How To Track Your Goal Progress: The PDSA Framework - Episode 31 w/ Coach Bryn

because we don't really know. A lot of times we don't know what plan's gonna work. We don't know what activities are gonna work, so we gotta test stuff, right? So the first thing is to have the plan and then to just do it, because that's how we're gonna figure out if this is a good plan or not. So not this perfectionist— we're not looking for the perfect plan, we're just looking for a plan to then take action on it and then see what happens. I'm excited for you to see this week's episode, but before we get to that, I have a message for you. If you're a parent of an elite athlete or a coach of a high-performing team and you want— you're looking for some help or assistance with making them more mentally resilient, perform with more confidence, be more consistent, anything like that, then this is for you. I have an 8-week program all designed to address exactly that, to help your athlete be at their best on a more consistent basis and not get tripped up by those little voices in their head and getting down on themselves for mistakes, but performing like we know they can. So what I want you to do is don't delay, schedule a— just grab a time on my calendar through this link, and let's set up a time to talk about your specific situation and how what I'm offering in my 8-week program can help. Okay, so it's brindresher.com/freeconsultation. So click this link, grab a time on my calendar. I look forward to talking to you. And now on to this week's episode. Welcome back to another episode of the Mental Advantage Podcast. I'm your host, Coach Brynn, and I can't believe it— 31 episodes. 31 episodes. Have you been enjoying it? If you have, let us know below. What are you getting from all these episodes? Please make sure that you like, comment, and subscribe because we're going to be bringing you episodes every single week. So with that, what are we talking about this week? What are we talking about this week? A couple weeks ago in my last solo episode, we talked about the biggest mistakes people make when goal setting and how to avoid them. And I hinted that we would be talking about it, uh, a part 2 this week. So this is part 2. One of the things that happens when people goal set is that they don't know how exactly to kind of gauge their results to know if it's working or not. Just let me know, has that happened to you? Have you ever had a situation where you were pursuing a goal and you just didn't know, like, how's it going? How do I know if I'm on track? Like, I know generally that I need these numbers, but how do I know if I'm doing the right things to accomplish the goal? I think a lot of us have this question, and sometimes it feels like you're spinning your wheels and you're not really getting anywhere. So we're going to talk about a process that I'm going to recommend for each of you while pursuing your goals, okay, to accomplish them. Okay, athletes have so many goals, right? They want to maybe become a better shooter by percentage. They want to have better defense, right? Rebounds. They want to have better kills in volleyball. Better shots in hockey, catches in football, tackles, etc. You name the sport, it's there. Goals in soccer. So, but how do I gauge the activities that I'm doing and make sure that that's actually going to produce my goal of my results? Okay, so I want to introduce a process today that we call the PDSA framework. P as in Paul, D as in David, S as in Sam, A as in Adam. PDSA framework. Okay, it stands for Plan, Do, Study, Act. I'm going to say that one more time: Plan, Do, Study, Act. So I'm going to break down each phase of the process and kind of explain why we use it. So A lot of times we don't really know how we're doing, like I said, according to our goal progress. So this PDSA framework is designed to help you gauge your results over a certain time period to then know what type of adjustments you need to make, okay, in the long run. What kind of adjustments that you need to make in the long run to know how I can get to the, you know, kind of make any adjustments or even know my progress in, you know, as it relates to my overarching goal. So like one of the mistakes I said is people kind of look at this big goals and they don't really have a specific plan. So you want to come up with— the first stage is plan. So we want to come up with a plan of activity over a certain period of time, a plan of activity over a certain period of time. Now this period of time has to be a short amount of time so that I can gather data on my activities to find out if it actually worked or whatever the case is. So let's say that I am a soccer player and I want overall to do a better job of being able to take shots on goal if I'm a striker. Okay, I'm, I'm, I'm a forward and all that stuff. I'm sure I'm using all the right terms, but you get the point. Okay. So my plan is to execute a certain amount of activities during practice over a, uh, let's say a 1-week time span. So the important thing about the plan phase is we have to decide what activities we're going to do over a specific frame of time. Okay, what type of activities we're going to do over a specific frame of time. Okay, and this