“The game has its ups and downs, but you can never lose focus of your individual goals and you can’t let yourself be beat because of lack of effort”— Michael Jordan

Goal setting is a powerful process for thinking about your ideal future, and for motivating yourself to turn your vision of this future into reality.

In order to set effective goals, there are some common goal setting mistakes which you must avoid to achieve success in your basketball mental game. When you make these goal setting mistakes, your goals serve to hinder you rather than inspire you.

When you start setting goals, you may see many things that you want to accomplish. So you start setting goals in all areas.

The problem with this is that you have a fixed amount time and energy. If you try to focus on many different goals at once, you can’t give individual goals the attention they deserve.

Instead, use the “quality, not quantity” rule when setting goals. Work out the relative importance of everything that you want to accomplish over the next six to twelve months. Then pick no more than, three goals to focus on.

Remember, the success of your work towards a goal rests on focusing on just a few things at a time. If you limit the number of goals you’re working on, you’ll have the time and energy you need to do things really well!

It takes time to improve your basketball mental game, get mentally tough and accomplish your ultimate goals. And sometimes it can feel that you aren’t making much progress.

This is why it’s important to take stock of everything that you’ve accomplished on a regular basis.

Set small sub-goals, celebrate your successes, and analyze what you need to do to keep moving forward. No matter how slow things seem, you probably are making progress!

You can also take this opportunity to update your goals, based on what you’ve learnt. Have your priorities changed? Or do you need to set aside some extra time for a particular goal activity?

Goals are never set in stone, so don’t be afraid to amend them if you need to.

When things get hard or don’t go as well as you plan, you tend to give up or quit.

Life happens. You will fail. You will make mistakes. Things will go wrong.

Just because you’re not seeing results as quick as you would like doesn’t mean you have to give up. You just need to focus on building your confidence to be strong in adversity.

Motivation plays a key role in determining your success, and it’s also a fundamental part of exercise.

Choose a mastery-oriented approach instead of ego-oriented approach because it can be measured, and it is helpful in keeping you on track with your training program.

Goal setting doesn’t need to be difficult, to be tedious or fruitless.

If you set and achieve goals that really mean a lot to you, you will literally change your world around!

You have all the power inside you‒you just need to tap into it.

*Download the free mental game assessment and get started on Improving your Mental Game in Basketball