Goals help you in charting out a course or direction for your game, and this helps you plan your life better. Goals for different stages in your grappling or combat-athletic career:

Long-Term Goals: These are ling-range in nature and cover 5 - 10 years of your grappling or combat-athletic career.

Medium-Term Goals: These are what you envisage for yourself in the next two years. Medium-term goals put into perspective the tournaments and matches that you have to work towards during the next couple of years. Specifics include the levels at which you plan to fight and the weight segments within which you wish to compete.
Short-Term Goals: These are the plans you make every few months and the achievement targets you set for yourself in the short-term. You list out specific matches that you plan to enter during the next 3-6 months and work out a specific schedule of activities in your preparations for these matches.

Your long term goals revolve around your ambitions, aspirations, and dreams. It is your vision for yourself and the manner in which you hope your grappling or combat-athletic career will progress in the coming years. Your preparation has to start now, both mentally and physically, if you want to compete for a national or world title in few years. Learning and skill development go through a gradual progression in eventually preparing you for the cherished big fights.

Medium-term goals require that you constantly assess what is happening within the grappling and combat-athletics fraternities, look for opportunities, evaluate the competition in terms of wins and loses, and so on.

Short-term goals, given their immediacy, will require planning the exact dates when you should practice, train, and get yourself physically and mentally ready. The fitness regimen that you should follow: your diet program: your mental preparation and the coaching sessions that you plan to attend all fall into place when you do the planning to achieve your short-term goals.

Performance-Based Goal Setting
Another approach to goal setting is based on your assessment of your performance in preceding matches. This requires that you and your coach make an objective identification of weak areas or deficiencies in your performance and go about finding ways to improve your skills in those areas. These deficiencies could be in technique or in mental skills. For instance, you and your coach may find that poor concentration significantly reduces your performance during a bout.

You basically have to identify those aspects of your preparation that need enhancement to deliver peak performance. When you identify your weak points, you have to set specific objectives to address these weak areas in your performance. Since this type of goal setting is performance related, players feel motivated enough to see it through and overcome the deficiencies in their performance. What emerges is a performance-based mental skills training program, whereby the goals that have been set can be measured over time. When you master the techniques in which you were deficient, your confidence levels also receive a boost.

How Do You Go About Setting Goals?

Here's a five-step guideline:
1. Determine your commitment to grappling combat-athletics - Are you here for only a few years and a few belts? Do you want to make a long-term career out of this? Is this just a hobby? Are you interested in competing because your friends and peer group pursue it?
You have to figure out where you fit in as far as commitment to the game goes. Your goals and preparation levels will vary depending on your commitment to the game.

2. Decide on the level that you want to reach - Express goals positively and as precisely as you possibly can in terms of tournaments, titles, championships, weight levels, etc. Write them down. Keep them in front of you.

3. Set Realistic Goals - Your goals have to be achievable. They can be inspirational, but certainly not impractical. Have big goals for the long run but in the short-term take small steps. Goals have to be realistic and practical, so that you have some control over how to go about achieving them. Attempting matches and levels that you do not have a realistic chance of winning (given your skills and preparation at a given point) is a real waste of time and effort. You have to avoid the tendency to attempt too much too soon. Here's a small tip in setting realistic goals - pick out the names of some grapplers and combat athletes who have made it big and trace their career track. See how they progressed in their careers and choices they made in their journey to the top. As you study this, it will give some insights into planning your career and setting realistic goals for yourself. You will also find that major wins don't happen everyday. It takes ample preparation time for any player to win major title.

4. Identify skills and performance requirements - Understand the skills that you have to acquire at the different stages to succeed and effectively reach your goals. Also, recognize the level of performance that will be needed at the different stages of your grappling and combat athletics career.

5. Prioritize matches and tournaments - Assuming that you have set some realistic goals for yourself to achieve, you must then direct your attention to the most important matches and tournaments, where making your mark would mean a great deal to your career. When you prioritize and thereafter win at important events, it will be a big boost to your confidence and self-image.