Goal-setting is vital, but your goals must be realistic and attainable to prevent frustration. What’s the best way to set goals to improve your dancing?

Setting Effective Goals

The following broad guidelines will help you set effective goals:

• State each goal as a positive statement: Express your goals positively - 'Execute this technique well' is a much better goal than 'Don't make this stupid mistake'
• Be precise: Set a precise goal, putting in dates, times, and results so that you can measure achievement. If you do this, you will know exactly when you have achieved the goal and can take complete satisfaction from having achieved it.
• Set priorities: When you have several goals, give each a priority. This helps you to avoid feeling overwhelmed by too many goals, and helps to direct your attention to the most important ones.
• Write goals down: this crystallizes them and gives them more force.
• Keep operational goals small: Keep the low-level goals you are working toward small and achievable. If a goal is too large, it can seem that you are not making progress. Keeping goals small and incremental gives more opportunities for reward. Derive today's goals from larger ones.
• Set performance goals, not outcome goals: You should take care to set goals over which you have as much control as possible. There is nothing more dispiriting than failing to achieve a personal goal for reasons beyond your control. These could be bad conditions, poor judging, bad weather, injury, or just plain bad luck. If you base your goals on personal performance, then you can keep control over the achievement of your goals and draw satisfaction from them.
• Set realistic goals: It is important to set goals that you can achieve. All sorts of people (parents, media, society) can set unrealistic goals for you. They will often do this in ignorance of your own desires and ambitions. Alternatively you may be naïve in setting very high goals. You might not appreciate either the obstacles in the way, or understand quite how many skills you must master to achieve a particular level of performance.
• Do not set goals too low: Just as it is important not to set goals unrealistically high, do not set them too low. People tend to do this when they are afraid of failure. You should set goals so that they are slightly out of your immediate grasp, but not so far that there is no hope of achieving them. No one will put serious effort into achieving a goal that they believe is unrealistic. However, remember that your belief that a goal is unrealistic may be incorrect. If this could be the case, you can to change this belief by using imagery effectively. 

Achieving Goals

When you have achieved a goal, take the time to enjoy it! Absorb the implications of the goal achievement, and observe the progress you have made toward other goals.

• If the goal was a significant one, reward yourself appropriately.
• With the experience of having achieved this goal, review the rest of your goal plans:
• If you achieved the goal too easily, make your next goals harder
• If the goal took a dispiriting length of time to achieve, make the next goals a little easier
• If you learned something that would lead you to change other goals, do so.
  If while achieving the goal you noticed a deficit in your skills, decide whether to set goals to fix this.
• Failure to meet goals doesn’t matter as long as you learn from your experiences. Feed lessons learned back into your goal-setting program.

Remember, too, that your goals will change with time. Adjust them regularly to reflect this growth. If goals do not hold any attraction any longer, then let them go. Goal-setting is your servant, not your master. It should bring you real pleasure, satisfaction, and a sense of achievement.