During my long tenure as a coach I would advise my athletes to establish goals that were based on the things they could control. For example, rather than setting a goal to win regionals, set a goal to be consistent onsighting the grade most likely to be set in routes at regionals.

If financial security is the goal, then determine an amount of savings in the bank that brings the sense of security. If there is number that gives you a sense of security, then set a goal to get to the amount you need to put into saving to get to that number, do you need a second job or other source of income? Or do you need to tighten the budget? Then set the objectives to get to the number you want.

In my experience, we are pretty good at not always choosing the right goals and really only get to know that through achieving something and finding out it wasn't really what we wanted. For example, the feeling of financial insecurity may stem from the annual salary we are getting. Looking around at folks we know and what they make, we may think we should be making more. However, it could be related more to the sense of not being valued leads to feeling financial insecurity, which leads to believing if we had more money, we would not feel this way. If the real desire is to feel valued; a feeling not contingent on the money in the bank. 

A desire to feel valued begins with valuing oneself. To achieve that goal, you have to look to yourself first to take steps to compliment your work, to value your time, to ensure you negotiate for what your personal needs are, and to live in accordance with your own values. Not only that, you must acknowledge your accomplishments every time you hit those. Gradually, you will feel that you are valuing yourself. 

Bottomline... to determine what goals to set, you need to know what leads you to the positive emotions of being fulfilled, that your contributions matter to something much bigger than yourself. An Olympian who competes to win a medal for the sense of self aggrandizement will quickly falter when the ego is battered by the better performance of another athlete.  The Olympian who competes for the love of the sport and the Nation's betterment will not be deterred by the high performance of another athlete. They will be spurred on to try even harder. 

I get to work with a variety of learners in a variety of formats and with a variety of content. There is nothing worse in my books than spending my time with people who do not want to be there. These folks are not motivated or inspired. A motivated person will show up with some curiosity about what they can take from this experience, be that knowledge or connections. An inspired person is hungry. They not only look for what they can learn, and who they can meet, they look for how what they get from this experience can take them to a place of being able to give to others. 

Motivation is driven by a desire to reach a goal. Consider this quote by Muhammad Ali, "Don't count the days. Make the days count," This is designed to motivate action in the moment. If you want to complete a degree, don't count the days until graduation, make the days count toward earning the degree - go to class, do the work.

Inspiration is rooted in purpose. Patanjali, the author of the Yoga Sutras is quoted as saying, "When you are inspired by some great purpose, some extraordinary project, all your thoughts break their bonds; your mind transcends limitations; your conscious expands in every direction; and you find yourself in a great, new and wonderful world". Inspiration is taking yourself beyond what you believe is even possible. That takes a great deal more than motivation, it takes a belief in the value of the effort.

As an athlete, I was not inspired. I was motivated to try hard and make the days count by doing deliberate practice. I struggled to buckle down to do the weight lifting or campusing. I struggled to make the days longer than the additional rep required. I did not enjoy the process, nor did I feel motivated to work through great pain for some send that was the next level for me. 

However, as a coach, I am inspired to get my athletes to believe in their own potential to be a better athlete than they currently were. That means I am inspired to understand the biomechanics of movement, to learn body cues that told me what muscles the athlete is activating, and where they are not activating. It requires me to learn about injuries and understand the best course of rest and return to play. Most importantly, it requires me to understand the attitude and individual purpose of each athlete. Their unique internal dialogue when confronted with challenge and fear. Using my own body and mind as a research subject, I am able to learn and to better understand and, in turn, coach.

Considers what motivates you. What goal are you wanting to achieve?

• Perhaps you want to get the job, or run at a particular pace, or finish a project.

What do you need to do to complete the goal? Notice how you feel as you write the list.

Now consider, what inspires you? What do you want to help others achieve? 

• Perhaps you want to see their smiling faces and the connection by bringing them altogether.
• Perhaps you want to see the shine on their face when they reach their goals.
• Perhaps you want to see the calm and peace in their heart and mind. 

