Goals Are Terminal.
Values Are Not.
SMART goal-setting is a useful tool. But the sport psych industry's obsession with goals as the primary motivational architecture has it backwards. Goals are checkpoints. Values are the road.
Standard sport psychology packages goal-setting as a foundational mental skill. Set outcome goals, break them down into performance goals, operationalize them as process goals. It's a clean framework and it works — up to a point. The point where it fails is also the point where most athletes are most vulnerable: when the goal is achieved and motivation collapses, or when the goal becomes unreachable and the athlete has nothing left to stand on.
The deeper problem is ontological. When goals are the primary architecture, the athlete's sense of purpose is structurally contingent on an outcome. Achieve the goal — relief, then emptiness. Miss the goal — failure, identity threat. Neither outcome produces the durable intrinsic motivation that makes athletic careers sustainable and meaningful.
This program takes a different position. The goal of goal-setting is not goal achievement. It is to build a performer who is capable of achieving any goal aligned with their values — because the underlying architecture is solid: clear values, behavioral standards, meaningful rituals, trained attention. Goals are useful navigational tools in service of a larger project. The project is a person.
"You can always move toward north, but you never arrive at north."
SMART Goals: The Technical Tool
SMART goal-setting remains genuinely useful as a translation mechanism — converting values-direction into specific, measurable actions. The problem isn't the framework; it's the frame. Applied within a values architecture, SMART goals become behavioral standards — concrete expressions of how a person who holds these values shows up. Applied without that architecture, they become a checklist that collapses when circumstances change.
From Goals to Behavioral Standards
The practical translation of values into lived behavior is what we're calling a behavioral standard: a specific, self-authored statement of how someone with these values shows up, consistently, regardless of circumstances or outcomes. Where goals describe destinations, behavioral standards describe the person making the journey.
This is where SMART technology meets ACT identity work. The behavioral standard is the committed action expression of the athlete's values — concrete enough to be observable, personal enough to be meaningful, and stable enough to survive a bad game.
The behavioral standard is where MI and ACT work intersect in the most practical way. Your job as a coach is to help athletes articulate their own standards — not to hand them yours. The standard that an athlete generates through the MI conversation has entirely different motivational properties than one a coach provides. One is autonomy-supportive. The other is compliance-seeking, regardless of how well-intentioned.
The open question that opens this work: "If you were the athlete you most want to be, what would someone watching you practice see?"
Goals → Standards Translation
For one current client, work through the full translation from values to behavioral standards to SMART goals. The direction matters: values first, standards second, goals third.
The Attention Map:
Nideffer & Wulf
Why does MBAT move through so many different attentional spaces? Why does performance coaching keep all cues external? One model answers both questions — and gives you the theoretical language to explain your work to any coach in any discipline.
Robert Nideffer's attention model, developed in the 1970s, describes attentional focus across two independent dimensions: width (broad to narrow) and direction (external to internal). The intersection of these dimensions produces four attentional styles — each with distinct performance functions, failure modes, and relationships to the other.
What makes this model practically powerful is what it reveals about MBAT: the four-week program isn't a meditation sequence, it's a systematic tour of the attentional map. Each practice type trains a different quadrant. When your clients complete the program, they have conditioned access to all four attentional modes — which is what "paying attention to the right thing, at the right time" actually requires.
The Four Quadrants
Taking in the full environment — reading the game, scanning for information, processing multiple inputs simultaneously.
Performance use: Pre-play read of the defensive alignment. Quarterback reading coverage. Point guard surveying the floor.
Locked onto a specific external target — the ball, the glove, the basket, the target line. Automaticity engaged. This is execution mode.
Performance use: Ball flight at contact. Free throw. Penalty kick. The moment of execution in any skill.
Processing and planning — strategic thinking, problem solving, connecting information to mental models and game plans.
Performance use: Tactical adjustments at halftime. Reading patterns over multiple possessions. Between-inning preparation.
Focused on a specific internal state — a single cue, breath, body sensation, or mental image. Preparation and regulation mode.
Performance use: Pre-performance routine execution. Arousal check-in. Breath as reset tool. MBAT Focused Attention practice.
How MBAT Trains the Map
Viewed through Nideffer's model, the MBAT sequence is a four-week progressive training protocol that deliberately develops each quadrant in a specific order — building from the most contained attentional mode toward the most expansive, with the connection practice extending attention outward to include others.
