Brain in the Game | Sport Mind Coaching Podcast
Dave Diggle
Episode One – Setting and Achieving Goals
Hello and welcome to the very first ever episode of our new podcast called Brain in the Game. My name’s Dave Diggle, and I’m going to be your guide on this really exciting journey we’re going to look at the mental aspect of elite sport. Traditionally, we’re all very aware of the physical coaches out there, the guys who work with the bodies of these athletes. As a mind coach, what I do is I focus on the brain and the cognitive area of the athletes, working with them on their strategies and their structures and their emotional welfare.
So the Brain in the Game is a podcast I’ve designed specifically for these athletes, the coaches and the parents to better understand and unpack what it takes to make an elite athlete. Each episode we’re going to look at a different aspect of sport, but we’re going to look at it from the mind perspective, we’re going to have interviews with some of the top athletes around and ask them what’s working for them and what doesn’t work; what they’ve tried in the past and what they’re looking at doing in the future. We’re going to talk to their coaches and try and get a better understanding of the changing face of professional coaching. We’re going to talk to their parents and understand the dynamic of having a child who is an elite athlete. We’re also going to look at some of the professional sporting groups that support these athletes such as chiropractors, oxygen therapists. We’re going to look at the biomechanics and understand the different dynamics of the integration of those in professional sport.
But before we jump into our first episode, you’re probably wondering “Who the hell am I listening to?” Well, my name’s Dave Diggle and I’m a professional mind coach. I’m the founder of the Smart Mind Institute. We work with elite athletes all round the world from different sports on their mental game. I’m a former British international gymnast myself. So - enough about me, I want to get into some of the meat of our very first ever podcast.
I want to talk to you today about setting goals, understanding how we utilise goals and maybe how we don’t utilise them well enough. When your athlete steps foot onto the pitch, on the track, on a court or on an ice rink, what specifically are you asking them to do?
• What is the outcome for them?
• Do they know?
• Do you know?
If we don’t know what the outcome is or what the goal is, then these athletes have very, very little chance of creating a really effective plan, and if they have no plan they have no accountability and if they have no accountability there’s no sustainability. Athletes such as Roger Federer, Tiger Woods and Michael Phelps, are very, very clear about their objective when they go out to compete. It’s not just a media polished outcome that they’ve created to tell the media, they know specifically in their head, when they step out in to their arena they know exactly what the game plan is, they know exactly what the end objective is for them that day. Not only do they know about that day, they know about the bigger picture too, so it’s this ability to set a very, very clear and precise goal that enables them to be able to replicate and sustain their training.
We all set goals or we all try to set goals, some of them we achieve; some of them we come close to achieving; some we clearly just miss; and others are just really epic mistakes. Setting goals is part of what makes us, as a human race, want to be better, to grow and to thrive, so it’s natural for us to set a goal.
What we don’t do, or we don’t do very well, is set a really good goal or a structure towards that goal. Did you know that less than 20% of people who set goals actually achieve that goal they set out to achieve in its original context or format? Most of them, or most of us, change the goal posts, change the outcome or we settle for something slightly less than what we wanted, just so that we can say “Yeah, we achieved it” but that really doesn’t give us what we want or what we set out to achieve and it doesn’t really make us feel like we’ve achieved.
Goals are a really important aspect to make a champion. When we look at some of the best athletes around the world, these are the ones that are striving for very, very specific outcomes. But goals really are just part of a much bigger picture. As an athlete we’re rarely taught how to set goals, let alone how to set a path and a structure around that goal to make it achievable, to make it motivating and to make it sustainable. There’s three really key aspects to creating this structure, this structure of success, that’s:
• The reason;
• The mechanism; and
• The system.
When I first work with athletes, one of the most important things I sit down with them and do is try and understand what their big picture is; where they’re going; why they got into the sport; why they got into that aspect of competition.
I often sit down and I speak to the coaches before I speak to the athletes and I’ll ask “When you’re working with this athlete or when you’re working with this team, what’s their objective?” and 99.9% of the time I hear the coach’s objective. I hear what the coach thinks that athlete or that team are striving for, and if the two aren’t the same then the path’s not going to be the same, the structure’s not going to be the same. So it’s important, as a coach, to sit down and understand:
Where are your athletes going?
