Is Your Goal Setting Strategy Off Target? As In Soccer, The Right Game Plan Wins

Anyone who starts a business knows the importance of goal setting. It provides direction and focus, boosts motivation, enables performance tracking and promotes accountability.

My journey from English soccer coach to building a multi-million-dollar sports company in the U.S taught me a lot about goal-setting — about what to do and what not to do. Some entrepreneurs get their goal setting wrong and set themselves up for failure by making these mistakes:

• Setting unrealistic goals — Shooting for targets that are beyond reasonable can lead to increased stress and burnout for both the entrepreneur and their team. Pursuing objectives that ignore market realities or resource constraints can consume valuable assets that could be better allocated to more feasible opportunities.
• Setting vague goals — For example, listing “increase growth” as a goal without specifics lacks measurables and context. Entrepreneurs without clear goals are more apt to be disorganized, make poor decisions, and get sidetracked.
• Ignoring the purpose — Not having a “why” behind the goal leads to setting goals that don’t align with your values or the overall business strategy.
• Focusing on outcomes over processes — Entrepreneurs can get so caught up in the end result that they neglect the habits, systems, and daily grind required to get there. Setting a goal without breaking it down into daily or weekly action steps leaves you without a clear path forward.
• Becoming too rigid — Sometimes due to in-house or market factors it’s necessary to adjust a goal downward. But a rigid adherence to the initial plan can lead to tunnel vision, making the business unable to adapt.

It’s amazing what clear goals can do for you. Whether it’s mounting an almost unbelievable comeback in a soccer match or hitting a new sales record, having the correct destination in mind is a huge part of getting there.

The opposite is also true. If you don’t know where you want to go, you can end up putting a lot of effort into going in the wrong direction.

To avoid wasting your time, there’s a simple process you can use to figure out where you want to go and the steps necessary to get there. With that game plan in place, it becomes far easier to start making consistent progress.

Visualize all of your goals, starting with the aspirational ones  

With the visualization approach, ask yourself: What would your life look like if you could wave a magic wand and have whatever you wanted? No restrictions, no limitations.

I like to think of this as a “what if” exercise. “What if I could retire at fifty?” “What if I could buy that beach house?” “What if I could start my own company?” “What if I could have that big family?”

Thinking like this can feel unnatural sometimes. It can seem childish. Why waste time daydreaming? But there’s evidence that visualizing helps your brain subconsciously seek out ways to achieve what you want.

Soccer players have been employing visualization techniques for generations. The legendary Wayne Rooney used to use an old Pelé trick to get the upper hand before a game. He’d ask the kit man the day before the match what color United and the opposition would be playing in. That night, he’d go home and visualize tearing the defense apart — in detail, using the colors he knew both teams would be wearing. The exercise clearly worked for him.

Your brain can do the same thing with opportunities to lead you toward your goals — if you give it clarity on the direction you want to go. Let’s imagine you’re setting up your ideal life as your starting eleven in a soccer match. We’ll play a straightforward 4-3-3 formation.

• Forward line — What you want for your body and mind — physical, mental, and emotional goals.
• Midfield — This covers goals related to your family, personal life, and friendships.
• Defense — Consider the things that strengthen your foundation and stability. That’s what you want in your professional, spiritual, community, and financial life.

Create your plan: Define your steps and timelines   

With a vision of where you want to go in place, all you have to do is plot the steps to get there. You can discover these steps simply by continuing to shrink the timeline on all of your goals. What do you need to do in the next year to be on track for each of your three-year goals? What do you have to do each quarter to hit one-year targets? What about each month? And each week? And each day?

When you feel ready to take your planning to a higher level, it’s time for you to break out your weekly planner. This holds the important information about your weekly actionable tasks and how to get stuff done. I actually print 52 of them the first week of January so there is never an excuse to skip planning my week.

My weekly planner (available on my website) goes like this. On the left-hand column, list the areas in your life that you have responsibilities for and require action each week. Let’s call these “roles.” Make sure there are no more than seven roles — typically five is the norm. These should be both work and personal responsibilities, as the weekly planner ensures balance through your work/personal life.

Then I write the three tasks per role I need to achieve for the upcoming week based on my monthly goals. Once this is filled out, there are three more planning steps:

• I add into the daily section of the weekly planner the non-negotiable, time-sensitive appointments or commitments I can’t skip.
• Then I add my workouts for the week.
• I set the 21 tasks (three tasks for each of the seven roles) that I have committed to into time-specific blocks.

And there you have it. Your weekly planner is complete, and you are ready to smash your week!

Time to perform  

Execution is often frustrating in soccer. A manager can only do so much. They choose the team, and they train the team. But once the game starts, it’s on the players to perform.

But there’s still a lot that they can control. If a team practices regularly on aspects of the game where they need to improve, they usually will improve and be prepared for all of those game situations.

That’s your aim here: You want to create a situation in which the only option is to execute on your plan, to take away all your excuses so the only option is the hard work that leads to success.

By having a plan written out and scheduled down to the half hour, you remind yourself what you have to do and why you’re doing it. That makes it much easier to remain motivated and to complete the work consistently.

By using this method, you don’t even need to remain motivated or remind yourself why you are doing it. You already did that in the planning. Now you just have to show up and do the work.

Written by Ciarán McArdle.