Goal Staircase

What's up, Cadre? Today I'm going to start off with a little bit of a weird ask, and that is to ask you to think of your most memorable staircase in your life. When you do that, think about as many details as you can. Think about the material of it. Was it wood? Was it carpet, brick, metal, whatever it might be, what color it was, did it have a distinct smell to it? Where was it located? All those different things. And for me, I can remember two distinct ones. One will be the brick stage staircase running up my old elementary school, and the other is this tan carpet that my friend's family had.

And we run down it all excited to play games and watch sports as kids. Think about yours. You might have ones that are more recent than my childhood experiences, but I only ask those questions because just like goal setting, the more details the better. And today we're going to talk about how goals can be orchestrated, similar to a staircase. This is video number two of our goal setting series. In the first one, if you haven't watched it, please do. It's all about the top five reasons why people typically don't succeed at goal setting.

Today we're going to talk about some skills of how we do succeed. But in that previous video, I talked a lot about the difference between process and outcome goals and how people typically don't set process goals. They're overly focused on the outcome or the results rather than the specific steps to get there. So in this video, we're going to talk about how to turn those outcome goals into process goals using the goal staircase and specific ways that we can turn those outcomes into processes and milestones.

Now, before we get there, let's start off with some basic definitions of some concepts. So, starting off goals, what are goals? They're simply targets that we're trying to hit. They improve our motivation, enhance our consistency, and give us a way to track progress and give ourselves meaning along the journey. Within the main topic of goals, there's three main types we like to talk about in research in sport and performance psychology. Number one is outcome goals, which are simply the results that you want to get.

Those are typically what people think about when they think of goals. Number two is performance goals, and those are kind of the standards or milestones or markers that we want to hit along the way. And then number three are process goals. Those are simply the procedures or specific strategies that you have control over that lead to results. Out of those three, what I really want to focus on today is process goals, and there's a reason for that. It's because they're simply better than the other two.

All right? And there's studies to show that in 2022, there's a study published that did a meta analysis of goal setting in sport. They looked at 27 individual studies and analyzed those, and that all the studies altogether had over 1700 participants that range from youth athletes with no goal setting experience at all, all the way up to high level athletes who've been goal setting for years. What they found was that outcome goals had a negligible effect on performance, meaning they didn't do anything.

Number two is that performance goals had a moderate effect on performance. That's all right. And then number three, process goals had a significant effect on goal success and performance. All that to say, process goals improve our performance and success a lot, lot of better than the other two. With that information, we want to know, how do we actually go about setting process goals? Well, today's your lucky day. We're actually going to do that with a specific strategy called the goal staircase.

So, let me show you how it's done. I want you to think about that staircase that you envision at the beginning of this video, and that'll relate to what we're going to talk about today, which is the goal staircase. And it's simply a strategy to help you visually map the process of goal setting over the time. You're gonna be working backwards, beginning with the end in mind. So you wanna start by figuring out where you want to end up and reverse engineer the steps to get there. So if all these steps were blank, I would first start here with the outcome that we wanna achieve.

So in this example, I'm gonna use someone who wants to run a marathon. So let's say the long term goal is to run a marathon, specifically in six months time. Now there we're gonna shift our focus from the long term outcome to the daily steps and the milestones that it takes to get there in between, usually between two to four, maybe five steps. You wanna include process and performance goals, and you also wanna incorporate short term and long term goals. So for this example, once I finish this slot, I'm gonna fill in this one.

Let's use a performance goal. 2 miles, maybe you wanna run 26 miles a week in your training plan. Maybe. Let's say that's not achievable right now. Well, let's start by getting a short term goal to get there. Let's go running 20 miles a week, which is, again, a performance goal. It's just a standard or a milestone. Then we go down to the specific steps we can take, which is the process goals. That's why I have a star there is, because just like that study I mentioned, those are the ones that have the most profound impact on our success and performance.

A process goal in this example might be simply running 5 miles over the course of four days per week. Now, you can even get more specific, maybe including the specific days that you would do those training blocks. Let's say you're doing Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday. You can put that in parentheses or however you want to format it. Now, from there we go to where we're currently at. This will be the last spot you fill in. Let's say you usually run maybe twice a week on average, and usually do anywhere from two to 3 miles.

Well, if you're just looking at this and your outcome goal is like this, which is how people usually set goals, that can be a daunting task, and you're not sure how to get there, this is a way to specifically map out the steps that it takes. And with our process goals, we feel more in control over that process overall. As you can see, setting process goals gives you more control over your journey, and it also leads to more success in your goal setting process. That goal staircase is just one method out of many in terms of how to actually map out your steps.

And in the next video of this goal setting series, I'm going to talk about how to anticipate challenges along the way of your goal setting process and how you can use mental skills to forecast those challenges, and specifically your appropriate responses to those challenges. So stay tuned for that.