relates to our overarching goal. So I want to become a better goal scorer or take more shots on goal. So firstly, I'm going to be doing a certain amount of things in practice. So maybe I'm going to work on my running for the first 20 minutes of practice. Then I'm going to work on my ball handling with, you know, like my dribbling of the ball with my feet. Okay, kind of you know, making certain cuts and certain type of, you know, maneuvers. Okay. And then after a certain period of time, I'm going to be also taking shots on goal and then simulated gameplay for the last portion of practice. Okay. Let's say I've come up with this practice plan and I'm going to execute these activities, um, over a course of a week span. Okay. Over the course of a week span. So that's my plan. Now your plan can look different. It doesn't necessarily have to be that. So maybe I do ball handling drills on Mondays, then I do conditioning on Tuesdays to make sure that my endurance and my conditioning is up. Then maybe on Wednesdays I work on my shots, okay? Then we do some practice scenarios, right? Where I'm working with a defender, someone else to kind of work on my ability to handle the pressure of a defense or a defender advancing on me. And then on Fridays I do lifting and work on my overall muscles, et cetera, right? So a plan could be different. In all capacities. So it can either be you're going to break practice up in a certain way, you're going to break your week up in a certain way. Whatever it is, decide on what your plan of attack is for that goal, okay, over a shortened period of time. The time period should not be longer, in my opinion, since most of us track our goals on a month-to-month basis, right? I don't think it should be any longer than 2 weeks at a max when you're doing this PD as a framework, I think your time period has to be short enough for you to be able to make an adjustment if you were to find that it wasn't working for you. How would you do that? So it's got to be over a shortened period of time. So we came up with our plan of attack, right? We're gonna, we're gonna break practice down a certain type of way, we're gonna break our week down a certain type of way, okay? And let's say we have a game on Saturday. So we've— what we broke down our practice plan, right? And we also say, okay, it's going to be over a week basis. And then how are we going to track our results? Okay, so we have our plan. Okay, so that's the important thing— come up with a plan of attack as it relates to your goal. I want to be able to take a certain amount of shots on goal. I want to be able to take a certain amount of basket shots if I'm playing basketball. I want to be able to have a bunch of throws or patterns that are thrown to me if I'm a receiver in football, and so on and so forth. So I figured out my plan of attack, and I figured out the time span with which I'm going to measure my results. Okay, so now that I have that, okay, now I have to to take action on that plan. I have to take action on that plan. I have to execute the plan. So that's the do stage, right? We came up with the plan, now we got to do it. We got to do it according to our plan because that's the only way we're going to find out if it works. We can't figure something out by just sitting there and, you know, like, oh, it's a great plan, but how do I know it's going to work? So this is where our perfectionism, as we referenced in an earlier video, kind of gets the better of us because we want to be perfect. But we've got to take messy, rapid action. We've got to execute this plan that we've carved out because we don't really know. A lot of times we don't know what plan's going to work. We don't know what activities are going to work. So we got to test stuff, right? So the first thing is to have the plan and then to just do it because that's how we're going to figure out if this is a good plan or not. So not this perfectionist. We're not looking for the perfect plan. We're just looking for a plan to then take action on it and then see what happens. Okay. So now we did it over the course of our time. Now, like I said, you're, you're, you don't have to do a week. You could do a couple of days. You can do whatever time period you need. It needs to be just long enough though to test for the, for certain things. So you don't want to necessarily pick something too small, like an hour, right? You want to go where you can gauge some results. It's kind of like going to the gym, lifting one barbell and then being like, oh, did I get a muscle? No, it didn't work. Bad plan. And a lot of us will throw the baby out with the bathwater by, you know, having a— like taking stock too soon of results. So you do want to give yourself enough time to get a certain amount of data and feedback on the plan. So make sure when you're doing it, you're not kind of like, oh, what happened after day 1? If my time period is a week, then I have to test it out for a week. Okay. And I've got to take action continuously on this plan and then track my results. Okay. So that's important. And leave your perfectionist self alone, okay? Somewhere else. Take it away. Take it out for a vacation. It doesn't need to be here during this process. So now that we have