Chris Mance II - Mental Skills Coach

A performance goal defines how you will measure and track the performance level you must reach to achieve an outcome goal you want. So, if you want to win a competition, you must set performance goals that relate to what it takes for someone in your situation to win.

To define this level of performance, it’s best to start with three categories:

1. Experience
2. Skills
3. Strategy

1. Experience

Experiences help you develop confidence and confidence is a key ingredient for achieving difficult goals. Without it, adversity will quickly dissuade you. Therefore, you must gain experience achieving lower-level goals that progressively increase in difficulty. Define these experiences, and then measure and track your performance as you achieve them on the road to your ultimate goal.

2. Skills

Performance goals dealing with skills are a product of beginning with the end in mind. What specific skills must you perform at the highest level to achieve the outcome you want. The only way you can know this is through your experience or the experience of a coach.

• Use your experience (or your coach’s experience) to break down the skills into 3 or 4 essentials. An essential is a skill that is absolutely necessary or extremely important to your performance objective.
• Identify the meta skills you need for each of the essential skills. Meta skills are the skills you need to build a skill.
• Organize each of the meta-skills in the logical order of progression. This means you must be able to do the first meta skill before you can do the second meta skill, and so on and so forth. For example, the order for the meta skills of a handstand push-up are a) A normal push-up, b) a pike push-up, c) a pike push-up with feet on a box, d) a wall supported isometric handstand, e) a wall supported handstand push-up, f) then finally a handstand push-up.
• Execute a plan of mastering each meta skill. The plan at a minimum should include a daily practice schedule in the logical progression order and target dates for the progression advancement milestones.

3. Strategy

There are two types of strategies when it comes to performance goals. First, there is the strategy for correcting errors and learning from failures. Just like in skill development, experience is the key ingredient for this type of strategy. For more information on how to set this type of strategy goal read this article.

Secondly, there is the performance strategy. This is how you put your skill development in context. Skills are only tactics. Tactics are the means for executing your strategy. Therefore, if you don’t have a performance strategy skill development is less effective. Accordingly, a performance strategy must consider the big picture of how you will align your skills to create synergy.

Synergy is the idea that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. In other words, when you put two or more skills together strategically, you will perform better than when you execute each skill in a vacuum.

This is no trivial concept and it’s not something you can copy from someone else. You must know your strengths and you must know how to exploit your strengths to your advantage to create an effective performance strategy. Then, you must set a goal to practice the execution of your skills in the context of your strategy as often as possible.