Virtual Sport Psych

The what, why and how of goal-setting in applied sport psychology

April 17, 2023

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Thank you for joining the Better Together Newsletter! This bi-weekly newsletter is dedicated to sharing insights into applied sport psychology and science-based tools that can aid us as sport psychology professionals in helping athletes, teams, and coaches enhance their performance and well-being. The goal is to deliver actionable insights in a concise and engaging format, making it easy for you to apply them in your work in sports.

Do you still know what your goals for 2023 were on January 1st? I hope you do! Some of my goals were to redesign the newsletter (✅) and the website (in progress), and to swim across the Bodensee in the south of Germany (pending).

When you think about how you go about setting goals for yourself and with your clients – how do you do that? I mean, you’ll probably use something like the SMART “rule”, you’ll probably talk about process, performance and outcome goals. But what is the exact process you use? Is there a blueprint you have or is it rather deciding how you do what you do next while you’re doing it?

I think – and it’s only my opinion – we should not only focus on the aspect of how to set different kinds of goals, but also on the process that is involved here. …and this process should – at best – be evidence-based as well.

Luckily, some researchers investigated the what, why and how of goal-setting recently.

Let’s see what we can learn from them and thus, get better together…

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

online sport psychology conference

RESEARCH OF THE WEEK

After I shared some research about team goal setting two weeks ago I just came across another recent study on goal setting. But this time it is not the question, whether or not goal setting is effective. This time this research is about, what the optimal goal setting process looks like. Matthew Bird, Christian Swann and Patricia Jackman (2023) set out to create a review on the current state of the art of goal setting based on peer reviewed publications.

Here are the most important findings:

  • Only 50% of published studies on goal setting used a theory. In others, theories were mentioned, but it remained unclear, how the theories guided the goal setting process. Thus: please have a theory ready when setting goals! To cite Kurt Lewin: “There is nothing more practical than a good theory.”
  • The goal setting process should build on five pillars:
    1) The context of goal setting
    2) Preparing to set goals
    3) Setting goals
    4) Preparing for goal achievment
    5) Following up
  • One crucial part about preparing to set goals appears to be the educational stage. Here, clients learn the basic principles about goal setting and especially WHY it is important for the personal performance and further development to set goals. Interestingly, I still see it quite regularly that athletes say, that they don’t need or want to set goals (especially for training, but also for competition), because “if you don’t have goals, you can’t be disappointed”…
  • Besides finally setting goals one very important factor is developing strategies to achieve these goals – even when the going gets tough. My personal opinion here is, that we sometimes don’t need the next best goal setting workshop. Instead, we need workshops that help clients prepare for obstacles and barriers along their way and how to cope with these challenges and problems, so that they do not lose sight of their goals.

If you’d like to dive a bit deeper into the article, you can do so here – as it is Open Access.

CHUCK NORRIS JOKE OF THE WEEK

Chuck Norris is able to slam a revolving door.

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