As we head into girl’s high school season, I want to share the concept of process or action goals compared to results goals.  Results are what we tend to look at religiously in swimming. It’s an easy metric. It’s time. It’s steady, continuous, and precise. We measure it down to the hundredth of a second, which if you’ve ever tried to see how fast you can start and stop a stopwatch, you know is a ridiculously small amount of time.Â
Result goals are easy targets for us because of the ability to measure them, but the downside is that we become fixated on them and every step of the way we are measuring our performance to that goal. Due to that fixation, we don’t spend nearly enough time thinking about all the decisions we make and actions we take that contribute to whatever that result was. We also don’t acknowledge the countless variables that are involved, some uncontrollable, that also contribute to that result.
I’ve found over the years that when most of the attention and subsequent goals are placed on the process and your daily actions, the result is much more likely to just happen. I’ve also found these types of goals help you develop some important life skills that will stay with you long past when your competition days in the pool are done.
Let me share some examples of process or action goals you can adopt that will have a positive impact on your swimming and your personal growth.
- Learn to communicate with your coach: You will get the most out of your practices and meets when you learn to develop bi-directional communication with your coaches. Communication should be a two way street in athletics and being able to articulate your thoughts, your questions, your goals, and really, just how you are feeling about things in a productive manner goes a long way.
- Learn how to manage the mental switch: As athletes, a lot of us are wired to focus on our sport constantly or for some of us not at all. Learning how to focus on your school during school and then putting that away and focusing on swimming during practice is a skill. Self-talk, physical and mental cues, and routines can help with this. Learn what works for you and try to master where your mind is.
- Catch people doing things right: A great leadership skill is learning how to recognize others. You have no idea the positive impact you can have on a person by just taking a minute to point out something they did well. In swimming, we are constantly being told what we need to work on. And what we can do better. One moment of positive reinforcement makes up for a lot of the other ones.
- Think food!: Think about what you eat before and after practice and before, during and after meets. Food is an invaluable part of performance. It’s fuel, it helps rebuild, and it helps recover. Being conscious and deliberate in making sure you are getting food in you before and after goes a long way. You gotta eat.
- Build confidence: Everyday, after every practice, tell yourself one or two things you did well that day. There are things every day you do well. We are just wired to focus on the things we don’t do well. Even on days where you feel like a weighted pontoon in a lake of molasses, you can still find something positive. I would go with focusing on having the best streamlines, or the hardest pushes off the wall when everything else was garbage.
There are countless more you can come up with around the way you approach practice, how you deal with setbacks, or how you relate to others. Put some thought into it, make them your own and place focus there. You’ll be surprised how much easier it is to obtain those results goals when you focus on the process and your actions.