Quadrant trained: Narrow External. The breath anchor directs attention to a specific external stimulus — the physical sensation of breath at the nostrils or chest. Narrow because it's a single point of focus; external because the object of attention is a bodily sensation rather than a thought or mental image. This is the entry point: simple, anchored, concrete.
Quadrant trained: Narrow Internal. Attention moves systematically through internal bodily experience — sensation by sensation, region by region. Narrow because the focus moves through one specific location at a time; internal because the object is felt experience rather than the external environment. Trains the check-in capacity essential for the Evans arousal model.
Quadrant trained: Broad External. The aperture opens to include everything arriving from the environment — sounds, light, temperature, spatial awareness — without grabbing onto any of it. Broad because the field is wide; external because the objects of attention are environmental inputs. The same attentional mode a quarterback uses reading a defense pre-snap.
Quadrant trained: Broad Internal. Attention turns inward across a wide field — generating and extending warmth toward self, others, and difficult others. Broad because the affective scope expands outward through multiple people; internal because the object of attention is the cultivated emotional state itself. Trains the self-compassion under failure that enables rapid Red Head recovery.
Wulf's Guidance: Keep Performance Cues External
Nideffer's model tells you what the attentional map looks like. Gabriele Wulf's OPTIMAL Theory research tells you where to aim during performance. The finding is consistent across decades of motor learning research: external focus outperforms internal focus for skill execution and skill acquisition.
The mechanism is what Wulf calls the Constrained Action Hypothesis: when athletes direct attention internally — to their own movement mechanics — they invoke conscious motor control that interferes with the automated motor programs their training has built. External focus allows those programs to run. The athlete's training takes over, rather than their in-the-moment analysis.
For performance coaches, this is a clear directive: your performance cues stay in the Narrow External quadrant. What the ball does. Where the target is. The effect of the movement. Not the mechanics of producing it.
"Keep your elbow in." "Bend your knees." "Rotate your hips." "Stay balanced." "Don't tense up."
Invoke conscious control, interfere with motor programs, increase error regardless of athlete skill level. Even for novices — Wulf's research is clear that external cues accelerate acquisition.
"Through the ball." "Hit the target." "See it, trust it." "Smooth release." "Soft hands on the catch." "Drive the ground away."
Direct attention to the effect of movement or the performance environment. Allow trained motor programs to execute without interference.
Wulf's external-focus advantage is robust but not absolute. Two contexts where internal cues have support: isolated strength training and hypertrophy work, where internal focus may enhance EMG activation in target muscles (Schoenfeld), and rehabilitation contexts where conscious motor re-patterning is the explicit goal. In both cases, the intent is not performance execution — it's adaptation. When the context shifts to performance, external focus returns as the default.
Attention Mapping Your Coaching
Prime / Perform / Learn
Every performance has three phases. Most coaching only addresses one of them. The PPL framework ensures the athlete is prepared before, regulated during, and learning after — at every timescale.
Prime / Perform / Learn is the organizational framework that holds all the skills from Weeks 3–4 together in a deployable structure. It answers the question athletes and coaches almost never think to ask: what does a complete psychological performance system actually look like at the level of a single pitch, a match, a season, a career?
The framework is simple by design. Simple survives pressure. Complex doesn't.
The Prime phase is the intentional preparation window before performance begins. Its purpose is to move the athlete from whatever state they're currently in toward the attentional and emotional readiness their performance requires.
Prime is not a warm-up. Warm-ups are physical. Prime is the psychological activation — the deliberate transition from everyday consciousness into performance readiness. It includes attentional focus, values activation, arousal calibration, and — for athletes who have built it — Plan B imagery rehearsal of the specific context ahead.
The Perform phase is arousal regulation in real time — the between-moment tools that maintain or restore optimal state while the performance is underway. This is where the Evans model lives entirely.
Perform tools need to be fast — a single pitch, a penalty, a point has a window of seconds. Anything that requires extended cognitive effort fails in this phase by definition. The three-step check-in/breath/point sequence is designed precisely for this window.
Perform also includes defusion when fusion events occur (errors, criticism, high-stakes moments that activate threat response) and immediate return to the external process cue.
