The Behavioral Science Behind Why Retired Athletes Suck at Non-Sport Goals
Retiring from sports marks the end of an era for athletes, but it is also the start of a new era, one usually filled with uncertainty. Did you have very clear and defined goals as an athlete? I know I did. Maybe you had a PR you wanted to achieve or a championship you wanted your team to win. Or maybe it was to reach a certain competitive level in your sport. So it should be easy to set goals for yourself outside of sports, right?
But maybe it’s not. Now in retirement, this could be a struggle, having no idea what goals to set in the other areas of your life? It seemed so easy in sports, you knew what you wanted to accomplish and went for it. Now it’s like…(crickets). Or maybe you have non-sport goals and struggle with being consistent in order to accomplish them.
So why doesn’t this goal-setting skill easily transfer to life after sports? From a behavioral perspective, there are multiple reasons why this is the case. Once you can see a new perspective on why setting and achieving non-sport goals is a challenge for retired athletes, you can take actions to successfully set and achieve non-sport goals. In the world of applied behavior analysis (ABA), there are a lot of strategies to address these very things. Your girl here, a licensed and certified behavior analyst, is going to give you some of those reasons that are specific to former athletes. And then I’m going to tell you what you can do about it. Let’s go.
Generalization
One of the factors causing this divide between setting sport and non-sport goals is a lack of generalization. In the behavior world, this word has a slightly different meaning than how its used in everyday language. For our purposes, generalization is taking something you learned in a certain situation or environment and being able to use it across new situations or environments. In the world of ABA, or applied behavior analysis, there are many reasons why a skill may not generalize.
Sports have clear definitions of progress and success, whether it’s qualifying for a certain level, winning a tournament or championship, placing in the top tier, achieving a personal record or score, and the list goes on. These things are naturally built into competitive sports and athletes have a community of coaches, teammates and others supporting their goal development and achievement. And the more time you spend in a sport (often MANY years), the more you learn about what your potential is and what you want to achieve.
Competitive sports provided structure in your life when you were an athlete, from training sessions, competitive schedules to accountability to your coach, teammates and yourself. That gave you a clear path on what you wanted to accomplish, how you were going to do it and lots of opportunities to work toward it. Being in that world gave you what you needed to set and accomplish goals.
All of these factors create an environment that helps you set and achieve goals in your sport. When you retire, that environment is gone, along with its structure and accountability. Suddenly, you are faced with an abundance of free time and a lack of direction and support system, which can be disorienting and overwhelming.
Skills, like goal setting and achievement, more easily generalize from one environment (sport life) to a new environment (post-sport life) when there are common things in those environments. So let’s say your former coach all of a sudden becomes your boss at work. That person knows you well, knows your strengths and can help you set goals at work that are achievable because of the knowledge they have about you. They are a common thread in both environments, making it easier for you to generalize your goal setting skills.
In addition, it’s probable that the goals you have set and worked toward have been mainly sport goals, and maybe school goals. You haven’t had the opportunity to use the skill of goal setting and achieving in multiple aspects of your life. When skills are learned in a variety of ways, they are easier to transfer to other areas.
So how can you generalize this skill to life after sports?
This is one of the more challenging factors to address because setting non-sport goals happens AFTER you have developed the skill of setting sport goals. In behavior analysis, ideally you plan for generalization ahead of time and incorporate these plans into the learning process so that generalization occurs more naturally and easily later. Even though there was no planning for generalization, there are still strategies that can be used to support generalization after the fact.
The more common elements between the circumstances where you learned a skill and the one where you want to generalize it, the better. Identifying and incorporating areas of strength, like time management or discipline, that helped you achieve your goals as an athlete into your goals in your life after sports can help bridge the gap then and now. Additionally, if there were any tools you used to work toward sport goals, like charts, motivational reminders, checklists, etc. find ways to adapt and use them for your non-sport goals.
Another way to generalize goal setting and achievement is to start with goals that are similar to ones you had in your sport. Now, you may need to get creative with this one but there is often common ground in what you want to accomplish outside of sports. For example, maybe you want to maintain a certain physical skill that you had as an athlete. Or maybe you want to keep a certain schedule for a physical activity or something else. Even if this goal is not the ultimate one you want to achieve, starting with something familiar can give you the reinforcement and momentum to go bigger from there.
One more strategy for generalization I want to talk about is enlisting a coach. You may have heard this advice before but I want to talk about WHY it is an effective strategy from a behavioral and generalization perspective. Because when you understand the why behind a strategy, you are more likely to do it right and be successful.
As an athlete you had a coach guiding you, giving you feedback, reminding you what you needed to do, helping you structure your time. It was someone to be accountable to. There’s a good chance that all of this helped you achieve what you wanted. Now that you are retired from your sport, this support is no longer there to help you along. Athletes tend to be very intrinsically motivated but we can’t ignore the fact that there were also supports in place, like a coach and teammates, to help keep you making progress.
