Goal Setting: Balancing Outcome & Performance Goals

Setting both outcome and performance goals is important, not only to maintain motivation but also to track progress. Understand the difference between outcome goals and performance goals with advice from a sport psychologist in this video on horseback riding techniques.

Make this Community Strong:

Be the first to add a comment!

Hi I'm Tonya Johnston. I'm a Sport Psychology Consultant. It's my job to help riders be psychologically prepared and mentally tough. In this segment, we're going to talk about goal setting and the importance of balancing outcome goals with performance goals. In goal setting, it's always a good idea to make sure you have really, really realistic goals, goals that you can adjust and track over time. Another important piece of goal setting is coming up with strategies to achieve each goal. So, it's all well and good to write down a goal at the beginning of the year, but you want to see how am I going to bring that with me throughout my season? One of these pieces is what I just said about balancing outcome goals and performance goals. An outcome goal is a goal that you have that's based on the results of a competition. So, this might mean qualifying for a certain medal final, being champion, being year end in the top four, a year end award, making it to championships, that kind of thing. Now outcome goals are great. They get us motivated. They get us fired up to prepare and work hard, and there are things that we look forward to. Anyone that competes wants to do well. However, they are always out of our control. We don't control how the rest of the class rides. We don't control the judging, all of those kinds of things. So outcome goals are never 100 percent in our control. This can lead to some disappointments, and this can lead to goals not being accomplished. Understandable, but you can sort of balance with having performance goals, so that you feel good when you come out of the ring. You have things that you can track, that are totally within your control. So, an example of a performance goal; again a performance goal is something that is completely in your control, and things that you track your improvement on over time. An example would be, let's say you've heard your trainer tell you to shorten your reigns on course, many, many, many times over the last couple of months. A performance goal of keeping my reigns short for an entire course at the horse show would be fantastic. So, performance goals are things that you may come up with your trainer, or you may take cues from lessons and know there are certain things you need to be responsible for and work on yourself. By having a balance of outcome and performance goals, you know that when you come out of the ring at a horse show, you can look back and say to yourself, hey I really did well on this, or 80 percent of the time my reigns were short. This is a big improvement, regardless of how you finished in the class.