Here is an interesting thought experiment for you… imagine you are a competitive athlete at the height of your career, fighting for a spot on the team and trying to evaluate your work to get better. Now imagine that you have no win-loss, RBI, GAA, personal records, trophies or medals to show you how you are doing.

How do you know if you are doing well? How do you know what to work on and where your strengths lie? What about your competition?  Where you stand if you don’t know who is winning? What if you are just starting off in this new sport and don’t have anything to base your performance upon?

This is the life of the sports official.

Let that sink in for a bit.

As an SPP practitioner, seeking the answers to these questions has helped me work with officials and with people in other performance domains (particularly those with wins and losses to look at).

Of course, referees have benchmarks and ways to look at their work but they never win or lose. Just like competitive athletes, they train, compete, evaluate, watch game film, and continuously strive to improve their game. Naturally, there are ratings, big games, important tournaments, and promotions which they can use to say they are doing well but those aren’t as clear as a stat sheet or record.

This leads to the concept of process goals. Things like “winning the Super Bowl” and “beating the national record” are usually outcome goals.

We don’t have control of outcome goals. Let’s take winning a club championship as an example. How many factors beyond an individual or team’s control go into winning that championship? There are opponents, weather, referees, injuries, illnesses, the bus might break down on the way to your playoff game… I could go on. So, you don’t win that championship. Does that make you a failure? Well, I suppose it depends on how you define success and failure. SPP practitioners caution against defining success and failure only in terms of wins and losses.

We do have control of process goals. When I work with an umpire, I like to break down the process into bite-sized pieces and create process goals from those bites. Everyone’s will be different but the key is knowing that (barring some totally unforeseeable circumstance) we control our process goals. For example, if someone wants to improve their rate of having their calls upheld on video review (outcome) we would break it down into the factors which go into making that good call for them. Perhaps they have been given the feedback that they are missing a step at midfield which puts them in a spot where it’s hard to make the correct call. We would break it down even farther to see what is happening in their mind to make them miss that step. Eventually they come up with a plan for recognizing that the situation is coming up and how to be proactive. That proactive step could be something like, “when play is at the 40m mark and moving toward me, I will take a lead step toward my goal,” and there you have a process goal. And if they also find that they have anxiety at making that high-stakes call, we would break that down into component parts as well. Anxiety isn’t always bad so we might just need to find a good way to use the anxiety.

And here’s the neat part, creating, managing, executing, and evaluating process goals can often help us move toward those outcome goals.