What can you do to help them get to that feeling? What do you need to understand first? How can you create the space for it to happen? How do you feel as you consider these questions?

I suggest that the things that inspire bring forth more powerful feelings than the things that motivate. 

This is how the mind works... it takes external information and uses it to inform how we should feel. Read through the following thought development,

• I am trying to get an arrow onto a target from a specified distance. I miss the target. The thought is. "shoot, that wasn't very good." Pun intended.
• After ten weeks of practice though, I aim for the target at the same distance and I miss, the thought becomes, "I am not very good at this."
• Years of shooting arrows and 10,000 hours of practice and thought becomes, "I can't do it! I am unteachable!"

I went from "the shot wasn't good" to "I can't" and "I am unteachable."
Or, I went from focus on the performance to focus on how the performance defines me. 
Those 10,000 hours of just shooting arrows do not mean a thing if I am not applying deliberate practice. 
Deliberate practice is the craft of looking at how I was positioned making the shot and refining what I need to change or correct to improve the shot. 

How many of us use the principle of deliberate practice in our daily life?

• How frequently do we examine our interacts and see where we could have refined our word choice or our question?
• How frequently do we examine our daily habits and use deliberate practice to examine where we could have interrupted a habit with a more skilled choice?

If you are like most folks, probably not very often. We coast, repeating the patterns of thought we usually have. Doing so means we have the same outcomes. 

​This evening I thought about going to the grocery store, aghhh.. but the drive and the people. I thought about watching Netflix and aghhh, the boredom and snacking. Neither thought made me happy. Then I thought, go to the beach, no phone, no one else, just meander along the beach and see what happens. The result has been the reflections in this post. I hope you find it helpful and if you are unhappy, then deliberately practice disrupting the discouraging and negative thoughts and reframing the thoughts to more gratitude and awe is the path to start traversing.

When I first went into climbing gyms, the routes could meander and cross over each other when lead climbing. Climbers understood the practice of looking where the route would go and making decisions about which quickdraws and when they would clip them. Now gyms set routes in very narrow corridors to avoid cross over, the quickdraws are much closer together to avoid big falls, and the setters often allow for good clipping positions to remove the risk of a fall while clipping. These changes to how we approach climbing in a gym have been developed to prevent incidents. Consider that when I started climbing, I learned outside on traditional style routes. The potential for a serious fall had potentially bigger consequences so I was forced to understand how to prevent those consequences, or suffer life altering consequences. 

I do not think climbing is the only arena in which this is playing out. Folks going to school with an emphasis on consuming information and regurgitating it rather than applying due to the vast amount that is expected to be learned. I am curious where this will lead. Wisdom is often gained through the experience of applying knowledge in a variety of milieus. Relating what seem to be very different ideas to create something new.

Blooms taxonomy is a description of how one can assess the depth of learning. The lowest level of learning is in the realm of recall or remembering something. The middle level of understanding is analyzing something and applying the knowledge to make a judgement. This would be like assessing someone's belay skill and experience with a belay check. The greatest depth of learning is assessed by determining if the person can use the information to create something. If you wanted to assess a person's knowledge of climbing movement skills, you could ask them to set a route. Can they create a series of movements that are possible for a particular audience?

Consider how we take information on the internet or shared in programming as truth without critically thinking about whether it is perhaps not actually true. I hear these "truisms" all the time in climbing.

• You cannot ground fall after the second clip.
• Double wrapped belay bars are safer that single wrap.
  
• The Petzl Gri Gri is safer than a passive belay device.

The real answer is that with each of these truisms, there are circumstances when the statement is not true. But to understand the real truth requires more depth of understanding about lead falls, the forces, and weight differences, anchors, friction, and mechanics. We are moving perilously close to math with these conversations and to have this conversation requires time. Humans do not like uncertainty, preferring absolutes and easy answers. It creates a false sense of certainty and reduces our anxiety. It also absolves us of responsibility.