• What is their big dream?
• What is their end objective?
• When they finish their career, what was it they were going for?
So when we think about this reason, the mechanism and the system, our emotions provide the reason; our stimulation maintains the mechanism; and it’s the patterns that we follow that dictate the system.
So that’s how it works in our brain, that’s the hard wiring, if you like, to how we get to an objective, from A to B. When we look at that from a coaching perspective, whether it be a physical coach or whether it be a mind coach, we need to be able to manipulate that, we need to be able to make that so individual for the athlete that it fits like a glove for them, it makes their strive and their journey perfect.
So how do we make that work? Well as I said, the first thing I need to do is understand the athlete, understand what they’re trying to do. So I sit down with them and I ask them “What’s working? What are you doing already that really does work? How did you get to where you’ve got so far? There must be something you’re doing that is efficient” because
1) we don’t want to change what’s working, but
2) we need to understand that cognitive process that they go through to create sustainability, to create success.
Then I ask them “What isn’t working? What aspect of your programme that you’re currently doing, of your behaviour, of your training, isn’t working, isn’t firing?” because if we understand what does work and then we understand what doesn’t work, it could be quite a simple fix and we need to take the strategy they have for what works and apply it to what’s not working.
The other aspect to that is, do we need to change it? Is it not working because it’s broken? Or is it not working because it’s just not efficient? Or is it not working because it’s not tailored to you? Have you adopted a strategy that was your coach’s strategy? I know when I first started coaching I coached how my coach coached me. Now, as time went on and as I became probably a more effective coach I added my own flavour, my own spices to how I coached. I worked out what worked for me, I worked out what worked for my athletes and as much as it started off as the same as my coach coached me, it morphed into more ME. But when I first started, it was purely and simply a carbon copy of how my coach, Mitch, coached me. And so when we look at these athletes, they take on what we tell them to take on, they take on our strategies, our beliefs, our systems, and sometimes, and probably more frequently than we like to admit, those strategies and systems aren’t tailored specifically for those athletes. What we need to do is tailor, is make it so effective and efficient that it works first time, every time.
So once I’ve understood what’s working, I’ve understood what’s not working, and I’ve made a mental note in my mind about what needs to change in order to make it effective, then I need to sit down and understand where they’re going; what’s the end objective for them. And part and parcel of that process is getting the athlete to tell me their goals; their objective; where they want to go; what’s going to make it a worthwhile journey for them. Because I’m not necessarily after the end step, what I’m after is the emotion. What I’m looking for is the driver, what makes this athlete get out of bed at five in the morning, like Phelps, and go and follow that black line through the pool, mile after mile, every single day after day, seven days a week; what makes that athlete get into the water and swim lap to lap after lap? There has to be an emotional driver, there has to be that main reason to do what they do.
Once we understand what drives them, what their end objective is, what their big picture step is, we then need to create the structure around that, the stepping stones towards that.
Part of the three main steps was the reasons, so we understand the emotion behind the reason. The next step is the mechanism. What makes that sustainable? How do you go from being a teenage athlete to being a world champion, being an Olympic champion? I know sitting here and thinking about that concept is that’s a long way to go, that’s a massive big step you’ve got to follow. That’s something that’s now going to need to be maintained every single day. If you think about this like a car journey: when we get into the car and we know we’ve got six, maybe eight, or maybe 12 hours of a journey in front of us - and I live in Australia, so that’s an average journey, going to the shops is six hours - but when you get into a car and you’re going on that big long journey and you don’t think about “Where am I going to fuel up? I’ve only got a tank of fuel that’s going to get me a third of the way, I need to plan. I need to make sure that I can feed my vehicle often enough to make sure I get to my end objective” They’re the stepping stones, they’re the structure around the big trip. If we think about that in the same context for these athletes, it’s a big journey, we need to plan where they get fed; we need to make sure that their emotions, their motivation and the structure feeds them. How we do that is the mechanism, what fires them, what feeds them, and that is achieving goals.
