Goal Setting with Colt Olson, PhD. (Mental Skills Coordinator for the Colorado Rockies, MLB)

Hello! Welcome to the Monkey Mind Newsletter where we provide you with the tools to be a more successful and resilient athlete and human. 

CONTRIBUTOR
Colt Olson, PhD. (Mental Skills Coordinator for the Colorado Rockies, MLB)

Dr. Colt Olson is a former collegiate football and baseball player and current mental skills coordinator for the Colorado Rockies. Prior to working with the Rockies, Colt received a Bachelor's degree in Psychology from Colorado Mesa University, where he played both football and baseball, a Master's Degree in Sport and Performance Psychology from the University of Idaho, and a Ph.D in Educational Psychology from the University of Northern Colorado. He currently resides in Colorado with his wife Jamie and Son Jax and spends his Springs/Summers traveling all over the country to work with players in the Colorado Rockies organization.

Website: https://www.raidoperformance.com/
Social media: Twitter @raidopsych
Podcast: 5 Minute Mindset on Spotify -  podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/5-minute-mindset
Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC18uTNQaGMzM-8ApUP0peTQ

TOPIC
Goal Setting

At the start of every season or every year, people like to take time to set goals. In athletics teams often come up with goals like winning a conference, state, or national championship, businesses set revenue goals, and in our personal lives, we set fitness goals.

Setting goals is a powerful tool for creating success especially when done correctly. We can give ourselves a roadmap to follow for whatever we’re about to face and give ourselves an opportunity to track our progress toward whatever it is we’re pursuing very important stuff. Unfortunately, though, we don’t always follow through with our goals the way we want to. We start off strong, we’re excited to start our pursuit, and we’re confident, but over time these feelings fade. We end up getting tired, we run into a few roadblocks that discourage us, we get distracted by our other responsibilities, maybe we get beat by another team, and we end up falling short. I know I’ve had experiences like that in my own life a number of times and it gets frustrating. We don’t always want to be the people that fall short of what we want or what we set out to accomplish, it sucks, but unfortunately, it’s pretty common.

So, how do we become uncommon in our ability to achieve the goals we set out to accomplish and follow through with what we say we’re going to do? We’re going to dive into that today. 

As I mentioned earlier, goals are powerful. When I was in graduate school, we spent a lot of hours talking about goal setting and learning the most effective ways to do it. There were a couple of really important takeaways from those goal-setting lessons.

Number one, people who take the time to actually set goals properly are more successful than people who don’t, and sometimes quite a bit more successful.

Number two, if you want to give yourself the best chance to be successful you have to set goals in a pretty specific way. They need to be very clear, and they need to include specific action steps. For example, if your goal is to do 100,000 in sales in one quarter, you need to break that goal down into small, daily steps you can take that will give you the best chance to make that many sales. You’d likely identify a number of calls to make every day, you’d identify a sales script that works, how you’re going to practice that script and plan for dealing with failure. Then you’d track all of these action steps daily or weekly throughout the quarter. When you approach goals like that you give yourself a good chance to be successful.

There was a critical aspect of goal setting that was never taught in my PhD program though, we never discussed how goals can actually hurt us. I never even considered this idea until I read the book Atomic Habits, which in a way is about the alternative to traditional goals. The book discusses a few important ways goals make progress harder on people.

First, goals play on our emotions. If we accomplish a goal, we’re happy for a little bit, and if we don’t we’re sad or disappointed, and either way, we end up focusing on that result in an emotional fashion. Emotions are rarely our friend when it comes to developing personally or professionally.

Second, they keep our lens narrow. We can get ultra-focused on one goal that might require a year of work but fail to consider what we are trying to accomplish or become long-term.

Third, winners and losers have the same goal. Every team I’ve been on had a championship goal, we rarely accomplished it and sometimes it led us to focusing on outcomes instead of processes, which is dangerous. I believe there’s a better way to go about achieving your goals, one that can set you apart and give you a unique approach to your work. That is identity-based goals. 

Identity-based goals involve figuring out the identity you are trying to assume with your goals (which is a better version of you), identifying how that version of you acts in relation to your goals, and then working to embody this identity on a daily basis. For example, let’s say you have a goal to be healthier. Wanting to be healthier means you are looking to assume the identity of a healthier person (which also likely includes being more consistent, disciplined, and committed to a healthy lifestyle).

Now, you need to figure out how that healthier version of you would act on a daily basis. They would likely drink more water and less alcohol, they would workout consistently even when they don’t want to, they would plan meals ahead of time, and be comfortable saying no to things that don’t agree with who they’re trying to become. After identifying these actions you now work to assume this identity consistently in your life. That is identity-based goals. They’re less emotional, not tied to outcomes, are built for the long term, and are uncommon in the actions they create.

MENTAL PERFORMANCE TOOL
Goal Setting Tactics

The tactics for creating and using identity-based goals were mostly just discussed, but I want to lay them out clearly here too.

Tactic 1 – Figure out what identity you are trying to assume with your current goals. This is likely a more successful, consistent, or powerful version of you. Personally, I like to think about what the best version of myself is and use that.

Tactic 2 – Identify how that better version of you acts in relation to those goals. These actions are what separates current you from the best version of you, so figure out which actions you need to change to be more in line with your better identity.

Tactic 3 – Use the actions you identified as a daily blueprint and use them to assume this identity. Commit to the actions, don’t set goals like everyone else.

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