will do this by setting yourself a SMART or SMARTER target so that you can improve this and achieve the target.

To help yourself try using a diagram (to help follow the picture below).

 

Here is a running exmaple that will help you to understand a little more.

To do this you need to set yourself a goal that you want to be able to reach within the next month e.g. being a certain distance off the floor (10cm) on your left leg and a certain distance off the floor on your right leg. You then want to set yourself a goal for the end of a certain length of time, “be down in splits on both my right and left leg by …..” and set yourself a month/time you want to be down in splits by. You then need to set goal for in between the starting and finishing goal, so you need to set yourself another goal for the next month e.g. be closer into splits (you may want to give yourself a distance).    

2. A Short Term Goal Setting Plan

This is the short term goal that I would like you to achieve for next week and this is to have improved your leg height on shouldering your leg by a couple of inches. This target requires you to stretch every day and practice the skill so that it can improve.  
Again, set yourself SMART/SMARTER targets that will help you to achieve this, practice every day and if possible try to measure each day so that you can see improvements. You could also try and record your improvement each day by making yourself a diary, you could record what stretches you did, how long you did them for and whether or not there was any improvement in the actual skill itself and if improving this skill helps improving other skills.  


Good luck for this week and I hope you achieve this, feel free to comment about any progress that you have made.