The Learn phase closes the performance loop — extracting learning, resetting emotionally, and pointing intention toward what comes next. Without this phase, performances accumulate without development. Errors stick. Wins inflate. Nothing compounds.
Learn is also the phase most athletes most consistently skip. The habit of "shaking it off" is not Learn — it's suppression. True Learn is brief, honest, specific, and forward-facing. It takes the same discipline to do well as the performance itself.
PPL at Every Timescale
This is the structural insight that makes PPL more than a pre-performance routine framework. The same three phases apply at every level of temporal organization — from the gap between pitches to the arc of a career. The coach who teaches this framework teaches athletes to build a complete developmental system, not just a pre-game warmup ritual.
Prime: One breath, process cue.
Perform: External focus, execute.
Learn: One second — what just happened, one breath, release.
Window: 5–30 seconds
Prime: Full pre-performance ritual — activation, imagery, values check.
Perform: Arousal regulation throughout.
Learn: Post-game structured debrief — 10–20 min.
Window: hours
Prime: Pre-season values clarification, goal-setting, standard-setting.
Perform: In-season practice of all tools.
Learn: Post-season full review — what grew, what didn't, what's next.
Window: months
The Learn Phase: After-Action Frameworks
The Learn phase requires a structure — without one, post-performance reflection either doesn't happen or deteriorates into rumination (for athletes prone to self-criticism) or superficial positivity (for athletes who avoid honest evaluation). There is no single correct framework. The right one is the one the athlete will actually use, consistently, in the window they actually have. Your job through the MI conversation is to find that fit — then help the athlete make the framework their own.
Three options are presented below as a coaching menu. Each is complete. Each serves the same purpose. Choose based on the athlete's processing style, their relationship to language, the time available, and what emerged in the values and identity work.
Three questions, one minute, every performance cycle. Simple enough to execute in the gap between innings, detailed enough to produce genuine learning over time. The structure enforces balance — one positive observation, one honest gap, one action — so athletes who skew negative can't ruminate, and athletes who skew positive can't skip the honest assessment.
Military-derived debrief structure. Effective for athletes who prefer systematic processing, and for team contexts where shared learning is the goal. The four-question structure moves from plan → reality → gap analysis → action without blame entering the conversation — a distinction worth making explicit when you introduce it.
Anchors the debrief in what actually matters to the athlete, rather than in performance metrics. Particularly powerful for athletes in the early stages of values work — where the question "did I compete according to who I want to be?" is more motivationally significant than "did I execute well?" Also the framework to reach for after a performance where the result was genuinely bad but the process was sound — it restores identity when outcomes have temporarily taken it.
Offer the frameworks, don't prescribe them. Present all three and ask: "Which of these feels most natural to how you already think after a performance?" The one they pick will be used. The one you assign may not be. This is autonomy support in the Learn phase — the same SDT principle operating through a coaching decision you make in about 30 seconds.
PPL Mapping for Your Practice
Building the Ritual
A pre-performance routine is a sequence of behaviors. A ritual is a pre-performance routine infused with meaning. The difference between them is values — and that difference determines whether it holds under the conditions that matter most.
Sport psychology has studied pre-performance routines for decades. The consistent finding: athletes who have established routines perform more consistently, particularly in high-pressure situations. The mechanism is attentional — a well-practiced routine narrows attentional focus, reduces distraction, and activates optimal arousal state through a learned association between the routine sequence and performance readiness.
That's the science of routines. What this program adds is the values dimension — the element that turns a behavioral sequence into something an athlete actually wants to do, even when everything else is pulling them away from it. A routine built for an athlete by a coach will be abandoned under pressure. A ritual built with an athlete, through the MI relationship, grounded in their own values, is the sequence they return to because things are difficult.
The coach's role here is architect, not author. You understand the structural requirements. The athlete provides the meaning.
"A ritual is a pre-performance routine infused with meaning through values."
The Structural Requirements
Regardless of how bespoke the content, effective rituals share structural characteristics. Understanding these lets you guide the construction process without prescribing the content:
The ritual has to fit the actual window available. A 20-minute pre-game ritual that gets disrupted by a bus delay is useless. Build for the constraint. When the ideal window isn't available, a compressed version should work.
The power of the ritual comes from repetition. The sequence becomes a conditioned cue for the performance state. Consistency matters more than comprehensiveness — an athlete who does three things every time outperforms one who does ten things sometimes.
