At the start of every season, you and your team will have clear goals about what you want to achieve that year. It’s the reason everyone turns up. It may be winning a title, getting selected or earning a personal best – most of the time, it’s all three.
Goals are the markers you use to identify what you wish to accomplish, and just as crucially, they help propel you forward; in short, they get the wheels turning. Your incentives, meanwhile, are the tools you will use to get there.
Like any journey to the top, the road will never be a smooth one.
Over the last four years, I’ve had the privilege to work with exceptional teams and athletes, and with every single group, there has always been a clear thread with what they want to achieve.
The most common theme for teams is their goal to win, while the incentive is to beat others.
On the surface, it seems to be a robust goal-incentive combination, but is there an even stronger and simpler one?
We usually only plan for the best and never for the worst. As such, only being attentive to the prize can sometimes lead you off the path.
This played out rather graphically at the start of the pandemic; I saw every team and athlete have their goals and incentives eradicated in a matter of days. Everyone from school-age athletes to Olympians found themselves lost. How strong was the goal of winning then?
As athletes, we like to think to ourselves as being robust and resilient. However, the last few months have been a great test of character for many.
When your Championship gets taken away or postponed, your team breaks up, and you find yourself alone with no coach. I’d say that was – and still is – a worst-case scenario for most athletes.
For every team and athlete that I work with, my aim of helping them win remains the same. I condition them to have a clear, straightforward process that will consistently raise their standards.
What happens when you simplify the goal and the incentive? It means that you and your crew can take the rough with the smooth and deliver impressive results long term, irrespective of the environment.
So, let’s do just that and simplify the goal: Now, our goal is to “Challenge how you think, and decide what aspects of your training you action.”
Essentially, we want to be asking ourselves: “How could I improve the elements that are key to my success on a session-by-session basis?”
Most of you will read this and think you do it anyway. You do, although there will always be an added amount of mental clutter.
You might be focused on the competition, the conditions, selection, testing, a bad result, complacency, doubt, or perhaps you find your brain telling you ‘it’s not fair’, ‘I’m too tired’, or ‘I can’t be bothered’. These thought processes can – and will – harm your performance by distracting you from what should be your goal.
So, the trick with goals and incentives is to look at how they can be simplified.
In 2018, the goal for the victorious St. Paul’s crew was to “be as fast as possible.” They had a massive run of success. The results came down to having Bobby Thatcher and a talented group of schoolboy athletes remaining attentive to a simple process.
That year, the St. Paul’s 1st VIII found themselves just shy of the junior world record at one of the summer regattas pre-Henley. It was a perfect opportunity for complacency to kick in. Yet, the crew stayed true to their goal to be ‘as fast as possible’, and remained humble in the face of this astonishing achievement.
So, after the race, I asked them a simple question:
“What the goal was for the year?”
They answered, “To go as fast as possible.”
I challenged it and pushed them, “So is that as fast as you can go?”
The reply was, “We can go faster and strengthen the process.”
So the goal was to go as fast as possible; the point being that everyone wants to win, so why feel the need to discuss it? Being attentive to how you get there will influence your consistency and depth of results far more than any confidence-boosting regatta record.
I’ve seen too much weight put behind harsh goals and incentives, which can indirectly obstruct how athletes and teams achieve their goals. These types of goals will exhaust athletes, or sometimes even cause rowers to become afraid of what might happen if they miss their goal.
I’ve seen talented athletes burn out using this weighted approach. It makes for a laborious, heavy season, and requires significantly more energy that with a simpler, lighter goal structure.
What happens when the incentive is solely for you to be better, and to strengthen the process you’ve built?
Use this approach as a sustainable way to move towards your goals.
Be constantly attentive to the basics, with the goal of how to make those simple things better each day.
It starts at the first session.
Take each step, do it well, and you’ll look up and see you’ve reached the top of the mountain.
This article was written by Stephen Feeney. To find out more about his work and story, head over to our content partners page, or read more of his work here.
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Images by Roesie Percy
