Your Goal Is Important For Your Success.

Goal, a clear conception, a vivid vision, a plan imagined this
is where it all begins.
We all need goals to guide our actions and energies. Without them,
our greatest gifts will wither away like a house plant that you
never waste.

Human beings are hard-wired to live purposefully, to have direction,
without a target to shoot at our lives are aimless.
Without goals, without positive desires and purpose, a shooter
languishes and their results go down and then, one of two things
happens.
The aimlessness and the poor results begin to shut that person
down in lethargy and emptiness or the person lashes out in
destructive ways, to make something happen.

It may be a simple statement but it carries great significance, we all
need a purpose not only in shooting but also in life!
Most of us have had goals set for us, by our parents, teachers and
then our employers but if we never take an active part in setting
specific plans for ourselves we severely limit our abilities, skills and
outward achievements.

No other person knows

all our talents, our experience, and desires,
no one person can decide for us everything that we can reach in the
shooting. Our families, our coaches, or the community around us can
help us to find our goals but we need to live a life based on our own
terms, it is up to us to take the initiative, to exercise our creativity
and to deploy our resources into action in such a way as to
add positive value to anything we do, for the good of others and
ourselves.

There are large stretches of our lives where nobody establishes
goals for us leaving it up to us to determine what we do with our
time and energy.
If we waste this opportunity to structure our lives creatively within
this realm of personal freedom we will never experience the full
range of happiness available to each of us.
Setting plans for your shooting is vitally important for achieving
greater levels of success in our sport.

Setting goals should be your first step toward achieving success.
When we refer to setting goals we are talking about setting
SMART goals.

SMART is an acronym for Specific, Measurable,
Actionable, Realistic, and Timed.

S = Specific

Your goals should be very specific right down to every last detail. A
vague goal will not trigger your subconscious into action. If you set
your goal as “I want to achieve more success in 2009,” that is much
too vague. Success can hold many different meanings for different
people. Success for one person may be winning at the Olympic
Games and for someone else, it may be to shoot a result 370 in Air
Rifle (AR) 40.

M = Measurable

Your goals must be measurable – for example “I want to reach a
result of 590 in prone within 6 months.” It needs to be specific such
as “I want to become a national team member from September of
this year.”

A = Actionable or Attributable
Setting a goal that is actionable means that you have to take some
type of action to determine the outcome of reaching your goal.
Setting goals that are not actionable is a waste of time. You need to
have control over the outcome of the goal, such as if your goal was
to become a national team member in September of this year you
are going to have to accomplish better results in qualification shoots
and competitions.

R = Realistic
When setting goals you need to be realistic. You should not set a
goal to be a national team member if you are a beginner. Small goal
steps are better than large steps!

T = Timed
A well-thought-out goal must include a timescale and must not be
open-ended. Goals can be short (days and weeks) and longer-term
(months, years).

But you will reach it only if you always have a GOAL.

As you travel through this wonderful journey of shooting life, do so
with a clear conception of what you want, a vivid vision, using goals
that are imagined and set using these principles! This is the
first step towards winning!