With the league season fast approaching here, now is the time to set your cricket goals for the summer.

In the hope that you will be inspired to do this yourself, it's time for me to put my money where my mouth is. Here are my goals for the summer and how I plan to track them:

Overall Aim: To make 2007 my best cricket season ever.

The purpose of having an overall aim is to keep inspired and build some more measurable goals around. In other words: If you achieve all your goals, you will have achieved your overall aim.

Cricket Goals

• Use visualisation daily. Visualisation is proven to give cricketers a better chance of success. This is logged in a notebook as a record.
• Stick to a nutrition plan. The easiest way to track this is to log what is eaten every day and score it compared to the nutrition guidelines set down by Dr. John Berardi. This ensures the right energy is available during the game. It's also useful to track your weight and body fat percentage too.
• Maintain fitness. This can be tracked by your own feeling after games (how tired you are) and also by the number of fitness sessions per week you do. I track this by setting myself a target of 2 fitness sessions per week in the summer.
• Practice regularly. Last season I could not practice as much as I wanted so this year I have set targets to warm up properly before every game and attend 90% of practice sessions. These are also logged in a notebook.
• Be more positive. Being a perfectionist I have trouble letting go of mistakes. This season my goal is to do this by reviewing techniques like self-talk, both before and after the game. I note how successful these tricks have been in my notebook after the game along with 5 things I did well in the match.

You will notice all of these goals are achievable by me without outside influence. I can't put it down to a dodgy decision or bad luck. That's why there are no run targets. You can customise this approach for your own goals.

My feeling is that if the right things are in place, then the runs and wickets will come anyway.

For me, goal setting is about planning what you can realistically do then going out and doing it. Success is bound to follow if your focus is right. What are your goals for the summer?