our amazing plan and we did it for a week, so we, we broke up practice and we, you know, we did running, we did conditioning, we worked on our ball handling, our dribbling skills as far as soccer is still a thing, right, with dribbling. We worked on our passing, we worked on our cutting and, you know, making ourselves available, how to handle defensive pressure. We did all of that. Now we have to study the results. So that's the S. We have to study what happened. What happened? Okay, now, so we did the plan, we took action on the plan, we enacted the plan, we came up with our time period, right? And now we have to study our results. Okay, so what happened? What happened over that week? Now it's very important that we look at things from an objective standpoint. We are not judging ourselves for being good or bad. Just what were the results? So we want to have sort of an objective lens of, okay, I put in 5 days of practice, I broke practice down in this way, or I broke my week down into this process. What did I notice was happening? What went— what worked well and what could have worked better? These are great questions to ask yourself. What went well? What could have worked better? So what you don't want to do is just judge it overall and be like, did it work? Okay, no, new plan. So, because a lot of times there's good parts of the plan, things that were actually effective, and then there's areas where you notice maybe you dropped off a little bit. Maybe I noticed that I, I focused too much on conditioning and I ran out of time to do more passing drills or even have time to do a scrimmage at the end of practice. Maybe, um, I realize I'm running out of gas in my drill, so maybe I do need to pay more attention to conditioning, you know, so to speak. So you want to find out what happened without judging yourself. So you want to leave the sort of— I call it the observer-judge effect. There's what happened, and then there's judging yourself for what happened. Like, oh, I was terrible on Tuesday. Practice was terrible. So rather than using words like terrible, what happened? Oh, well, I was really solid in the beginning of practice, but I noticed towards the end of practice I lose a focus, and maybe I'm having a little bit more trouble understanding drills or certain plays. Or where am I falling off? You know, where are the— where, where's my activity creating some challenges or some blind spots for me that I maybe need to like look at when I'm reviewing it. Like, oh, I didn't notice that I actually have a problem going left as a, you know, if I'm playing basketball and dribbling, or the routes that I'm doing with my back to the end zone are posing more difficulty for me. Things like that, right? So you want to learn about yourself. So you're studying the plan and what we— what our personal objective was to produce a desired result. And then based on the execution of that plan, what happened? What happened? What, what went well? What could have gone better? And what areas, right? And then, then, and then in that study process, okay, we're gonna come up with a new action plan because we're going to learn some stuff about ourselves. We're going to see that, oh, phase 1 of the, you know, the, the plan worked well, uh, but— or phase 2 works better, but phase 1 we kind of fell off. Whatever it is, however you're going to label it, You want to look at what went well, what could have gone better, and then what adjustments do I need to make based on examining the feedback, right? So looking at it, how am I going to grade myself? Not in a good or bad, right or wrong, but like what, what, what happened and what areas could be adjusted to maybe produce new results, okay? So now that I have this week process of like what, you know, what I mean is week long, not W-E-A-K but W-E-E-K. Now that I looked at this week-long process, this plan, And then I took action on the plan. Then I studied the results. What actually happened? What was— what, what do we want to keep and what adjustments do we need to make? Maybe we need to maybe back off on the conditioning on certain days, or, you know, maybe only do it at the beginning of the week and then the latter half of the week focus on things like noticing based on my patterns, my conditioning, certain areas, right? So I'm going to make some adjustments and then you're going to act, act, take action on a new plan, right? Take action on making those adjustments, and then you're going to rinse and repeat that cycle. So this is going to give you a bunch of benefits, okay? Plan, do, study, act, okay? Because through this process, I'm gonna better gauge whether I'm able to make an effective plan and then take effective action, and then based on effective review of that action, then I'm going to be able to produce and adjust accordingly to then produce a new plan and then repeat the cycle all over again. Okay, so I learn more about myself in the process. I start to see what areas are good. I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater and just throw everything, because this is what happens a lot of times when you do activities with certain teams. When I've done team building in the past with athletes, Sometimes we'll have them do an activity