Practice Believing in Your Goals to Achieve Them

Practice Believing in Your Goals to Achieve Them
Written by Ricky Moore

As a coach there are two things that are the hardest to instill in athletes. The first is kinesthetic awareness and the second is tapping into the mental game. Everyone knows that kinesthetic awareness takes hundreds if not thousands of repetitions. The mental side, in my humble opinion, takes millions of repetitions, and is a lifelong skill we must always be trying to master not just in the gym or sports but everything we do in life to be successful and happy.

We have been seeing a great shift in the gym for wanting to reach competitive goals whether that is reaching a higher level in CrossFit, weightlifting and other sports or goals. I often get the question, “Coach, I want to go to Quarterfinals or Semifinals or Games as an athlete.” With then another follow up question of, “How long does it take, how long did it take you, or how did you do it?” 

Those are a lot of loaded questions and I can take the easy way out and respond, “Well, it depends!” (Which is true, everyone is different and way too many variables in life there to be a direct answer for everyone.)

But quick answers to those questions are that it took me 5 years with an AMAZING community, coaching staff and the last piece is that I truly BELIEVED I would make it to the CrossFit Games one day on a team. (I never wanted to do it individually, ask C.J. and Tino about that haha). 

Believing in Your Goals is Key

I BELIEVED. I didn’t put a time frame on it however. Each day, each skill, each time domain, each variable of fitness is that I BELIEVED it would happen. The same goes with skills, with careers, with everyday life. I see inside the gym of people that all WANT something but very few BELIEVE they can or will.

Let’s take weightlifting for example. I have seen hundreds maybe thousands of attempts for PR’s at either Snatch, Clean, Jerk, Squat, etc. Every single one of them “want” to make that weight but 87.34927% of them don’t BELIEVE they can. Then I start to explain the difference between “WANTING” and “BELIEVING”. For most a light bulb clicks and they find what we coaches call the “AHAAA” moment with the athlete.

How to Practice Believing in Your Goals

So with your goals inside and outside of the gym start to practice more BELIEVING. It takes a lot of reps to learn how to develop a new skill. Consider this a new skill and really focus on practicing BELIEVING in what you can do. You may not get it in a day, week, month or year even. You will get it when you are honest with yourself about it and that is when goals become reality.