Research has shown that setting yourself effective cricket goals can lead to an improvement of up to 78% in your game.

It's also one of the simplest techniques to employ in your efforts to becoming a better cricketer. All you need is a pen, paper and 10 minutes or so.

Goal Setting for Club Cricketers

Once you have a few minutes to yourself, take the following steps:

1. Write it down. Note everything that would like to achieve in cricket. It might be a season or for a certain part of it. It can be long term too, but don't write any goal that would take longer than a year to achieve. You can be as vague as you like here, but be realistic too. A goal of "Take loads of wickets" is fine, but "Play for England" might be a stretch.
2. Avoid performance goals. It's OK to try and score 600 runs in a season but you may not achieve it due to external factors. Try and make your goals more controllable. For example, gain more confidence, better concentration or bowling with more accuracy.
3. Get specific. Underneath each goal, write down a bit more detail about it. Here you need to decide on how you will measure the goal and what specifically you will do to get to it. For example, if you wanted to bowl with great accuracy you may set yourself the target of going to the nets for 3 hours a week to practice bowling at the stumps and you would measure success by how many hours a week you actually bowled.
4. Break it down. Break down the goals as far as possible. Some goals can be broken down monthly or weekly, some need a daily target. If you wanted to be more mobile in the field you may want to do dynamic flexibility work every day for example.
5. Review it often. Once you have all these specific, measurable and realistic goals keep them safe. Review them as often as needed (daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, whatever). If the goals are not as specific, realistic or challenging as they first seemed it is vital to adjust them to fit.

The most vital factor in goal setting is not the goals themselves, but the need to review them as often as possible. That way you can make sure they are realistic and keep moving towards them. Goals are your map to greater cricket performance. Don't miss out on such an easy way to improve.

Thanks to Roger Barnes emailing me a question about goal setting that I turned into this post.

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