An earlier blog post discussed the idea of setting the right goals. Let’s consider setting boundaries or rules in this post. First of all what are boundaries in your sports context? There are lots of different contexts in which boundaries are set. For today, let’s consider boundaries you set yourself.

Typically a self-set boundary might be time and/or location based, “I need to train for 1 hour to train today and I’m going to be at the gym.” This has obvious practical implications, such as when is that hour, where you will be and it roughly defines how much activity you can complete. These can be described as external boundaries.

Other boundaries that exist might be internally driven and they might sit somewhere between conscious and subconscious in terms of how aware you are of their effect. For example, “I’m only going to be happy with this session if I push myself harder than last week.” Here you’ve set yourself a rule or a challenge that defines how you feel as an outcome and also outlines the physical endeavour in a comparative way to what you’ve done before. The effects of this can be varied. Lets picture the scene and say that you have achieved the physical challenge of pushing yourself harder than last week – you know this because you have a ‘binary’ record of your physical performance such as jumping higher, riding for longer, running faster as compared to last time. By your own rules, this should mean that you are happy with the outcome. Are you? If you are, what are the consequences of being happy with the outcome? Do you stop training now you’ve achieved that goal? If you aren’t, what are the consequences of being unhappy? Do you continue to strive towards the perpetual upward trajectory of pushing yourself harder than last week? Where might that lead? Potentially to injury, feelings of under achieving and fatigue.

Noticing how our tendency to set boundaries consciously or subconsciously and whether they are based on external or internal drivers can help us to understand how we might change the way that we set them for a better performance outcome. How? Let’s consider the situation described above again. Change your thinking just a little bit and the effect on your performance could potentially be quite wide ranging, “I’ll be happy with this session if I try to push myself harder.” By removing the very definitive and restrictive word ‘only’ you’ve given yourself more room to be happy with your performance and by extending the terms of pushing yourself harder to trying to push yourself harder, you can base your judgement of trying harder on more than just a binary (or numerical) outcome such as jumping higher. It might be that you tried a new or different style of jumping and this can be part of your success, or if it goes wrong, part of your failure that needn’t be a catastrophe.

In short, by replacing strict ‘must do’, ‘only acceptable’, ‘have to’, ‘need to’ thoughts or rules with something more flexible such as ‘try to’, ‘hope to’, ‘develop this’ you are more likely to feel that you’ve achieved what you planned.