Traditionally goal setting has always been in the realm of sports as something that is paramount, but realistically it’s something that we don’t pay enough attention to, we don’t really craft our goals to be successes. Often when I speak to athletes for the first time, I’ll say “What’s your goal? What is the next goal for you?” and it’s such a faraway goal or it’s such a grandiose goal that realistically I know they’re either not going to make the journey, or they’re not going to reach that height. And if we don’t reach that height or we don’t make that journey, then we don’t get rewarded, so the goal becomes null and void, it becomes a failure, and it impacts on our ability to fill and to utilise confidence.
Confidence - I’m often asked to work with athletes on confidence issues, and my whole philosophy around confidence is it’s just a history of success. It’s a history of points of hitting success points and that we feel so good about it, that we reward ourselves, that we feel confident. If we set ourselves up to be confident, to be successful, then the journey we go on becomes a very, very enjoyable trip. If we don’t, if we spend the whole time slogging our way through that never really reaching our goals, never really rewarding ourselves, then that journey just becomes hard work and it gives us the opportunity to bail out at some point. When the going gets tough, when we go through injuries, when we hit competition periods where maybe we’re not performing as we know we should, then it gives us the opportunity to go “You know what? This is just too difficult, I’m out of here”.
So setting effective and efficient goals is paramount to keep us on track, to keep us motivated. When we hit that emotion of our objective, we have a chemical that gets released in our brain called dopamine. That’s the chaser, that’s the hunter, that’s the anticipation, the excitement of “I know where I’m going and I’m heading in that direction and I’m feeling really good about going there. I know what I want” and that’s exactly what dopamine does in our body, it keeps that fire burning. That’s important to motivate us, but what keeps us going is hitting the rewards, the serotonin dump that comes in our brain, the second chemical. When we hit our goals, when we set a goal as an athlete “You know what? I’m going to go 3km a day in the pool and I’m going to knock five seconds of my time”. When you hit that goal and that serotonin releases into your body and you feel great, then the pain of that 3km dissipates and you’re good to get back in the pool the next day and say “I want to do this again”. That is a drug that goes into your body that is great, it’s one of the most motivating and sustainable, self-medicating drugs that we have. Utilising that is paramount if we want to create these sustainable, elite athletes.
So what do you do as a coach or what do you do as an athlete to set yourself up for success? How do you create that confidence, that motivation? How do you make that something that’s sustainable to keep that momentum, create that big drive forward? Again, when we think about Phelps, when he gets in the pool at 5am seven days a week, what motivates him? When does he set his goals? Are they daily goals? Are they session goals? I’m assuming, because of the drive this athlete has, he will be setting very frequent, very achievable goals, just pushing the envelope each and every time to create that momentum. And the same with Tiger Woods, he still gets out of bed at dawn every single day to hit hundreds if not thousands of shots, yet he’s one of the most successful golfers on the circuit. On the flip side of that, when we fire our firing pin being the mechanism, being these success points, the reward, the hitting of the goals and that serotonin; that is what gets us out of bed the next day. That is what gets us through the tough times and as a coach we need to make sure there are so many goals that it overwhelms us, the success overwhelms us, it drives us forwards.
So we’ve talked about the two aspects here. We’ve talked about the emotion and the reason and we’ve talked about the mechanism and the rewards, the goals. So that leaves us the system.
So let me walk you through my system, the Smart Mind Institute system. I created this blueprint that we give to our athletes, it’s called a decision matrix and the whole concept behind this decision matrix is to create a sustainable and replicable pattern. Because that is exactly what the system is, it’s our patterns; it’s what we do each and every time to get a specific outcome, a specific result.
So when we start with this decision matrix we start with the objective, and what we’re after here is to get the emotion so we can create the drive forward, the big end objective. Once we have that end objective and we have the emotion wrapped around that, we have the driver, the reason to do it to sustain this whole process. I then sit down with the athlete and I say “Okay, once we’ve got this end objective, what’s the one thing that has to happen right before you get your end objective?” So if your end objective is to go to the Olympic games what’s the one final step before you represent your country in the Olympic games? Is it putting on the blazer? Is it walking around the opening ceremony? Is it landing in the host city? What is it for you, what is that final step before you say to yourself “Yeah, I’m there I’ve reached my end objective”. Is it actually the competition itself? That’s the final goal, the goal before you reach your objective.
