When I was in high school, specifically my junior and senior year, our football program hadn't made it to the playoffs in years. We weren't the best team, especially my junior year. Therefore, our team set a long-term goal to make the playoffs that year. Specifically, we had a goal of winning five games that year in conference, which would allow us to compete in the playoffs. That was our hoped-for ideal state of mind that year, a future, higher goal than in the past. As we discussed in class, people who set goals outperform those without goals. I think this is often mistakes coaches make when leading their teams. They don't make it clear what their target goal is and what they want to accomplish. Within the present status of our team, however, there existed a discrepancy (discrepancy creation) which helped provide a motivational basis for our actions.
This wasn't an impossible goal, but the goal difficulty was enough (moderately difficult) to energize and increase our performance. Each game provided the necessary feedback for our success and failures, helping determine how close or far we were from making the playoffs. With this feedback, our efforts were arguably enhanced as these specific short-term goals of winning a game energized our efforts, our persistence, and by directing attention and strategy. This feedback of victories and defeats, or knowledge of results, allowed us to keep progress of our results.
In the end, we accepted this goal, set extrinsically by the coaches even though many of the players were already intrinsically motivated to achieve this goal. This goal really worked because game-by-game we were rewarded (or punished) based on the result of the football game. They provided us each week a short term goal which, when repeated successfully, provide committment boosting opportunities for reinforcement.
In the article below,
http://www.mindtools.com/page6.html
personal goal setting is expanded upon:
"Goal setting techniques are used by top-level athletes, successful business-people and achievers in all fields. They give you long-term vision and short-term motivation. They focus your acquisition of knowledge and help you to organize your time and your resources so that you can make the very most of your life.
By setting sharp, clearly defined goals, you can measure and take pride in the achievement of those goals. You can see forward progress in what might previously have seemed a long pointless grind. By setting goals, you will also raise your self-confidence, as you recognize your ability and competence in achieving the goals that you have set."
It also has an interesting section on achieving more with focus within personal goals as well as lifetime goals, which is something I may expand upon more in future blogs.
Last year, I decided that it was finally time to start thinking about the step after college. For me, I knew that I had to go to grad school. As we discussed in class, and you have in this post, setting short-term goals was crucial in obtaining the long-term goal. Reeve (2005) also reinforces this: "To accomplish a distant goal, the performer first has to attain several requisite short-term goals" (p. 210).
So, in spring of my junior year, I began researching graduate schools and narrowing down the programs I wanted to apply for. My goal for that time period was to compile a list of schools that made the first cut. I also got the guts to actually sign up for a time to take the GRE - no turning back now! Then, summer came and I had to set multiple short-term goals to study - after taking the free summer GRE prep course at UNI, I had different goals to learn a certain number of vocab words, do a certain portion of the quant section, etc. This kept me semi-motivated to achieve the goals because they were so close (Reeve, 2005, p. 211). From obtaining these series of short-term goals, I was reinforced enough to keep myself committed and my needs satisfied (Reeve, 2005, p. 211).
I agree with the original post's article that short-term goal setting for a long-term goal is used in every aspect of life. For example, the long-term goal we have set for ourselves is to obtain our BA (or BS). Four years (or five... or six... lol) seems like a long time, but because we have short-term goals (passing classes after each semester), we don't think of graduating as such an unobtainable goal.
Just like in the original post, because your high school hadn't made the playoffs in awhile, you could say that making the playoffs would be a little lofty, and simply just play and give up on the goal. However, because you focused on short-term goals (i.e. winning game 1, game 2, game 3, and so on), the feedback and reinforcement you received from them allowed you to stay motivated and persistent to achieve your long-term goal.
I found this post really interesting becuase I did my article analysis this week on an article about setting goals. Setting goals in atheletics is extremely popular but I guess I never thought of that as an example. In the article I read "Harnessing The Imagination: Mental stimulation, Self-regulation, and Coping" they described mentally visualizing yourself accomplishing the goal. But more importantly, they described the most successful way to do so. In their studies, they had students visualize themselves studying and how they would go about getting the 'A' (Process Stimulation) and then another group of students visualize themselves receiving the grade 'A' (outcome stimulation). They found when setting goals for youself, it was more succesful to visualize the actual process and the steps necessary to reach your overall goal.
According to Reeve (p 219) "to accomplish a distant goal, the performer first has to attain seeral requisite short-term goals". I find this to be extremely true when relating back to this article-- keep you eye on the overall goal, but set the smaller goals first to have a better chance at achieving your overall goal :)
sorry, here is the article from my above comment--- it's through the Rod Library website so if you'd like to view it you might have to log in
http://psycnet.apa.org.proxy.lib.uni.edu/journals/amp/53/4/429.pdf