“My goal is to win the next game one possession at a time. That’s it. I don’t have any other goals” – Brad Stevens

Defining and determining your goals is one of many psychological strategies that can help you achieve peak performances.

The process of setting goals not only influences your performances, but it’s linked to positive changes in a variety of psychological states, such as basketball confidence and basketball mental toughness.

Additionally, goal setting is a tool that can be beneficial in all areas of life, including your personal life.

Building a long-term career plan is an absolutely critical task for any professional players (young or experienced), since it serves as a “guiding light” to keep you focused and on-track.

Even though you start with a long-term plan, you can’t stop there – you need to connect the dots in between.

A full plan should have:

1. A long-term vision and mission – the future state you want your career to be on next 3 years and how you achieve it, based on your professional values
2. A series of medium-term objectives in support of that vision – the 6 months to 1 year milestones and goals to help you keep an eye of your long term vision
3. Short-term “plateaus” you can seek – skills, experiences, or accomplishments you can seek in the 1 to 6 months timeframe to help you achieve the medium-term objectives
4. Immediate goals – the 1 day to 1 week objectives that serve as the stepping stones to your final vision

The last two points are the most important to achieve your goals. Your long-term career vision and mission are built upon those immediate and short term accomplishments.

A common mistake many young professionals make is thinking they can jump to their long-term vision in one step; most likely, they are several steps away and need to understand and articulate the milestones in between.

Reach out to the successful basketball players who have achieved what you’re trying to achieve, and either reach out to them to understand the steps they took, or study their profiles to figure out their stepping stones.

The key concept is to understand the stepping stones to your long-term career vision and having a clear objective in mind with each step.

Once you’ve identified and started executing on your immediate and short term objectives, you can think of your medium-term objectives.

If you were clear about your medium-term objectives, you can break those down into a series of 6 months to 1 year “plateaus” – specific skills and experiences you’d like to acquire that build upon your collective skill set and make you a more valuable professional.

The reason to represent mid-term objectives as “plateaus” is because, your capabilities in a new area will initially expand rapidly, but your growth in that area will taper off after about 6 months – at that time, you should identify and start focusing on the next skill or experience you want to build. Here’s an illustrative example of how these plateaus “stack” to make you a more valuable professional:

If you’ve finished a year climbing a plateau and don’t feel you’ve succeeded yet, go for another year. If you feel you’ve succeeded – find the next plateau. If you can’t find your next plateau in your current situation, pull back and think about your next medium-term objective to guide your next move.

These ideas will help you connect the dots between your current situation and your long-term career plan.
Ultimately, it’s a matter of breaking down and understanding your long-term vision into the 1 to 3 year stepping stones, and always seeking the next 6 months to 1 year “plateau” to build your basketball mental game and your mental toughness.

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