Goal Setting

If you don't know where you're going, you'll never get there.

I've always found the toughest part about goal setting to be just doing it. Setting a goal means committing to trying to achieve a specific outcome, and sometimes just knowing what you want to do is the hardest thing. It means prioritizing, which means you have to sacrifice in some areas in order to increase what you're doing in others. There are so many hours in the day, so many places your parents can drive you, so many hours your coaches are available, and of course then there are the things that are always more important than sailing - school, family, and whatever else you have committed to.

A very popular mnemonic (look it up) for goal setting is SMART. S means specific, M means measurable, A means achievable, R means relevant or rewarding, and T means trackable. Not every goal is going to fit into this framework, but most well-constructed ones will.

I've got to keep it short today (my goal was to get a good post out after being overwhelmed with regular work and some important family stuff), so we'll break this up into a couple.

S. Specific. "I'd like to get better at sailing" or "I'd like to have better results this year" are popular goals that I hear all the time. And wouldn't we all like to do both of them? The problem is that they don't really mean anything - they don't give any framework for what you should do to get started achieving them.

In bike racing, we talk a lot about limiters. You have strengths and weaknesses in one set, and limiters, neutrals, and enablers in another. You might stink at climbing, but if you live in an area where all the races are flat, your weakness at climbing isn't a limiter. It doesn't prevent you from winning races. On the other hand, if you stink at sprinting and live in an area where there are a lot of flat races, you're going to need to get better at sprinting. Now. So in that case, a weakness is indeed a limiter.

For specificity, I like to have people examine all of their strengths and weaknesses and decide which are limiters, neutrals, and enablers. Every race has a start, so if you are struggling with starts, that is going to be a limiter. You need to work on starts. So that becomes a primary goal if you want to "get better results." Successful starts have a bunch of different components - determining first beat strategy, picking the favored end, getting and USING good line sights, good boat handling, time-to-line management, good acceleration, the ability to have either a high mode or a fast mode immediately after the start, and probably a couple of others I've left out.

If you don't have a lot of physical strength and you are a Laser sailor, guess what? On the other hand, if you're skippering an I420, not only do you basically need just enough strength to pull the mainsheet in, excess strength is going to mean excess weight, so one person's enabler could be another person's limiter. It all depends on what you're after.

So today's homework is to first determine how much priority you can give to sailing. If you are trying to become a Juilliard-level musician, you can become a very good sailor but the goal of becoming College Sailor of the Year is probably unrealistic (although not technically impossible). On the other hand, if you'd like to go to an Ivy League or other top-tier school and also become College Sailor of the Year, that's a fairly well worn path. A very very challenging one, but it's a path.

And then the second part of your homework is to deconstruct what you're good and less good at, and categorize them into either limiters (things that prevent you from success), neutrals (things that neither contribute to or prevent success), and enablers (things that promote desired outcomes).