Choosing the Right Goals

Why do you play golf? Pause, and think about that. And don’t stop at your first answer. While this question seems easy to answer, for most individuals it is not. Knowing why you play should help you set goals.

What are your current strengths and weaknesses? What would you like to work on improving? We don’t have to consistently target our biggest weakness, nor the ‘most important’ thing. The goal is to be successful with the goals.

Good Goals

Goals that we are in control of are better than externally constrained goals. An extrinsic goal is to ‘win the amateur tournament.’ While not exactly a bad goal, there are a lot of factors outside of your control. Either reframe the goal to something more internal, like ‘make the cut’ or temper this goal with supporting goals that are intrinsic–within your control, such as:

• Increase bunker save rate
• Work on long distance putting
• Improve focus in noisy environments

We only control our performance. A goal that relies on you outperforming a playing field is less controllable. Preparing to show up with your best game and ready for the tournament specific challenges you are in control of. As with most things in life, focusing on the doing and not the outcome is the best way to achieve an outcome. Stay in the moment. This is why learning, or process, goals are better than performance, or outcome, goals. The best way isn’t to score lower, it is to improve your weaknesses.

Goal Gap

If you have immediate goals and long-term high-level goals, what are your mid-term goals? Do you need them? Finding the right mix of goals will vary depending on your level of motivation and your personality. Generally, we want a couple goals in long/mid/short term timeframes.

Having one large goal with a set of supporting goals is more effective than having just one goal. It makes your practice more fault tolerant. If you skip a practice session, but were successful with another supporting goal, you are less likely to beat yourself up which is more likely to keep you on track with your goals.

Diets are a great example. There’s a lot of reasons diets are largely unsuccessful, but looking at just goal setting, one of them is if a person has a single goal of ‘lose weight,’ it’s tough to stick with that. It is high-level with a single evaluation point. If you have an off day, it becomes easier to cheat. You cheat a little, then a little more, then you’re a failure so you may as well go fully off the rails (known as the what-the-hell effect).

However, if your goal of weight loss as a part of a bigger goal, such as losing weight and cardio training so that you can compete in speed golf… Well, a few extra calories one day that you did your cardio on is seen as a smaller transgression. You have a set of goals that allows for you to see success, instead of focusing on a binary ruling of pass/fail.

The Limits

We do not want to be too reliant on goals. We need to recognize that extrinsic goals are likely to lead to inconsistent effort (if you want a rabbit hole about Self-Determination Theory check out Intrinsic Motivation and Self-Determination in Human Behavior, Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (1985)). This makes sense; we should focus on things that are within our control to stay motivated. We should also experiment with goals to see how they work to keep us engaged.

If you already have a growth mindset and/or are highly motivated, goals may not be as useful to you. Generally, the less motivated you are, the more that goals stand to help. But do so with a defense in depth approach; make it easier for every day to be successful.

In addition to motivation, goals are a mechanism to inform us of what to focus on. The less we need to think about what to do, the easier it is to get started.

The more proficient a golfer you are, the more that goals stand to help. As a beginner, most anything we do will help us improve. As the years of experience build, it is hard to break the habits and really push for change. This is where goals can shine–you may not be working on anything completely new, but the structure makes it easier to know what to do for the results you want.

Summary

Goals are a tool and not a complete answer to improvement. For how to define and structure them–SMART criteria, major goals, supporting goals, and the tasks under them–see Setting Goals. They do not guarantee success but can help you stay on course. The trick is to set goals that keep you motivated to keep practicing/playing/learning. The outcome is almost a byproduct of a well-defined goal. We need to keep ourselves challenged, but towards outcomes we can reasonably achieve with consistent effort.