And then we work backwards, we work backwards from that final step, what has to happen before that final step? What’s the step before that final step? And then we work all the way back, right until the now. Now, you’re probably asking yourself “Why on earth would we work backwards?” Well the reason we work backwards is because if I asked you to stand here today after watching the London 2012 Olympics and say “Right, your next objective is Brazil” that’s four years away, that’s a long way away. Alot can happen in four years. Lots of interruptions and hurdles and deviations can occur that can take you off your chosen path. The pattern that you create can easily be disrupted. If you didn’t have the accountability, if you didn’t have the structure to keep you on track - the GPS, if you like - then it’d be very, very easy to get lost. So we work backwards: we start with the objective and then the next step is the last goal before we reach our objective, and we work all the way back to now. Once we’ve done that and we have that, we can see exactly the stepping stones all the way to our objective. We can tweak them, we can make sure that each one filters into the next one, so each one feeds the next one, making sure that they’re sequential.
The final step to that, when we create the stepping stones is the action steps. How do we go from one goal to the next goal? What do we need to do? These are called action steps. Again, this is a very, very measurable step. If we turn round and say “You know what? I need to feel confident” that’s an emotion; emotions are very, very difficult to measure. One of the things that I speak about very frequently when I’m working with clients is if we don’t measure what we’re doing we can’t change or replicate it. We then need to reward ourselves. We need to make sure that we get that serotonin dump, making sure that we go from that goal to the next goal, we have the drive, the motivation and the momentum to go to the next one, so the reward system, the rewards process, which feeds the system. What is a reward system? If I asked you as an athlete “How do you reward yourself? When you do something new, when you have a new skill or you reach a new goal or a new milestone, what do you do? What do you do to make that something memorable?” And most of you will be saying you don’t do anything, you just move on to the next one and move on to the next one and move on to the next one. That’s all well and good and part of your motivation, part of your drive as being an elite athlete, will sustain that, but would it sustain it over a long period of time? Would it sustain it over an injury period or a competition period that you’re struggling through? Probably not.
So what do you do or how can we reward ourselves to make that momentum sustainable? Frequently people will say to me “I’ll go out and I’ll spoil myself. I’ll go and have a massage. I’ll go to the movies, or I’ll have a junk day” which for athletes is something that’s probably quite motivating. All these tangible things are great but from my perspective, I think the thing that’s sustainable the most, the thing that means the most to me, is acknowledgement. I know when someone turns around and says “Thanks Dave, you’ve done a great job” that means more to me than going out and going to the movies. When somebody turns around and says “Thank you” that means more or somebody says “Congratulations”.
So as an athlete, it’s those things that will mean more, it’ll be more emotionally sustainable for you, more emotionally driving.
As a coach, do you acknowledge your athletes? When they do something really, really well, do you actually acknowledge them for that achievement? Understanding now how important that is, if you don’t I suggest you start doing that. If you want your athletes to create that momentum forward, that sustainable momentum, you really need to feed their emotions. You really need to make sure that when they do achieve, they want to keep doing that, they get addicted to that serotonin.
So this process really does feed the reason, the mechanism and the system. Remember, if we don’t have a clear direction and a reason to travel on the path, then we are likely to get lost along the way.
We have packed a heap of content into this, our first episode of Brain in the Game. I hope you’ve had as much fun listening to the show as I’ve had presenting it and got some value and some key learnings from what we’ve discussed today. I’m passionate about what we do, so I hope you got something you can take away and move into your clubs and into your sports.
If you are a subscriber, I will email the links to download a Decision Matrix. If you would like a copy of this worksheet, as well as the transcription of today’s episode, pop over to our website http://www.braininthegame.com.au where you can join our list and we will send them out to you to try it in your clubs.
There’s a feedback and contact link there, if you have any questions or you want to share any of your experiences then please feel free to contact me and if you have any specific questions I’ll answer them in our next episode.
So until the next episode, train smart and enjoy the ride. My name’s Dave Diggle and I’m the Mind Coach.
Copyright 2012-2022 Dave Diggle
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