Standards and goal setting

[rory]

[Cross-posted from fencingforum.com, where I haven't had much response]

I've been doing my reading recently on the subject of setting standards for myself, and setting goals.

I've been reading "Slaying the Dragon" by Michael Johnson, which discusses using a highly goal oriented process to achieve success, and I've just read this excellent article.

Who here has defined goals and a process that you've designed to achieve them? And can you share or are they trade secrets?

[parrythis]

In order to be worthwhile, goals need to both stretch your abilities, yet be achievable. Setting the goal properly is as important to the process as working to achieve it is.

This has been discussed around our salle a bit. For me, goal setting is not about winning medals, or earning ratings. It's about making measurable progress. The way I measure my progress is by attending tournaments. I compare my results at a particular tournament with how I did in the same tournament in previous years. As long as I keep improving (on average, discounting the odd "off" day) I am achieving my goal.

[MyrddinsPrecint]

At the begining of the season, I set outcome goals and process goals.

Outcome goals are the easiest-- They end up being things like "I want to make individuals at USACFCs".

Process goals are more important, and much harder to set AND much harder to determine if you've acheived them. They'll be things like "I want to work on footwork more at school", and "I want to focus more on individual actions when fencing my team at school, rather than winning"......... Or, especially, "I want to work on getting power out of my back leg, instead of dragging it."



Intrinsic Motivation is the best thing available, and process goals work better in conjunction with intrinsic motivation.



There's a LOT of literature on goal setting. Just... not so much in fencing.

Although there've been a couple of threads on fencing sports psychology, some of them even include references to books and PDF files about fencing specific sports psych--- search and check them out!