Setting Your Goals In Soccer and Challenges

Many youth soccer players share the dream of going pro. Ask them how they plan on getting there, and they’ll probably say something along the lines of, “You have to be an amazing player.”

Now ask them how they plan on doing that. Odds are, they won’t have an answer. Suddenly, the path to their dream isn’t so clear.

Athletes can add a sense of clarity to their future by breaking their dreams down into goals, and then breaking those goals down into actionable steps called challenges. Clarifying your goals and challenges makes your dreams seem significantly more attainable by giving you a way to tell if you’re on the right track towards achieving them. And every step closer is certainly worth celebrating.

The Difference Between Goals and Challenges

Goals are important steps towards your bigger, loftier dreams. For instance, if your dream is to become a professional soccer player, your first goal might be to earn a spot on a higher local club team. That’s definitely an important step towards going pro. Now, how do you go about achieving this goal?

This is what challenges are for. You might think of challenges as a method of measuring your progress in terms of skills, athleticism, and soccer IQ. Challenges are meant for the near future, and they give players more reasons to be proud of their development. Without challenges, you have fewer reasons to be proud of yourself until you reach your goal. Good luck making your club team when you don’t feel satisfied with your progress.

The point is, challenges are vital for maintaining confidence. Every accomplished challenge brings your confidence up a level. If you set appropriate challenges, you’ll be brimming with confidence on a constant basis, setting you up for continuous success.

Setting Your Challenges

So, your goal is to make a higher club team. For this to happen, you have to make improvements in different aspects of your game. Welcome to your first set of challenges.

For instance, let’s say you want to improve your speed and agility. Your challenge could be to beat your opponent to the ball every time you’re pitted against another player in a race for ball control.

Another challenge could be related to passing with your weak foot. In this case, you could set a challenge to spend 15 minutes a day for a month doing some wall passing with only your weak foot.

These accomplishments may seem small at first, but they serve as hard evidence of your improvement. Pretend you didn’t set any challenges for your next match. When the match is over, how will you know if you demonstrated improvements in any aspect of your game? How will you know if you’re on track towards your goal? Without this knowledge, your confidence would remain stagnant or even take a dip instead of growing as it should.

Clarifying Goals and Challenges Through Mentoring

At Beyond Goals Mentoring, a big reason we put so much emphasis on establishing challenges is to bring the player’s attention to the present. When your mind is occupied by the future and long-term goals, it’s easy to forget why you started playing soccer in the first place. And all the success in the world is meaningless if you’re not having fun.

So, if your athlete has big dreams but isn’t sure where to start, let’s set up a mentoring session so we can help them narrow down their dreams, goals, challenges, and most importantly, what they find most fulfilling about the sport they love.