Goal Setting for Athletes: Nick Davis on Mental Skills

Based on Episode 75 of the Just Fly Performance Podcast, a conversation between host Joel Smith and Nick Davis, head women’s track and field coach at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse and a trained sport psychologist.

Good goal setting for athletes rarely fails because the athlete lacks ambition. It fails because the goal is a single finish-line wish with no structure underneath it. That is the case Nick Davis, a college track coach with a master’s degree in sport psychology, makes across this episode. Davis treats the goal as the visible tip of a system: an outcome anchored to a real performance standard, consistency targets that prove you are getting closer, and a stack of process goals you can actually control day to day. The rest of his mental-skills toolkit, self-talk logs, visualization, and practicing competition, exists to keep athletes moving through that system instead of freezing in front of it.

Key Takeaways

• Set three layers of goals, not one. Davis maps an outcome goal, performance and consistency goals, and process goals, and spends most of his time on the process layer the athlete can control.
• Anchor the outcome to a real standard. If an athlete wants to be an All-American, they should know the mark it actually takes, so the goal builds confidence instead of dread.
• Plan the obstacles before the season starts. Time management, injury history, and sleep get named up front and given strategies, so an obstacle stops being an obstacle.
• Make the worrier’s self-talk visible. A self-talk log shows anxious athletes how negative they really are; awareness comes first, then reframing thoughts into something productive.
• Practice competition and rehearse the state. Meet simulations, a pre-competition routine, and visualization (controllability before vividness) help an athlete find and hold the arousal sweet spot where they perform best.

Why goal setting for athletes usually goes wrong

Davis is a believer in goals, but he is blunt that most people set them badly, which is why so many athletes come to distrust the whole exercise. The first problem is that athletes name a result without knowing how to build toward it.

I don’t know that a lot of athletes really know how to set goals. They just say things or want things that they think they should want, versus things that excite them and keep them up at night.

The second problem is a misunderstanding of what a good goal even looks like. If every goal is comfortably in reach, the athlete is not actually stretching. Davis wants athletes to expect to fall short of the top goal, and to treat that as a sign the target was set honestly.

If you’re setting goals well, you’re not reaching all your goals. You’re always going to have a goal that you end on that you don’t quite make.

For a coach, the application is to stop rubber-stamping enthusiasm. A goal an athlete picks because it sounds impressive, or one set so low it is guaranteed, both fail the same way: they do not drive the daily behavior that produces the result.

The goal-mapping system: outcome, performance, and process goals

Davis runs athletes through a specific sequence he calls goal mapping. It starts with an outcome goal, the competitive finish an athlete is chasing, such as making the podium at conference or reaching All-American status. But he refuses to let the athlete stop there, because an outcome with no attached standard cannot guide a season.

If you want to be an All-American, you should have an idea of the standard it takes to achieve that goal, because if you’re nowhere near that, how is it going to contribute to your confidence over the course of the year?

So the next layer is a performance goal (a height, distance, or time) plus consistency goals that make progress measurable across the season, like clearing a standard in a set percentage of meets. Davis ties this to a simple competitive truth: a championship result is usually just a reflection of the athlete’s ordinary week-to-week level.

When you get to a championship meet, you’re about as good as your average meet. If you’re feeling confident about what that average meet is, you’re more confident going into that championship meet.

The layer he cares about most is the process goal, because it is the only one the athlete fully controls. These are the measurable, shorter-term skill targets that, stacked up, make the performance and outcome take care of themselves.

Where we spend most of our time is on the process goals. Those are the areas that are more measurable, shorter-term goals focused on skill acquisition.

Plan for the obstacles before the season starts

The final step in Davis’s goal map is one many programs skip entirely: naming the things most likely to derail the plan before they happen. He has athletes list the obstacles at the outset, then builds a strategy for each so it loses its power to surprise them mid-season.

What are some obstacles that could potentially be in your way throughout the year? Let’s come up with some strategies so that those things don’t happen, so that obstacle is no longer an obstacle anymore and they can focus on what’s important, which is the process.

In practice that means concrete conversations: a college athlete short on time gets time-management coaching, an athlete worried about a recurring injury builds a self-care and prehab routine and a sleep habit. The point is not to predict the future but to keep a foreseeable setback from becoming a season-ending excuse.

Self-talk logs: making the worrier’s inner voice visible

Davis draws a line between the athlete who is energized by a big moment and the one paralyzed by it, the warrior and the worrier. His most useful tool for the worrier is not a pep talk but a record. He has athletes keep a self-talk log for a day, a week, or a single practice, and the first pass is usually a shock to them.

A lot of times I’ve had athletes do a self-talk log. The first time we do this with athletes who tend to be worriers, they are almost appalled by how negative they really are.

Awareness is only the setup. From there he reframes the negative thoughts, not into empty positivity, but into something that would actually help the next attempt. He also warns that none of this is a one-time fix.

There are no Band-Aids. The Band-Aid might work for a day, and then all of a sudden it doesn’t work the next day. Does that mean scrap the idea? No, it means work at it.

Underneath the tool is a stance about ownership. Davis holds athletes accountable for their own thoughts and emotions precisely because he believes those are trainable, not fixed.

They don’t feel a lot of times that they have control, but it is their choice to feel what they feel.

