The importance of goals

Look I really believe goals are important and I guess one of the first goals I ever set was when I was kind of around that 10, 11, 12 year old group, without consciously saying I was going to set myself a goal, but I used to run up behind the hill regularly, just about every other day, behind the house up to the ridge, and it was a bit of a scramble.

And I used to try and make myself get to the top faster, it was just a little competition I had with myself, and whether I was faster or slower, it didn’t really matter. The point was in my mind each time I did that race, or that race in my head. I was going faster each time. So I was always getting a positive reward whether it was realistic or not.

And I think it was really important because positive feedback gives you an optimism and an opportunity to go on and do new things. I think the….quite often we let negative feedback temper our creativity and belief that we can do almost anything. And I believe that most of us can do almost anything. You know I’ve always believed that, I think you’ve just got to make a decision and go for it. But you have to look at the good things that are being fed back to you. People will give you negatives all the time, and I think it’s your choice whether you take those negative symbols or connotations on board.

So from then on I was really….I believed I could do a lot of things if I put my mind to it. When I went to high school, I think another big period for me was in the third form, I decided to play volleyball, maybe because my sister played it when she was there. And when the call went out, come along to the gym and have a go and I did, and the….I was short, I wasn’t a tall guy at all, I’m still not very tall, relatively short for a rower, and the same for volleyball, height is an advantageous thing to have, and in the first competition…..inter school competition we had, of all the teams that were chosen to compete in that form, I was chosen in the bottom team. There were four teams and I was chosen for the bottom one, the D team.

I was absolutely gutted when I heard about that, and saw my name up on the thingthe D team and I couldn’t believe it, because I rated myself, and I thought I was better than that, and I made another goal I guess at that time to get into that A team, and it didn’t matter how good or bad I really was, I believed that I was better than what somebody else told me I was. That feedback I got I didn’t take on board, I believed I could do better than that.

That year, that third form year, of all those people who played volleyball, I was the only one that went on to play for New Zealand. And I was also the shortest in the whole team as well, both in the school team and in the national team, and I was a spiker, I didn’t want to be setter, I wanted to be a spiker. So to do that though I had to jump high, and I would go home at night, I would be always practising to jump higher and higher and higher. Even when I was doing the dishes I would be doing little calf raisers while I was washing dishes in the sink, so I’d be just getting my calves stronger so I could jump higher. And it was those little things because I believed I could, you know I went out and proved I could.