EHAL Magazine February 2017

Everything Horses and Livestock Magazine

February 2017

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Everything Horses and Livestock

you will want to incorporate intermediate goals into

your training cycles as well as short-term goals in

your daily and weekly activities.

Think of goal setting like climbing a mountain. Your

ultimate goal is to reach the summit; but to reach it

you must break the climb into segments (intermedi-

ate goals) and then divide those segments into in-

dividual steps (short-term goals). The feedback you

gain along the way will allow you to readjust your

short-term and intermediate goals to stay on course

for your long-term goals.

3. Goals are not just for your shooting events. It is

just as important to include goals in you and your

equine partners training. Benchmark goals can help

you monitor your progress on a regular basis, and

daily or weekly training goals can help you stay

focused on both you and your horses training ob-

jectives, especially when life sometimes makes it

difficult to see the forest for the trees.

4. Create specific goals. Specific goals, rather than

vague ones, will provide clarity to your training

program. Rather than saying, I want to improve

my shooting skills (vague), specify, I want to move

to the next class or level in mounted shooting this

season (specific).

5. Specific goals need also to be measureable.

If you want to move to the next class or level in

mounted shooting, then you have a way to measure

that goal – by gaining individual wins at shooting

events. Measureable goals often involve time tar-

gets, e.g. I want to shoot ten out of ten targets.

6. Speak your goals with a positive tongue. Rather

than saying, I cannot miss any balloons today (neg-

ative), state, I will shoot each balloon one at a time,

as each one comes to me (positive).

7. Set goals that you have control over. This means

focusing more on performance and process goals

than outcome goals. Outcome goals have to do

with placement in the overall results, performance

goals have to do with achieving a certain number

of popped balloons for example, and process goals

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