Build a pre-competition routine around your arousal sweet spot

Davis wants every athlete to know where they perform best on the internal dial between calm and fired up, and to notice fast when they have drifted out of it. He describes this as an individual bandwidth, the sport psychology idea of an optimal zone of functioning.

Athletes that are strong in competitive situations are aware of where their sweet spot is in terms of their arousal and anxiety levels. They know where they operate best, and they’re also aware of when they’re not in that sweet spot.

His method for finding that zone is counterintuitive: study your best days, not your worst. Coaches and athletes reflexively pick apart failures, but Davis argues the blueprint lives in the performances that already went right.

Oftentimes we don’t analyze our best day as much as we should, because really, that’s where the answer lies. What were you thinking, what did you do to get yourself in the state you were in the day you did your very best?

A pre-competition routine then gives the athlete a reliable way back to that state, hyping up or calming down on demand. Davis leans on breathing and mindfulness work for the calming side, and points athletes toward simple daily practice (even a meditation app on the walk to class), because the value is the felt sense of control it gives them when a meet turns chaotic.

Visualization that works: controllability before vividness

Visualization is central to Davis’s program, but he is careful about how he introduces it, because a worrier who imagines failure just rehearses the fear. His progression mirrors any physical skill: master control of a simple image first, then add sensory richness.

If you’re going to use visualization as a coach, give them the opportunity to start off small. You want to make sure that they have controllability first, but then, as they get better and better, start adding some vividness to that visualization.

He makes the imagery concrete by removing the unknown from championship venues in advance, so the setting feels familiar the first time an athlete actually competes there.

We’ll take pictures of where the championship sites are, so they can get a sense of being there before they’re actually there. When they’re competing, in their minds they’re like, well, I’ve done this a hundred times before.

He is equally clear about the limit of all this mental work: you cannot force flow. You can only build the conditions that make it more likely.

The hard thing about flow is that flow is not something you can actively think about doing. You’re so immersed in what you’re doing that you lose all track of thought process.

Practice competition, don’t just run drills

All of the goal and mental-skill work is wasted if the only place an athlete meets pressure is the actual meet. Davis builds competitive stress into practice on purpose, both planned meet simulations and unplanned, on-the-spot scenarios, so athletes learn to perform under conditions that resemble the real thing.

If we’re just doing drills all day and patting ourselves on the back for executing drills properly, well that’s great, but that’s happening in isolation, outside of that actual environment where they’re going to be asking themselves to perform.

When an athlete falls apart under that manufactured pressure, Davis does not just hand over another technical cue. He asks what is actually running through their head, on the theory that a coach who treats symptoms will never reach the cause.

I want to ask them, what is the self-talk that’s going on in your head right now? Because maybe you’re not thinking about the right things, or maybe you’re fearing failure. Instead of watching the symptoms play out, let’s go to the root of the problem and try to fix that.

He also turns the mirror on the coach. Part of an athlete’s anxiety, Davis argues, is manufactured by coaching that piles on too many internal cues, and research on attentional focus backs the fix.

Research shows pretty consistently that external cues, focused on the outcome of the skill, yield better results than having them focus on their foot or their hip or their arm.

Frequently asked questions

How should athletes set goals?
Davis maps goals in layers rather than naming a single result. Start with an outcome goal, attach the real performance standard it requires, add consistency goals that track progress across the season, then build the process goals (the controllable, skill-focused daily targets) where most of the effort should go. Finally, list the likely obstacles and plan for them before the season starts.

What is the difference between outcome, performance, and process goals?
An outcome goal is a competitive result (make the podium, place at nationals). A performance goal is a specific mark (a height, distance, or time) that matches that outcome. A process goal is a controllable, shorter-term skill target you work on day to day. Davis stresses that athletes control the process directly and the outcome only indirectly.

What are process goals in sports?
Process goals are the measurable, skill-focused steps an athlete can control regardless of the result, covering both physical qualities and mental approach, such as improving a specific technical element, a speed or strength target, or being more consistent with positive self-talk. Davis argues that stacking process goals lets the performance and outcome take care of themselves over time.

Does visualization improve athletic performance?
Davis finds it valuable when it is taught carefully. He starts athletes with simple, controllable images before adding sensory vividness, because a worrier who vividly imagines failure only deepens the anxiety. Done in the right order, visualization builds familiarity and control, which is why he even shows athletes photos of championship venues in advance.

How do athletes get into a flow state?
You cannot will yourself into flow, according to Davis, because the state depends on being so immersed that you stop tracking your own thinking. What you can do is build the conditions: feel competent for the demand, sit inside your arousal sweet spot, and study your best past performances to learn how you got there, so it happens more often.

About the authors

Nick Davis is the head women’s track and field coach at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse and holds a master’s degree in sport psychology. A former jumper and javelin thrower at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, he has coached at Marquette University and MIT and was named USTFCCCA New England Regional Assistant Coach of the Year in 2015 and 2016. His work centers on the mental side of performance: goal setting, self-talk, visualization, and preparing athletes to compete.

Joel Smith is the host of the Just Fly Performance Podcast and the founder of Just Fly Sports, a former collegiate strength and track and field coach who focuses on speed, power, and athletic development. Listen to the full episode with Nick Davis on Just Fly Sports.