Having a coach to guide you in achieving your next goals is a very effective way to generalize this skill to your life after sports. A coach can be someone that specializes in what you want to achieve or specializes in working with former athletes. Or it can be your best friend or someone else that will help you structure the steps to achieving your goal and hold you accountable. Having a community of people that are working toward similar goals (like your former teammates) can also be a common element from your sport days that provides that outside support.
Reinforcement
Another reason why goal setting is more challenging in life after sports is that the motivation to achieve goals is different for sport vs. non-sport goals. Simply put, as humans who engage in all sorts of behaviors, we are more likely to do certain behaviors more if the result is something we really enjoy. That’s called positive reinforcement and it’s powerful. This can vary widely for people…what is motivating for one person may not be motivating at all for another person. The level of positive reinforcement that you received for hitting that PR or winning that league championship can be very different from the level of positive reinforcement you will receive for meeting a goal that is unrelated to your sport.
Like I mentioned before, athletes are often intrinsically motivated. What this means in the behavior analysis world is that the motivation comes from inside you and you do something because you like it. Maybe you enjoy how your body feels after a good, hard workout or the joy or other emotions you experience when you achieve something.
There is also extrinsic motivation involved. These are outcomes from the world outside of you. Things like the roar of the crowd in the bleachers, the medal around your neck, the article written about you and/or your team, the celebration following a victory. Chances are an athlete’s motivation to accomplish a sport goal is both intrinsic and extrinsic.
The outcome of a non-sport goal may still be motivating but you’re not going to have a crowd cheering for you, a trophy to raise on the podium, the public recognition or your team rushing the field. If the positive reinforcement is not as powerful, it is more challenging to do the behaviors needed to achieve a goal. So getting some praise from your boss or hitting your macro count for the day and getting a badge in your app is probably not as powerful of a reinforcer as the ones you got from your sport.
The more powerful the reinforcer, the more you are willing to do to get it. So continuing to work hard toward a non-sport goal is less likely to happen with a less powerful reinforcer. Let’s address this and talk about how to use positive reinforcement in an effective way for your non-sport goals.
First, let’s talk about intrinsic motivation. This is a little trickier because you can’t really control what happens inside of you and how you feel about it. But you can become more aware of it and use it to your advantage. Think about the non-sport goal you want to achieve. Think about and then write down all the internal things you enjoy about the steps you need to take toward achieving it.
Here’s an example. My goal is that I want to knit a sweater that I can wear. So to do this, I need to learn how to knit different stitches, understand how to read the knitting pattern, get the right type and amount of yarn needed for the project, and knit the sweater. So this might take a while because I am a very beginning knitter. What I think I will enjoy about the process is learning how to make other simple pieces while I learn the stitches. I will also enjoy watching the piece grow in my lap as I knit it. I also know that I like to feel productive with my time so I will like the fact that I can do this in the evening as I wind down with my family but also be productive because I created something tangible. I could go on but hopefully you get where I am going. If I don’t have any awareness about why this is enjoyable for me, other than a cool sweater I can wear and get compliments on, the process becomes less motivating and I am less likely to keep it up. But if I am experiencing these other enjoyable things along the way, I am more likely to establish a routine of spending at least 3 evenings per week working on my knitting.
As far as extrinsic motivation, that is a little easier to incorporate. We all love a reward or a treat. Sometimes those rewards, or reinforcers, are naturally built in. In my example above, I will end up with a scarf I made myself while I am learning stitches on a simpler project. There are also reinforcers that we can build in for accomplishing steps toward a goal or the bigger goal itself. Here’s where you can get creative. Maybe if you finished a project at work, you stop at your favorite smoothie shop on the way home. Or you get to buy that shirt you’ve been eyeing for meeting a certain milestone.
The important thing about external reinforcers is that they need to be effective. If I make a smoothie for myself every morning at home, maybe the one from the smoothie shop isn’t enough to push me to finish that work project. You can like something without it being an effective reinforcer. It should be something that you don’t regularly have, because if you do there isn’t motivation to work for it. Spend some time writing down things that are highly motivating, that you are willing to work for. It’s also good to explore new options. Seek out new opportunities that could be reinforcers in the future.
Another effective strategy to combine with external reinforcers is self-monitoring or self-management. This means you are keeping track of your progress on a frequent basis. Tracking can be on an app, checklist, chart or any other means that you will remember to use. Monitoring our own actions and behaviors brings awareness to what we are doing and keeps us present. For many people, checking something off or seeing visual progress is a reinforcer and will increase the likelihood that they will keep up that behavior. This is another area where you can get creative and do what you know works best for you. There is so much technology out there to help keep you on track, from reminders to to-do lists to counters there are so many ways your phone can help you live your best life, and hopefully decrease the frequent scrolling that’s taking you away from what you want to accomplish.
