It's Now Or Never: Time to fix our next set of goals (From Dorset Echo)

It's Now Or Never: Time to fix our next set of goals

6:00pm Thursday 7th March 2013 in Sport By Echo Reporter

IT IS hard to believe that it is four months since we started our sailing campaign.

When you are immersed in the middle of everything it is hard to track whether you are progressing, so stopping to take a breath once in a while is important.

We still have plenty to work on but we also feel that we have achieved a lot since last November.

At the start we were lacking a boat, fitness, sponsorship and supporters. We hadn’t sailed in a long time and didn’t feel anywhere near ready to race around with other boats.

We have made progress in all those areas and have now reached the point where we are excited to line up against other teams and see how fast we are. In fact, we need this competition to establish our next set of goals.

We have been working with Joe Swindell, from Certa Leadership training, and the idea of having clear goals is something he has been helping us to think about.

We are learning that there is an interesting psychology to the setting of goals and how publicly we put them out there. For example, does stating a goal of where we are aiming to finish in Palma provide motivation or pressure? If we don’t achieve a publicly declared goal what impact will this have on us? Will we respond to it positively or will it knock our confidence?

We have been consistently very conservative when talking about how we expect to get on in Palma, simply because we don’t know where we are yet in relation to other teams.

This makes the event really important to enable us to identify our strengths and weaknesses and use this knowledge to set our goals for the rest of the year. It has been a really interesting exercise to talk through all of this stuff with someone objective who challenges us to be clear and honest with ourselves.

Setting ourselves a specific, stretching target for the Palma regatta is something we will do before we hit the start line.

Whether we decide to publish it here is still up for debate.