The importance of setting goals in Sports Psychology

To achieve good results, adequate preparation is essential.

Goal setting is a strategy that helps to control important psychological aspects that affect an athlete's performance, such as attentional control, self-confidence or motivation. that affect an athlete's performance such as attentional control, self-confidence or motivation. Setting realistic but ambitious goals is one of the basic methodological keys in Sport Psychology.

To do this, and taking into account the season, training sessions or matches, the coach must decide which are the objectives that the athletes will have to achieve, individually and collectively.individually and collectively. If the objectives are realistic, specific, measurable, attainable and achieved within a given time, they will bring many benefits to the athletes and the team.

Setting clear objectives

The objectives point the way forward for the work of the coach and athletes. When clear objectives are not set or the goal is too high, both motivation and self-confidence are affected. Therefore, a good goal setting helps to enhance many psychological aspects and sets the direction in which efforts should be directed.

In addition, setting goals also allows to evaluate the sporting progress and allows changes to be made when expectations are not met.

Types of objectives: result objectives and achievement objectives

In order to set seasonal or match objectives, the coach (or, better yet, the sports psychologist) must differentiate between achievement objectives y performance objectives.

1. Performance objectives

Outcome objectives refer to collective and individual collective and individual results The goal to be achieved, e.g., winning the league, getting more points, etc.

2. Achievement objectives

Achievement objectives refer to the individual and collective behaviors that the individual and collective behaviors that athletes must perform in order to achieve the desired results. to achieve the desired results. For example, improving counter-attacking, mastering one-touch passing or shooting more shots from different positions.

Outcome objectives are more useful to increase the interest of the athletes, but performance objectives are more effective so that athletes can perceive that they are in control of the situation they are facing. Both types of objectives help to define the direction to be followed by the coach and the athletes.

Benefits of performance objectives

Accomplishment goals have certain benefits. The most important of these are listed below:

• They allow athletes to establish beneficial contingencies between their own behavior and the results.
• They accentuate and reinforce the behavior of the athletes more than the consequences of what they do, which do not depend so much on them.
• They allow a more realistic assessment of the feasibility of the objectives.
• They encourage athletes to focus on their own behavior, adopting a more productive and rewarding style of functioning.
• They allow the evaluation of performance in a simple and effective way.
• They promote self-confidence, alertness and motivation of athletes.

Characteristics of effective goals

For objectives to be effective they need to meet certain requirementsThey can be detrimental if they do not meet certain criteria.

For example, if the coach sets goals that are too ambitious and unattainable, it will cause the athletes' self-confidence to be negatively affected. To avoid this, the following are a series of characteristics of effective objectives:

• Final and intermediate objectives should be defined and a time frame for achieving them should be set.
• Objectives must be specific and very well defined.
• Objectives should be attractive, but also realistic
• Objectives should be challenging, but at the same time require a proportionate cost to achieve them
• In team sports, collective and individual objectives should be set.