Avoidance
Let’s be real, people like to do things they are good at. And athletes take that to a whole other level. As an athlete you spent a lot of time perfecting your skills so that you could be the best possible version of yourself in your sport. It’s the result of that, or the consequence in behavioral terms, that keeps you training and competing. Consequence sometimes has a negative connotation to it in everyday language but it is really just anything that happens following something you do. Consequences can be good, bad, neutral or anything in between. So accomplishment in your sport is the good consequence (also known as positive reinforcement, like I talked about above) that follows your training and hard work that keeps you doing it. That’s what positive reinforcement does. It makes it more likely that we will continue to do the actions or behaviors that it follows.
The idea of working hard to be mediocre, or dare I say bad, at something might be your worst nightmare as a former athlete. Or maybe it’s not that bad, but it’s definitely less motivating than working hard to excel at something that you are already good at.
As humans, not just athletes, we spend a lot of time paying attention to our mind telling us all the bad possible outcomes of our actions. This is what minds do. The intention here is honorable…to help us stay away from danger and things that could harm us physically and emotionally. And we often listen to our mind and avoid things that may be uncomfortable or cause suffering. But in the world we live in now, if we continuously avoid things that could potentially result in emotional suffering, we may never leave the house or do anything outside of our comfort zone.
Working toward new goals to accomplish things that are less familiar and potentially uncomfortable with a chance of failure can be a scary idea, especially to a former athlete who is used to excelling at what they do. You may have experienced failure as an athlete, but you had a whole network of support to pick you up off the ground and get you back on the field (reminder here about the generalization strategy of having a coach and community). The mere idea of failing and/or being bad at something and the emotional uncomfortableness that comes with it may lead you to avoid putting yourself in that situation to begin with. Avoidance is something that can clearly have a negative impact on accomplishing a goal.
Working past avoidance can be a very big challenge and a lot of what I focus on in my services for retired athletes. In fact, I will soon have a whole course on it. But for now, here are some takeaways that you can implement now.
This may sound familiar to you, as this tool is used across many areas. And that’s because it’s effective. Make your goals SMART goals. If you haven’t heard this before, I’ll break it down.
S: Specific - Make the goal clear, narrow and defined so that you know exactly what you want to accomplish. If a goal is vague, it may be difficult to know when you’ve met it.
M: Measurable - This makes it possible to track and monitor your progress, like I talked about above. Know the how much and/or how many of your goals and how you will know when you accomplished it.
A: Achievable - Make your goal is something that pushes you but is reasonable and able to be accomplished in your current environment or circumstances. The last thing you want to do is set yourself up for failure with something that is not possible to do in the current moment.
R: Relevant - Your goal should be something that matters to you and supports your values so that you are maximizing that intrinsic motivation. We’ll talk more about values in a minute.
T: Time-bound - Set a deadline or target date for your goal and make it reasonable. Having a deadline increases your focus on the steps you need to take along the way and prevents you from getting lost in the everyday stuff (a form of avoidance) that keeps you from your longer-term goals
Another strategy for ensuring that you are making progress and working past avoidance is to break your goal down into small steps. It is so much easier to take a small 5-minute action that takes you closer to what you want than to set an enormous goal with no smaller steps in between so that you don’t even know where to start - and then avoid working toward the goal. Checking off those smaller steps on your self-monitoring tools feels good and keeps you motivated to accomplish the next one. See how this all ties together???
Finally, let’s talk about values. This could be an entire course in of itself too (and probably will be in The Vintage Athlete one day) but there are ways to get clear on your values now. Values are different from goals but they go hand in hand to support one another.
A value is a chosen path that you find meaningful and important. It is a principle of what you want to stand for and what you want to live by. Values are not the same as goals. Values are directions we keep moving in, whereas goals are what we want to achieve along the way. There is no “accomplishing” a value. You can’t complete it. We can work toward and accomplish goals in service of living according to our values. But values are an ongoing path in life that guide us to act in meaningful ways. When you are clear on your values, goals that support them are easier to set and achieve.
There are many tools out there to do a values assessment so quick Google search should get you there. Some examples of values are growth, loyalty, balance, citizenship. They are the principles that you want to describe what kind of person you are. Get clear on your values in your life after sports and your goals will follow.
Conclusion
There will always be more factors in a retired athlete’s life than the ones I talked about above. So it’s not always that simple. But as a behavior analyst and former athlete, I can tell you that a lot of behavior comes down to these factors in setting and accomplishing goals, especially as a former athlete. If you can recognize them and implement the behavioral strategies that are effective in addressing them, you will be in a much better place to set and develop a plan for accomplishing non-sport goals.
Rather than getting stuck in the frustration of struggling to set and achieve non-sport goals, taking a behavioral approach helps you be more objective about your goals, what actions to take and how to take them. As you may have experienced, not everything comes as naturally as being good at your sport. And that’s ok because you are a human being and you don’t have to be amazing at everything to be an amazing human. But you can absolutely take what your sport has taught you and your strengths as a person to achieve meaningful and impressive goals in your life after sports.
To get more clear on your values and what actions you can take to live according to them, join my FREE 3-day experience, The Vintage Athlete Awakening. I will take you through strategies to gain clarity on what you want in your life after sports. Get FREE access here!
