Andrew Longley – Article 5 – Meaningful Goals that Actually Work

Andy is a team performance expert with a background in psychology & applied neuroscience, who will over the coming months share insights ground the art and neuroscience of high-performance coaching. Each article will share a little of the latest applied neuroscience plus give simple tips on how to practically bring it to life in your own coaching.

Great to be back with you. In my Fourth article, I introduced you to another part of the coachup model of high-performance teams and coaches, which you can see below. We looked at the science behind Trust and Psychological Safety in order to stimulate innovation, teamwork and performance.

The coachup.academy model of high-performing teams/coaches

Today we’re going to take a look at another fundamental part of high-performance coaching. We will focus on how to create meaningful goals. What we explore today will be equally relevant for both individual and team goals.

Great coaches understand that meaningful goals are a fundamental part of high-performance because when crafted well they focus effort, increase motivation,
unleash personal drive, improve teamwork, and lead to determination and perseverance in the face of obstacles. To bring this to life further this let’s look at the flipside and picture an athlete performing without a meaningful goal. They’d be inefficient in their efforts wasting time and energy, skipping training due to low motivation, struggling to self-motivate when you’re not there, failing to contribute to the team efforts, and giving up when things get a little tough. This athlete would be a nightmare to coach, and they will certainly not be setting any records or winning any medals. Without these goal-based attributes there

is no performance, let alone high-performance which is why knowing how to create meaningful goals is such an essential aspect of high-performance coaching.

First, let’s clarify what a goal is. It’s a targeted objective that guides action and effort towards a desired outcome. Goals can be individualized (get fitter, improve comms, sharpen technical skills) or collective (win the league, improve teamwork in a new system).

The research has a lot to say about goals that work. It also tells us about goals that do not work. So let’s start there and blow up the myth of smart goals. SMART (standing for specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timebound) has been popular as a goal frame for decades, but nobody has ever got out of bed with a spring in their step for a SMART goal. They simply aren’t meaningful enough to us

to unlock all of our conscious and unconscious action and effort. SMART goals are outdated and not what the latest science suggests are going to lift our motivation, drive, effort and perseverance towards our end target. Before we look

at what the neuroscience suggests make up powerful goals, let’s look at a little of the science behind goals.

Let’s start by understanding the essential foundations of great goal pursuit, our habits. If we want to pursue a goal efficiently and effectively, we need to have strong habits. If we take the example of a meaningful goal: Exercise each evening with at least 30 minutes of challenging cardio

so that I wake up feeling amazing with more energy to spend quality time with my kids. In order to be effective at achieving this goal, I need strong habits of finishing work by 1700pm, having dinner for the family pre-planned, prepared by sports bag, had good nutrition and hydration during the day etc. These habits are what lead to goal achievement success.

In neuroscience, a habit is an engrained neural path and
a Canadian neuropsychologist named Donald Hebb once remarked, neurons that are wired together, fire together. This means that once synaptic connections are made between neurons, the more they are practiced the stronger the connection becomes and the deeper the neural path. Think of these as paths in a north Canterbury field. The
first time you walk through the long grass, a basic path is formed. The more you walk down this path, the stronger the pathway becomes. So too, with any new behavior. The first time we practice this new skill or game plan, it may seem

basic or unnatural. But through repetition that behavior becomes ingrained and essentially automatic so that we can perform it effortlessly and when under pressure. The literature is divided on how long it takes to create a habit neurologically, but the fastest the research suggests is at least two months. This shows how long our athletes will need to persevere to create effective habits to support the achievement of meaningful goals. This means that high- performance coaches support the formation of effective habits in order to unlock the effort, motivation, drive, positive support, and perseverance for goal pursuit.

Some further neuroscience to show why meaningful goals are so important for high-performance is the fact that our brain is constantly doing three things, 24/7, both consciously and unconsciously. Therefore, for us to ensure our brain is supporting our high-performance efforts we need to align with three actions:

Searching for meaning and purpose. We saw this in article 2 about Purpose, so when our goals are meaningful and in sync with our unique purpose, we are satisfying our need for this alignment and accessing motivation & drive.

Stripping out uncertainty. Our brain hates uncertainty and treats it as a threat. When we have goals which we remember, bring clarity, and give us a clear path forward our brain will avoid the activation of a threat state and remain in the performance state.

Seeking social connections & growth. We’re designed to be social beings so when our goals help build any social connections, we activate our reward system and gain motivation & engagement. This
is why team goals are so powerful. Our brain also seeks growth and progress – it hates stagnation. Therefore, when our goals move us forward with learning and/or performance, we’re in the sweet spot.

So now let’s get practical and look at what characteristics goals need to have in order to drive higher-performance. They should:

Capture our emotions: Then our goals will be memorable and internalized. This is because if
a goal is emotionally resonant and captures our emotions, we care about achieving it and we’ll give our full motivation. When our goals are intrinsically motivating, they will also sustain for longer. Here’s a comparison to bring this to life:

SMART goal: Lose 10kg from running every morning for the month of January.

Meaningful goal: Exercise each evening with at least 30 minutes of challenging cardio so that I wake up feeling amazing with more energy to spend quality time with my kids.

Only have a Few: If we easily cannot remember our goal, we will not be able to direct our energy, motivation & attention to it, both consciously and unconsciously. And we really need our unconscious self working towards our goals if we’re going to achieve anything! So, if we only have a few meaningful goals which are easy to remember we will gain the true benefits from them.

Revisit our goals regularly: because we must remember our goals in order for them to work, we need to help our brain do this so we should revisit our written goals once a day over at least four days. The important part of improving the memory of our goals is having the night’s sleep in between the revisits because this is when our brain encodes our day’s learnings. In essence, this technique helps because our memory retention improves every time we revisit them and when it’s separated by sleep our retention rate improves even further.

Make them near-in-time: Our brain has a bias to focus on the immediate. When we make our goals near-in-time, we work with our natural bias and not against it, plus we also get the benefit of avoiding procrastination (which let’s face it, we could all benefit from!).

We can of course have long or medium-term goals, like qualifying for the next Olympics. However, if we do, we should break these clearly down into chunks which are near-in- time.

Revisit our goals once achieved: We learn & grow via a process called positive prediction error which means that when we perform ‘better than we expected’ this is a positive prediction error to our brains which raises our confidence and creates a new mental benchmark for what we believe we can achieve. We need to draw our attention to this in order to experience the learning & confidence gains.

A pro-tip for coaches: A great coach will help direct their athlete’s attention to when they ‘performance better than they expected’ to build confidence & lift their performance expectations. E.g. “You thought you wouldn’t be able to compete at all with the best sprinters in the meet on Saturday right? But you made the A final and exceeded your expectations. Fantastic.”

Make them stretching: When our goals have the right balance between difficulty level and our skillset to take us towards the end of our comfort zone, then we are in the ‘stretch zone’. This will not only help us achieve more, but also maintain confidence (from not making them too hard which increases the chance of failure) and optimize our learning rate.

The latest research suggests the optimal way to learn via stretch is to succeed 85% of the time and fail (and learn) 15% of the time. This is the optimal balance for stretching ourselves so that we acquire new skills or mindsets quickly, maintain confidence, and also learn via failure.

As coaches, when we help our athletes and teams create meaningful goals for themselves, we’re providing a best performance platform possible.

So, there we have a little of the applied neuroscience behind goals.

The sixth article in this series will focus on why a high- performing coach must provide clarity to their athletes wherever possible in order to drive individual performance and build a high-performance team culture. Stay tuned.

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