Visualization is a very powerful technique for staying motivated and achieving success. Think about what your goals and why you want to achieve them. Then, think about what your life will be like once you've done it. For example, if you are working hard as a college hockey player, think about how great your life will be when you’re driving an expensive car and living in a mansion once you’ve signed your first deal with a professional league. Everything you visualize will be different based on your individual goals and your own self. Visualization is something that the top pros in the world do on a consistent basis. Be sure to make visualization a habit that you do every day to dramatically increase your chances of success. You can also visualize a scene as if you were ten to fifteen feet away in the 3rd person. Just allow the scene to flow naturally with you doing everything perfectly to achieve the desired goal.
Visualizing the puck is also a valuable mental technique. Yes, you have spent a lot of time on the ice playing with the puck and shooting it around, but take a minute to just think about the puck. Imagine that you are watching a video of yourself moving with the puck. Visualize yourself in the third person, as if from a video camera about twenty feet away, and see yourself doing your favorite moves and performing flawlessly. The more that you do this, the better you are likely to perform when this situation arises on the game field. Before each game or prac- tice, take ten minutes to do your visualization. This is a powerful strategy that can greatly improve your performance if done consistently. If you are learning a new technique, be sure to visualize yourself doing it over and over.
You can combine visualization with positive self-statements for a powerful ef- fect. Everybody thinks negative thoughts. It is human nature. However, con- tinual positive self-statements can combat those thoughts. Since negative thoughts are so common, you cannot get rid of them completely. Instead, you can use positive words and phrases to make the thoughts more effective. For exam- ple, instead of thinking, “Training is tiring me out so bad, I just want to give up,” think “No pain, no gain.”
Finding self-awareness can help you pave your road to success as an athlete. True self-awareness enables you to admit your strengths and weaknesses and to recognize your talents and flaws. Athletes often find it hard to come to terms with self-awareness when speaking with their coaches because they don’t like to admit their faults to the person who controls their play time. However, being honest with yourself and those who support you can help you improve your practices, de- velop good playing habits and boost your overall self-confidence. A good way to begin finding self-awareness is to set an accountability goal every two weeks. I have found that a good way to do this is to keep a progress journal. In this jour- nal, write down every positive and negative experience you incur in your athletic ca- reer. If it is a positive experience, write about how good you feel about yourself and how it has made you a stronger athlete. If it is a negative experience, write about what you did wrong, how you learned to fix it and how you will make a better decision next time. The best part about keeping all of this in a journal is that it is fun to go back and read it over from time to time to see how far you’ve come.
Without setting a goal, you are very likely to never achieve success, not just in hockey but no matter what you’re doing. Your goals serve as the roadmap that keeps you on track. Without goals, you may very well veer off course and be less likely to reach your achievements.
To be motivated for cycling, it is essential to set goals and know what you're going to do to reach them. Without goals, it is very hard to intelligently make a plan to steer your cycling career in the direction desired. The first thing you can do to stay motivated to play and work out is to set goals and review them several times per day. A good and effective idea is to write your ideas down on paper and put them in a place where you can easily review them. When you write something down, you tend to retain it much better. Take a few minutes and write down some goals, if you don't have them already. A good strategy to utilize when making a goal is to make it seem easy. For example: I will easily do my workout four times per week or I will easily increase my number of winning shots by the end of the season.
Be sure to be very specific about your goals and why you want to achieve them. Vague goals leave too much room for guesswork and too many loopholes for laziness. For example, let’s say that you write down a goal that says, “I will eas- ily do my workout.” Yes, that is a goal and a good one, but it’s not specific enough. A workout could mean anything in this case and could easily cause you to say, “Well I walked one mile today so that’s my workout,” even when in reality, that type of workout will not help you become a better hockey player. Let’s take a look at how you could better break down this goal to be much more clear and spe- cific.
“I will easily do my workout.” Okay – so when you have a vague statement like this, start digging deeper. Pretend like your mentor, boss or coach is the person telling you that this is your goal. Visualize your coach saying “You will easily do your workout.” Are you just going to nod your head and say, “okay boss!”? Probably not, because you’ll likely find yourself scratching your head in perplexity once you go to fulfill that request.
Figure out what parts of the goals you could question to become more spe- cific. For example, if it were me faced with this goal, I would say, “What defines my work out? Am I working out my entire body or just certain parts?” This could lead your coach to reply with, “You will easily do your leg and upper body work- out.” So now you know specifically which parts of your body you’re working out – while your goal is much clearer now, there is more to clarify. If my coach were to say to me, “You will easily do your leg and upper body workout,” and I nodded and said okay, I could just do the workout once a week and think I’ve fulfilled the goal. Let’s dig deeper.
