Goal setting, the process through which participants and coaches identify their purpose and current priorities and decide on their course of action, has received a lot of attention from coaches and researchers.
That’s not a surprise: it’s been shown that having goals improves performance.
According to the goal-setting theory (Locke and Latham 2013), there are four ways that setting goals enhances performance:
- Having a goal can help a participant focus their attention on actions to achieve the task.
- Goals embolden participants to invest effort into their pursuit of them.
- Goals influence persistence and the amount of energy invested over time.
- Goals encourage the development of new strategies that can help with goal achievement.
Goal setting, however, doesn’t just involve coming up with a goal. (For more on this, read our guide, The Art of Goal Setting.
There are a number of additional factors to consider when setting goals, including;
- goal difficulty (easy goals vs difficult goals)
- goal specificity (specific goals vs non-specific goals)
- goal proximity (short-term goals vs long-term goals)
- goal source (self-set goals vs assigned goals)
- goal type (process, performance, and outcome goals).