Everything Horses and Livestock Magazine
EHALmagazine.com|
February 2017
| ©
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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