GOLD MEDAL GOALS: The difference between goals that can help and goals that can harm.

By Joanne Love

Do you ever set goals you never achieve?

Have you ever looked back on past attempts to achieve something and ended up beating yourself up over the fact that you didn't achieve it? It's not because of a lack of time, energy or skills; It's because you have never been shown the way.

Gold Medal Goals will unleash your greatness within. You don't ha

• Language: English
• Publisher: Proactive Performance Australia
• Release date: Nov 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9780994405845

Joanne Love

For over 30 years, Joanne Love's coaching methods have influenced Australia's leading athletes, coaches and teams. Joanne represented Australia in the 2008 Beijing Paralympics as a swim coach; she has also coached a number of Olympic medallists and world record holders. Just recently she has worked with the British Athletic's team in the lead up to the 2016 Rio Olympics. Joanne is also a trained psychologist and her unique outlook draws upon years of educational knowledge, her ability to create successful outcomes and her psychological training. She knows how to inspire athletes to maximise their performance.

Book preview

Introduction

My brother had a little white mouse in a beautiful cage with a yellow spinning wheel when I was growing up. I would love to watch it run around and around on the wheel. First, it would run fast, and then it would slow down to a walk. But after watching this for weeks on end, I started to feel upset. I wondered how it felt about not making any progress. It wasn't running anywhere. How could it repeat this pattern continually? Was I feeling bitter about going nowhere?

Do you ever feel like you're on that spinning wheel, unable to make progress? When you're working hard and getting very little from your efforts, you're probably wondering what you are doing wrong. It was a pattern I saw repeated when I started my Swim Coaching career. Athletes who were frustrated, expressing devastation over what had occurred and for most left suffering.

I am sure you've experienced the feeling of frustration when you can't do something soon enough, even with all your efforts. Frustration creates stress - it can make us feel stuck, cause us to get uptight, and create difficulty focusing on specific tasks at hand. It feels terrible! I can't think of any better way to describe that feeling other than AAARRGGHH!! But long term, what was the damage?

What was the common denominator – their GOALS. Poorly made, vague, and on occasion, obviously influenced by others.

Now I am on a mission to correct those wrongs. I've witnessed the impact these poorly constructed goals have caused. I saw athletes with wishy-washy goals who were left shattered after events. Even after achieving a personal best, they were upset, classifying these performances as bad because they genuinely didn't know what they wanted.  Or those athletes who had fantastic performances but were still confused about how it even happened, creating anxious thoughts of whether they could do it again.  Yet, those with clearly defined goals were more reflective and had the ability to reset and move forward. Even when they didn't achieve what they wanted, they were happier.

Observing this roller coaster of emotions caused by goals led to my research. With the rise in mental health issues in sport, this is an important area that needs to be addressed. I needed to understand if what I was witnessing was impacting mental health. So, I investigated the link between goals and mental health. The results were conclusive - poorly set goals do impact your mental health. This has implications not just for athletes but everyone from school students through to those creating retirement plans. While my research started with athletes, I have expanded this research with everyday people, corporate, entrepreneurs, school students, basically, anyone who wants to achieve their dreams. Since starting this study, over a thousand people have completed our quiz, and it continues to grow.  

Everyone wants to be a success, no matter how you define it. Success can be wealth, a job title, your happiness or even your health. But when you're thirsty for success, you tend to act like those mice running on that spinning wheel. All your energy goes flying in every direction from the spinning wheel, but very little of it goes where it needs.

If you're feeling like that, then this book is for you. It's important that you love this life of yours, do the things that make you happy and dream big. It's the first step to building a great relationship with yourself and fostering positive wellbeing. After all, no one likes feeling frustrated and depressed every day. But sometimes, it's easy to get lost in the excitement of these dreams. If you expect your dreams to fall into your lap, you are wrong. Because your constant lack of achievement will drag you down and cause havoc in every aspect of your life. Soon enough, building into anxiety and distress. Ongoing failure will leave you confused and devastated, opening doors to mental health issues.

Successful people aren't superhumans, but they know what they want and work to achieve it. They are successful because they have clear, concise, and desired goals that promote happiness, pride, and positive mental health.

If you are unsure how good your goals are, take the test http://bit.ly/goalsindicator.

My experience in sport is extensive, but when I couldn't understand an athletes psychological issues, I went back to university to study psychology. A competitive swimmer myself, in 1980, I missed out on the Moscow Olympic Team selection, but this opened the door to my coaching career. My greatest achievement was being selected as a coach on the Beijing Paralympic team and coaching gold medalists swimmer Sam Bramham. And now, I work with people from all walks of life to improve their performance using better goal-setting methods.

Would you like to see your goals come to fruition? 

You can create your own 'gold medal' goal. Gather those dreams and envision your ultimate goal because you will go on one hell of a ride. This book will help you find that goal that makes your hearts beat faster, and your adrenaline levels rush. Learn how to craft your goal, so it becomes a 'gold medal' reality.  And rest assured, your mental health will be protected all along the journey. 

Part One

The Destructive Opponent

Don’t take it lightly, don’t underestimate their power.