Next, I would ask my coach, “How often will I easily do my leg and upper body workout?”
Let’s pretend that he or she replies to me with, “You will easily do your leg and upper body workout four times per week.” Okay so now we have a specific area of the body and a measurable number but I still see more information that can be broken down. My next question would be, “How many times during those four sessions a week would I work out each body part?” My coach could reply, “Work- out your legs twice a week and your upper body twice a week,” to which I would reply, “What four days should I pick?” to which my coach could reply, “Monday and Wednesday for legs, Friday and Sundays for upper body.”
At this point, the revised goal states, “I will easily do my leg and upper body workout four times a week, working my legs on Mondays and Wednesdays and working my upper body on Fridays and Sundays.”
Now we have a very clear and specific goal. I know what body parts I am work- ing out and when. Though I think I would be satisfied with this goal, I could go even deeper and specify at what times and where I will be working on my goal. If I included those details, my goal would read something along the lines of, “I will easily do my leg and upper body workout four times a week in my home gym, working my legs on Monday and Wednesday mornings before breakfast, and my upper body on Fridays and Sundays before breakfast.”
Let’s just take a look at the goal we began with and the goal we worked into a clear and specific statement one last time just to make a comparison:
1.I will easily do my workout.
2.I will easily do my leg and upper body workout four times a week in my home gym, working my legs on Monday and Wednesdays before breakfast, and my upper body on Fridays and Sundays before breakfast.”
Which goal do you think you would be more successful with? That was just one example. Make your vision compelling and something that really excites you. Too many people make small goals that lack passion, don’t be afraid to dream big and shoot for something truly incredible. I could make one more mod- ification to the aforementioned goal to make it truly incredible...
Now that’s what I call a truly complete goal! Once you know what your goals are, the next thing to do is to develop an action plan. It’s easy to set a goal. I just made up that workout goal in five minutes and it was easy as pie. Anybody can make up a goal, just as I just did. The true challenge and differential factor is whether or not anyone can actually achieve those goals. Creating an action plans helps you remain self-accountable and actionable in moving toward goal achieve- ment. Now, you will discover what it takes to create your very own action plan.
The first step is to plan a deadline for your goal. Using the workout goal as an example, I would need to find a time and place to get started. Let’s pretend that I don’t have a home gym, so what would I do then? I would need to find a place to do my workout. This may entail me researching gym memberships in my area or investing in actually creating a home gym. I also stated that I wanted to do the workout before breakfast, so I would have to make sure I actually have an available time slot before breakfast. Let’s say that I have to go to work at 9 am every day and I eat breakfast at 8 am so instead of getting up at 7 am I may have to set my alarm for 6 am. The key is to first start working out all of the details that will get you started off on your path to achievement. If I don’t take those steps, then I probably won’t be setting up a workout routine.
The second and most important step, in my opinion, is to set a completion date for your goals. Without an end date, you’re more than likely going to fail to achieve your goal. For example, let’s say a manager at a grocery store asks their employees to rearrange the cracker section. If he doesn’t say that it needs to be done by Friday at 5pm then it is likely the employees will not look at the task as a priority and it will probably never get done.
Using the workout goal as an example, I stated that I would do it “until I can barrel through a workout with feeling exhaustion.” In my case, my end date is a moment of achievement. So until I feel that breakthrough moment where I say, “Hey, I pedaled for two hours and I feel awesome,” I will not have reached my goal. Good ways to measure goal completion are to set a time and a date, like in the grocery store example, or to set a feeling, like in my workout example. For a truly challenging goal, you could set yourself to feel a certain way by a certain time and date, which may mean that you have to really focus hard on your goal within a certain amount of time.
You may find it easier to break your goals down into smaller goals for an easier achievement time. A good example of this is to set weekly or monthly goals before you set an ending time and date. For example, I want my goal to be able to barrel through a workout without feeling exhaustion so I might start out by being able to practice for 30 minutes without those feelings and then work my way up to an hour and so on. Those smaller accomplishments can help me feel motivated to keep going until I reach my final outcome. It is not possible to achieve a huge goal overnight so breaking it down into smaller tasks/milestones is actually a really great strategy to try. I’m a particularly self-motivated person so I find that when I make small accomplishments, it pushes me to keep going as far as I can push my- self.
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