28.10.24

With summer race and event season closing, take time to reflect on your achievements. We often move on to new goals without realising what we learned, or we dismiss or play down achievements.

What might you want to reflect on?

Did you enjoy yourself?

Being honest with yourself about enjoyment can be harder than you think. For example, are you swept along with others in something you think will be fun and then realise the experience wasn’t fun after all? Then, even when you realise it wasn’t fun, you find yourself telling others you did enjoy it. This might mean you are a people pleaser, and it can be linked to your desire to be accepted and feel belonging within a group. There is nothing wrong with this provided you are having fun and are accepted. It’s not so great if you realise your efforts go unnoticed and you feel marginalised or excluded. The extrinsic praise or reward from others that is important to you can be crucial to your sense of enjoyment. If your sense of enjoyment is driven by intrinsic, innate or internal motivation and you find you didn’t have as much fun as you’d hoped you might want to investigate what really motivates you. Noticing how you feel and accepting, rather than denying it, can be a game changer. For example, if you notice that you are hating every moment of an extended bicycle hill climb and find yourself close to tears, realising that you dreaded every hill climb in your training it might be time to stop torturing yourself with hilly cycle routes or events. If on the other hand, you relish the challenge of hilly rides and thrive on the views, soak up the rush of every descent and feel incredibly satisfied when you reach the peak of each hill then you are in the right place, doing the right thing.

Did you choose the right event/s?

This leads us on to choosing the right event. By reviewing your sense of enjoyment and rating each of the events you completed by scoring out of 10, you’ll build a clearer picture of what went well last season. Use this information to make decisions about what might be next. Let’s say you entered 4 events, you score all but one of them at less than 6 out of 10, and the 4th event at 8 out of 10. Look at that event: everything about it. The disciplines involved, the duration, the location, the competitiveness, the social aspects, your perception of success in your performance. What sets it apart from the others? Does this seem like it connects with your idea of what the right event is?

Did you achieve what you hoped to?

Achieving what you hoped is directly linked to your goal setting at the beginning of last season. If you followed a SMART goal setting process, the chances of achieving what you hoped are more likely. The Specificity of your goal or goals is key, i.e. is or was the goal specific to you and the intended outcome? Or are you following someone else’s goals? Is or was the goal Measured against a benchmark. This doesn’t have to be a physical benchmark like getting faster, it can be a psychological benchmark like, “I am, or was, much calmer at the start of my events.” Understanding the Achievability of your events is crucial. Working with your coach to establish what achievable means to you at the start of a season will help foster feelings of confidence and self-efficacy. If you begin with unachievable goals, you will inevitably feel affected emotionally and failure will be an effect or consequence from which recovery is difficult. The Relevance (and realistic nature) of your goals having described the S, M & A before becomes inherently woven into the picture. Can you honestly say that this goal is relevant to you just now? How do you know this? Will succeeding make a positive difference to your life or how you feel about yourself? I like to include Reviewed as representative of R as well: it allows you to reflect, adapt and change your goals along the way and should be integral to your relationship with your coach. Finally, T is for Time-bound and also links with the previous letters of the acronym. Without having a time-scale in place, however tight or loose, it is very difficult to measure your success or realise achievements in a satisfying way.

Did you learn anything?

So, the season is over. You may have achieved excellent results and performed your very best. Do you take this for granted, believe you are invincible and carry on with expectations of more of the same next year? Are you humble and dismissive of your achievements always playing your performance down? Or did you have a stinker of a year and struggle through, underperforming? Did you blame this on circumstances and others and feel angry things didn’t go your way? Perhaps you blamed this on yourself and believe you are just hopeless at your sport? There are many different ways of being and feeling in sport as there are in life. Regardless of how you are as a person, a key outcome is to learn from your experiences and observations. People grow and develop as a result of numerous influences and learning stages in life and what you believe to be true about yourself will be instrumental in the picture you hold of your future. To learn from the season before, take a big gulp of honesty and look at the evidence and proof behind your performance to form a true picture of how to develop in a way that is authentic. For example, if your excellent results are directly linked to achieving your SMART goals and genuinely improving against your measures then, yes, you can pat yourself on the back and feel proud of your success. It is key to note how much hard work and commitment was involved in this and that this level of success is not so much about invincibility as resilience. And if your disappointing results are linked to a combination of circumstances, commitments to others and not making the best choices about events the key here is to consider the comments above about what matters to you. There is no amount of squeezing that will fit a square peg into a round hole. Choose events that work for you.