At least one element of the ritual explicitly connects to the athlete's stated values. This is what makes it a ritual rather than a habit. The values anchor is what the athlete returns to when pressure rises and the routine feels like effort.
The final element of the Prime ritual is always an external process cue — the bridge from the internal preparation work (breath, values, imagery) into the external focus required for performance execution. Nideffer: Narrow Internal → Narrow External.
Building via MI: The Ritual Conversation
The ritual is built through conversation, not prescription. The following MI guide maps specific open questions to each PPL phase — giving you a structured facilitation process that maintains the athlete's authorship throughout.
"When you've been at your absolute best in competition — what was happening in the minutes before you started?"
"When you've performed badly — what was different in how you came in?"
"What do you need to feel before you perform? Not think — feel. Energy level, focus, connection to what matters?"
"If you had three minutes before the most important performance of your career, what would you want to do with them?"
"When things go sideways during competition — what do you currently do? What helps? What doesn't?"
"Is there a cue — a word, a physical movement, a breath — that you already use to bring yourself back? What is it?"
"After a competition — when do you feel like you've fully processed it? What does that look like?"
"What would it mean to you to be able to close the book on a bad performance and genuinely move on?"
Build Your Client's Ritual
Use the canvas below to draft one client's full PPL ritual — built around their values, their sport context, and what emerged in the MI conversation. This is a first draft; the ritual will be refined through iteration and actual use.
Ritual Reflection
MBAT Week 4:
The Container
Day 28 is not the finish line. It's the moment the work you've done becomes a container — a reliable 15-minute daily space you now own, and can fill with whatever your practice requires.
Jha's research establishes a minimum effective dose: 12 minutes per day, five days per week, for four or more weeks. The program you've been following is built on that evidence base — 15 minutes daily for 28 days, each week training a distinct attentional quadrant. This week completes the map.
Week 4 is Connection Practice — the Broad Internal quadrant of the Nideffer map. Where the Body Scan (Week 2) trained you to move attention deliberately through physical sensations and label each one as pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral without trying to change anything, Connection Practice extends that same discipline to emotional experience. The body was the training ground. Now you bring that same accepting attention to the internal relational field — feelings of warmth, difficulty, irritation, tenderness — and apply the same discipline: notice, label, accept, move on.
This is how both the body scan and the connection practice teach the same performance skill: you can feel what is happening inside you and keep performing anyway. Nothing inside you needs to be resolved before you act. That capacity — present, undefended, still moving — is what "regardless of circumstances" actually means.
MBAT Week 4: Connection Practice
Settle with a few natural breaths. Then direct attention inward — not to the body's physical sensations, but to the relational and emotional field. Begin with yourself. Notice what's present: ease, tightness, warmth, resistance, fatigue. Label it: pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. Accept it. Move on. You are not trying to generate a feeling that isn't there. You are noticing what is there and meeting it without defense.
Then extend attention outward in widening circles: someone you care about, someone neutral, someone you find difficult. At each, notice what arises — the warmth or friction or flatness of that contact — label it, accept it, and move on. The difficult person is where this practice gets serious. The goal is not to manufacture positive feeling. It's to stay present with whatever actually arises and not be captured by it.
The structure beneath the practice is identical to the body scan: you are juggling attention through a sequence of targets, applying the same three-step discipline at each one — notice, label, accept without trying to change, move on. What changes is the content. Week 2 was physical sensation. Week 4 is emotional and relational experience. The mechanism is the same. The application is broader.
This is the final attentional quadrant — Broad Internal — and it completes the map. An athlete who has trained all four quadrants across four weeks has developed the foundational attentional capacity to perform despite what is happening inside them, whatever form that takes.
When you guide clients through MBAT, Day 28 is the moment the program makes a subtle but important shift in framing. The message stops being "do the practice" and starts being "you now own this space." That reframe is an autonomy-supportive move — it transfers ownership from the program to the athlete. The practice becomes theirs, not a compliance requirement. Done well, this transition is when MBAT stops being an assignment and starts being a ritual.
Track Your Final Week
28 cumulative to complete the program
Week 4 Assignments
Program Experience Summary
This is the reflection that gates Week 5. Write it after your final MBAT session of Week 4 — not before. What you write here is what you'll draw on when you guide clients through the same program.