Last week I delved into some of the intricacies of goal setting, how we use it on a regular basis and how the brain can assist us in the achievement of our goals. I suppose after having put that out there then it’s only fair that I should practice what I preach and set out the goals for Largs Thistle for the coming season.

One of the things that I didn’t cover last week in relation to setting goals was that we can choose to set our goals and keep them private whilst you work towards them or you can make them public by telling people or posting them on social media. Depending on your personality, either approach can be advantageous.

If you’re more of an introvert or maybe working on re-building your confidence then I would suggest that it would be sensible to keep your goals private because any perceived dip in progress in the eyes of other people could have a negative effect on you and set you back.

On the other hand, if you are a confident person who doesn’t dwell too much on what other people think of you then I would suggest making your goals public. I say “doesn’t dwell too much” because I’m a firm believer that everyone pays some attention to what other people think and those who say they don’t are trying to pull the wool over your eyes.

My reasoning behind this that by making your goals public, it adds an extra layer of motivation in your effort to achieve and it will hold you publicly accountable to other people. This in turn will push you harder to achievas you don’t want to appear as a failure in the eyes of other people.

So getting back to our goals for Largs Thistle for the coming season, our long term goal is to win the League. I’ve stated this publicly on a couple of occasions and this is far and away the main goal for me, Arnie and the players for the season. I have to point out that this is not a boastful prediction but merely an understanding that we are good enough to achieve it. The difficult aspect of this is that there will be a number of other teams who will believe the same but I think the competitiveness of it is why I’m really looking forward to matching up against everyone else.

In the shorter term, our initial goal will involve the League Cup and qualification from our group into the quarter finals. Given that several of our league opponents are in our group, this would give us a good confidence boost going into the league campaign and will mean that we are on the right track. Having played and won the League Cup a number of times though, there will be a need to make sure that any further progression in the competition doesn’t have a detrimental effect in respect of our initial League matches.

As important as setting our goals will be the need to continually evaluate our position in relation to where we need to be and where we are. We must have a realistic awareness of our position as we move forward so that we can make adjustments if the situation requires. If things aren’t running to plan, we will be well advised to take note of the oft-quoted comment attributed to Einstein, “The definition of insanity is doing something over and over again and expecting a different result”.

At the moment, we are six training sessions into the pre-season and so far we have had a good reaction from the players. There is no doubt that there is room for improvement however I’m confident that come our first competitive match we will be ready to go.