APPLICATIONS ASSIST IN ANNUAL PLANNING AND GOAL SETTING

As a performance psychologist and coach, I am a strong believer in meticulous planning for success. Planning process requires certain things from coach-athlete relationships and first and foremost, mutual understanding of the process.

Thereby, I'm experimenting with using performance profiling (Butler & Hardy, 1992) together with traditional goal setting and personal application of SWOT-Matrix. Before practical application of these, my main concern is in the athlete engagement. Moreover, do they think this a bit of jargon and out of context or find it helpful?

Performance profiling reflects the athlete's own perceptions of their abilities and attributes and how they rate themselves amongst absolute elite (Butler & Hardy, 1992). The advantage from it is the self-engagement and straight forward numerical results indicant strengths and areas for improvement.

The goal setting process enables the athlete provide them a source for motivation and dedication to work. My aim is to find a set of goals for each athelete that all have theoretical underpinning. Moreover, tha SMART principle (O'Neill et al, 2006) should be identifiable as well as the three main types of goals, outcome, process and performance, should be included in the annual plan.

The most exciting thing for me, is the use of SWOT-Matrix (Hill & Westbrook, 1997). Traditionally SWOT-Matrix is used for businesses and organizations in order to explore internal and external factors with possible effects. SWOT is an abbreviation from Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats, and aim to cover the aspect having potential effects to the performance.

Interesting to see it all works, and does it work as a mean to an end – achieving the targets.

Butler, R. and Hardy, L. (1992). The Performance Profile: Theory and application. The Sport Psychologist. 6 (3), p. 257.

Hill, T. & Westbrook, R. (1997). "SWOT Analysis: It’s Time for a Product Recall". Long Range Planning 30 (1): 46–52.

O'Neill, J., Conzemius, A., Commodore, C., & Pulsfus, C. (2006). The power of SMART goals: Using goals to improve student learning. Bloomington: Solution Tree.