Everyone has heard about setting goals. Everyone has heard that goal setting helps with our motivation. Though we know how important it is to set goals, it’s not so easy to set them. And even when we set goals, they can challenge us to be the right goals at the right time for the right purpose. In sport, goals help athletes and coaches to direct their attention, to focus on the task at hand, to increase the level of difficulty so that athletes keep progressing, but what if th

Sports performers logically set challenging, specific goals to stretch them towards success. The research to date argues in their favour (Kremer et al., 2019). But what if setting teeny tiny goals helps along the way too? We can all learn a wonderful lesson from one of the most famous examples of a systematic goal-setting procedure, taking off in Munich in 1972 and landing in Olympic gold in 1976 at Montreal. One man, Joh Naber, sat at home on his living room floor watching M

When we think about our habits in sport, we might feel that they are routine behaviours we do without thinking or paying much attention to what we are doing, but goals always seem so purposive. For example, if we were going to clean the kitchen, we might say that we are going to clean the kitchen for two hours and then have lunch. What if I cleaned the kitchen thoroughly every Saturday as a habit? Would I still consider it a goal? What if I were working on Saturdays for three

"My mother taught me very early to believe I could achieve any accomplishment I wanted to. The first was to walk without braces". Wilma Rudolph, American runner who, after contracting polio as a child, had to walk with orthopaedic support until she was 12, and then went on to win three gold medals at the 1960 Rome Olympics (1940–1994) We all crave success now – we all want to win now. But success now is difficult to come by if we have not prepared properly to succeed, despite

Taekwondo Psychology My first step onto the taekwondo mat as a complete beginner left me clueless about what lay ahead . At age 11, I wasn't ready to perform in front of 400 people , but that experience kicked off my amazing 11-year trip with this life-changing martial art . Taekwondo goes way beyond just kicks and punches. My search for taekwondo classes led me to find not just training partners but a whole taekwondo family . Starting as a white belt , I found that there was