It is not a foregone conclusion – because that is when the unexpected happens, and you give away your mental edge.

Your opponent has nothing to lose – If you go down, desperation sets in. Unfortunately, panic causes even more mistakes than usual.

Have you given your goal the respect it deserves?

1

The Impact of Ineffective Goals

Introduction

A scream came from across the room. Amanda's husband was concerned, worried about her strange behaviour. Amanda, a young entrepreneur, worked hard, but her mood was increasingly standoffish and challenging. Amanda's scream was one borne out of frustration. She was ready to swipe her computer to the floor and all the books surrounding her. She was sick of feeling sad and guilty. Guilt and shame that she'd let her family down. More money was going out than coming in. These pervasive feelings were becoming gradually darker; she knew she needed help. And this was the moment where she said, No more.

Enough was enough, and she reached out for my help. Before our phone call, we had exchanged a few emails and calls. She often asked the odd question looking for guidance, but not much more. I watched her from afar, often mesmerised by all the work she was seemingly doing. And our paths would cross at the odd conference, wherein the quick catchup I'd hear about all the courses and activities she was undertaking to improve her skills. But this call was different; this time, she truly needed help. Amanda was a mess, depressed and overwhelmed, but not overwhelmed by her workload, but by not knowing what she was doing or where she was headed. Her exact words to me were that she felt like she was in a fog. Amanda was doing so many things but had no idea of what she truly wanted to do. She had lots of ideas, but that is where it stopped. Consistently, she felt like she was only ever scratching the surface. In reality, Amanda had only ineffective goals.

What was great about Amanda; she wasn't frightened to have a go. She had more daring than anyone I knew. In her words, she was always dreaming but never applying herself, and now she recognised her constant excuses. For example, I need to train. I need to upskill before I can go any further, were a means she used to console herself for the lack of progress.  The multitude of unnecessary things was causing the overwhelm, not her actual workload because she had none.

Do you want to live through hours, days, even years of wasted time?

Ineffective goals based on unclear decisions with no planning can affect your health, safety, relationships, and overall wellbeing. Your life is a sum of the choices and decisions you make. The traditional definition of choice means the right, the power or the opportunity to choose between different options. Choices made today can create and change our future. Wise choices generate wonderful enjoyable experiences and things. Unwise choice can leave you unhappy or unfulfilled because it doesn't suit your needs. These choices are your future goals and, ultimately, the life you want

Did you know that on average, 27,375 Days is all you get? That is the average number of days a person lives.

If you are a little older, you could have less than half left. So how can you make every day count? With all the doom and gloom of Covid, each day now seems blended together. It leaves us feeling demoralised. These are days you can't get back.

But YOU have a choice. All you need to do is take charge and make the most of each day by creating the most effective goals you can. So you can live with purpose and implement what you want. Then even when tough challenges occur, you will be surprised by the resilience you possess.

It might seem frightening to focus on what looks so far out of our reach. Or those secret desires and goals that get overridden by family and peers, 'to protect us'. Or friends leave us hanging by agreeing rather than speaking the truth and calling us out.

But suppose we remove this clutter and the overwhelming myriad of choices that beat us down. Then, you have a greater chance of achieving – the goals you genuinely desire. The overload of choice is like trying to find our way across an ocean, with the fog obscuring our view. This fog makes us disengage; it all becomes too hard. So we pick the easiest option, but not necessarily the one we want. We start questioning ourselves, Why am I here? What am I doing? And then we opt not to do anything at all. But if we can control our choices, we can find the freedom that we want. And if we know what we want and why – that fog will clear, and a speedier and more precise path will open up.

Through my research, it was found that people with Effective Goals, those who have a laser focus, are influenced by their values and know what they stand for, have better wellbeing than those who have ineffective goals, like Amanda. Amanda had goals, but only wishy-washy ones at best. There was no focus, hence why she was confused and overloaded. And if the symptoms she was feeling were left long-term, it would eventually affect her wellbeing more than she was currently feeling. And even lead to mental health issues. So if we want to stay mentally healthy, our choices and goals become very important.

In my past work with elite athletes, I could easily attribute one of the leading unhappiness issues to a lack of, or poorly planned goals. So, for example, when an athlete performed well and achieved a personal best, it was typical for them to be unhappy or even angry.

Then, when asked why they weren't happy, the most common answer was, It wasn't good enough.

Pushing them further, I'd ask, Why wasn't it good enough?

This would produce a shrug of the shoulders, tears or a show of frustration. These athletes could never articulate why or what they were trying to achieve; nothing would be good enough because there was no clarity with their goal.

Constantly dealing with these sad and angry athletes was the primary reason I conducted this research with Monash University. Even though the main study is finished, my research is still ongoing. In addition, the goal-setting questionnaire developed from this research continues to show new insights.

But it wasn't only athletes I saw with poor goal setting, but an ailment affecting many. And hence why I have written this book. To help everyday people learn and apply the necessary components of Effective Goal Setting with some additional mindset hacks to keep you on track.

The first part of this book will focus on your purpose in life to set