Use Your Mind to Support Your Goals

The New Year is often a time when ambition seems to heighten as we take charge of our goals. When you think reviewing your goals is enough to ensure you’ll keep on task with them, think again. It may be wise to consider that many of the goals we set require the integration of a new habit within the body-mind and that doesn’t happen overnight. They also require added support from every area of our 5 Elements of Success, yet often we don’t check in with that first.
You see, our bodies and minds are intrinsically connected with stored memories of the habitual processes we’ve instilled in them. We may take our conscious-mind at any time and decide we want to change something, but the journey to actually integrating that change may not come as quickly and easily as we’d like. Considering this ahead of time when creating our goals, it may support us to look at the actual process we are choosing to undertake as well as the behaviors and attitudes necessary to reach our goal.
For example, let’s say one of your goals this year is to attain more distance and accuracy with your driver.’ We’ll assume you’ve determined an exact distance or percent increase on distance to make your goal specific and measurable. This should be easy enough, right? So, you take this goal and move forward working towards it, but you have other goals too so you’re finding the time to work on this one specifically is ‘not that much.’ Still you work on it in the time you have because you intend to get there. Fast Forward a few weeks or months and you’re feeling shattered. By now you should’ve been where you wanted to be, you should’ve reached this goal or at least be closer, but you’re discovering you’ve made minimal progress and that makes you frustrated. Taking this frustration into your practice you fatigue early on and start thinking negative thoughts, beating yourself up about your performance. Fast forward a few more weeks and it seems your progress has completely stagnated…what to do now?!
It’s easy for the conscious-mind to decide on a new goal, but it takes patience, discipline, and determination to ensure the goal is met. It’s important to recognize the investment that’s necessary to see a chosen goal to fruition. After all, with the example above, you’re essentially working on training your body-mind to program a whole new memory for your driver shots. That means you’re going to need to understand the strength necessary for this goal and what needs to be done from a physical performance standpoint. You’re going to need to have your equipment checked and be sure you’re supported on that level with an appropriately fitted driver that’s in good condition to help you meet your goal. You’re also going to need to practice repeatedly with presence as well as assistance and suggestion from your coaches, remembering your desire and applying discipline until you see the goal to fruition. In addition, you’re going to need to be aware of what’s going on with you mentally, allowing yourself to calm around any struggle, apply patience, stay focused, and keep an optimistic state to support peak performance. Much of the journey will be unknown to you until you’re experiencing it, so learning how to have an open-mind and go with the flow, adjusting as necessary and praising your progress, will also be useful mental skills.
As you’re considering your goals this season, remember our 5 Elements of Success and how these play into each and every goal. Be careful about over estimating your goal and under estimating the process. When you give your mind a better understanding of the potential process ahead of time it will stay stronger along the journey and you’ll support yourself to enjoy it more while getting right where you want to be!