that's designed to get them to think critically, creatively, teamwork bonding, problem solving, things like that. And a lot of times they'll be this close to producing a result and then someone will say, well, that didn't work, so let's just— that plan didn't work, let's come up with a whole new plan, when really they only needed to adjust about 1%, 1% of the result. There was just a small defect or, or let's say, weak part or ineffective part of the plan, but instead we kind of go back to the drawing board. Now, there are times that going back to the drawing board could be effective, but I'm going to tell you that the worst thing you can do is just scrap every plan like it was not effective. So that's why it's so important— the study phase of this is so important. And then you're going to take action on your adjustments, and then you're going to come up with a new plan based on what you saw. Okay, So plan, do, study, act. Plan, do, study, act. Or you've heard it before, plan, do, review. Either way, you need to know how to do this process, and it's an iterative process. Iterative, which means you're gonna have multiple iterations until you find the right rhythm for yourself. The right rhythm for yourself, okay? And sometimes it may not just be you, okay? I wanna say one other thing before we end this. It may not just be you. There may be other components of the plan. Maybe you need some outside eyes, you need some support, you need some fellow teammates. There's other things you need. What experts do you need? What other areas of knowledge or, you know, specific designations do you need to tap to be able to effectively accomplish these things? So a lot of times we're doing this by ourselves and we need that outside sort of eyes, ears, and perspective to help us kind of do this process. But I, I wanna— I cannot stress enough how important it is just to have a major goal and then break it down over these week-long processes. So like, in other words, if I think it's going to take me 4 weeks of this activity to produce this result, I want to see how much I move the needle in that 1 week so that if I need to make an adjustment, that I can correct that as quickly as possible to be on course. To actually produce that result in 1 month. Is that making sense? So PDSA framework, okay, you want to do this on a regular basis. I got this from the medical field. They use this in healthcare of like, how do they figure out the PDSA process to kind of break down what's happening, who's involved in these processes, what parts went well, where was the communication breakdown and then what needs to be adjusted to make this process work so that they can find the right things that are for the best of involved for the patient as well as, you know, the clinic and everything to kind of sing along swimmingly. So similarly for you as an athlete, as a performer, you want to find that same rhythm and say like, where is the process breaking down? So if you have a team, like if you are someone who has a team that you're either running Hiring out, etc. This is another process. So PDSA can be used in multiple ways, but finding out where your weak spots are, but also really important because a lot of times people miss this when they do the review process when they're studying, is they forget to study the, the strengths, what went well, because you want to keep those parts. You don't want to start back at the drawing board at zero. Okay, so my advice, in addition to watching— if you didn't watch the previous episode about goal setting and all that, go watch that episode and then come back here and learn how to do the PDSA process. Study it and come up with your first sprint, as they call it, like a short-term place where you're going to kind of put some action into place, a plan, and then you're going to do it and you're going to study it and then you're going to take action again. Put that together and then come back and tell us how was the results, what happened, what has changed for you as a result of doing this process. Most of us will learn a lot, but we don't have a way to kind of assimilate that data. So you got to figure out a plan on where you're going to take action on the stuff you're learning so that you can then see how you're, you know, like, are you— you learned it, but you're not— you don't really understand it until you do it. And then you study it, and then you take action, and then it starts to become a part of you. And this is what happens with premier athletes, professional athletes, they have it down. They have a habit, they have a lifestyle. It becomes that over time. But part of that is sort of getting to know yourself through the process of doing the PDSA framework. And through that, you're going to find more effective, efficient, high-performance habits, patterns, and processes that are going to produce you optimal results and ultimately help you accomplish your goals and your dreams. I hope you found this episode helpful. Please leave a comment below about what your favorite part was or what aha occurred to you. Obviously, we will see you next week for another powerhouse episode with another amazing athlete from the world of professional sports. And we'll see you next time.