Goal Setting Strategies Learned from Olympic Champions

When it comes to setting goals for the New Year, have you wondered how Olympic athletes do it? What can we learn from those Olympic champions? World records and Olympic champions are never accidental. The ways and strategies they use to set and accomplish their goals can be very effective and must have really worked for them. In similar ways, they can work for us too.

When we set goals, an important decision is about the size. Is it better to set large goals, or small ones? The idealistic answer to that is “large ones”. Because they bring us maximum result and realize our full potential. That’s also how you get to win gold medals if you are an Olympian.

But those large and lofty goals are usually very difficult to accomplish, so for average people they are rarely realized. On the other hand, smaller goals are often easy to achieve, but may not be significant enough to make any real change in our life.

The best strategy therefore is to aim high and celebrate incremental progress toward our larger goals. It is also a better approach to finding happiness and fulfillment from the goal setting process.

When we watch the Olympics, we usually see teams that ranked 3rd and 4th compete for the bronze medal, while 1st and 2nd fight for the gold. In both finals, the teams who won bronze and gold medals were often jubilant and would dance around in excitement, while the losing teams in both matches were understandably disappointed.

This is all normal, and there is nothing unusual about any of these reactions. But what seems illogical is that the silver medal winners tend to react far less positively than those who won bronze medal, even though one would think placing second is still preferable than being third.

Therefore, psychologically it’s much better to feel like you’ve won, even if it’s an easier goal. There is a great advantage to setting a high goal. It will inspire and motivate you to reach for the stars. But what really works for most people is to break that big goal down to relevant and smaller goals, which you will more easily get to by staying positive and motivated. And once these smaller goals are achieved, the large ones are often very close to reach.