Читать книгу Sports Psychology For Dummies - Leif H. Smith - Страница 51

How will you know when you’ve achieved your goals? That may seem like a simple question, but it isn’t always. Goals need to be measurable. For example, you can easily measure a goal such as “I want to lead the team in tackles this season,” but it’s more difficult to measure a goal such as “I want to improve my confidence.”

For every goal you set, you need a method of measurement. That way, when someone asks you whether you’ve achieved your goal for the season (or, better yet, when you ask yourself whether you’ve achieved your goal), you’ll be able to answer yes or no and have the data to back it up.

If you don’t measure your goals, you’re plodding along a path without any course or direction in your journey. When you measure your progress, you get to see and feel success, make adjustments, and enable yourself to reach your goals more efficiently.

Don’t limit yourself to goals that are easily measurable. You can set mental goals and measure your progress just as well. Throughout this book, we suggest rating yourself on a scale of 1 to 5, and tracking your progress in a performance journal throughout the season. You can read more about this in Parts 2 and 3.

We frequently establish “mental and emotional statistics” for our athletes. For example, after every practice or game, athletes can rate their levels of confidence, motivation, effort, positive attitude, and ability to handle pressure. Athletes who track and monitor their mental progress on a consistent basis simply get better faster!

Todd has developed two different journals and adapted at times the journals to working with teams and helped coaches and athletes create their own “mental stat” sheets for after practices and games. In these journals or individual mental stat sheets, Todd has players rate on a scale of 1-5 mental and emotional stats such as “Confidence” and “Poise” and “Attitude” and “Effort.” He also then creates a small space to jot additional more specific notes, but each sheet is only one page and when placed in a journal format, easily fits in a player’s athletic bag. It is simple and straight-forward to complete and only take a couple of minutes, but it makes certain that athletes and coaches are reminded to rate themselves on the mental stats in the journal that all athletes need to be aware, and then many times some specific ones to an individual athlete or team.

The athletes who journal get better at a faster rate and therefore perform better more quickly. This also makes the process more fun and also allows for you to compete at higher levels if you so desire.