Enhancing the Quality of Your Self-Talk

Self-talk is the ultimate filter that determines the strength of your mental game.

Consider two athletes, where both make a costly error:

  • Athlete 1 will naturally experience some frustration, regret, or some other negative reaction. Their self-talk may follow, something along the lines of “I’ll never get this” or “I suck today”

  • Athlete 2 will also naturally feel some negative feelings bubble up. Before their self-talk goes down the negative spiral, they notice and take initiative in creative constructive self-talk, like “I can still have a great game despite that mistake” or “what went wrong there, and how can I be better?”

Looking at self-talk this way, no one can argue the fact that Athlete 2 is in a better position to succeed during the rest of this game.

Despite how clear this is, a myriad of athletes experience negative and catastrophic self-talk every day. Easier said than done rings true.

There are 2 important steps in being more like Athlete 2 compared to Athlete 1.

Step 1: Awareness

I’ve written extensively about awareness in this article. The main concept is this: flex your awareness muscle through a formal practice, just like any other muscle, to train it so you can be quicker to catch mentally damaging thoughts when they arise. As a result, you’ll be quicker to course correct and spend less time with low-quality self-talk.

Step 2: Enhance the Quality of Your Self-talk

Here’s where most people need more direction. Without understanding how to improve self-talk, most people fall back into their default self-talk patterns (which aren’t too effective).

One way to think about enhancing the quality of your self-talk is making it constructive. Positive self-talk is great, but many athletes, understandably, feel resistant to telling themselves positive, happy affirmations after making a gut-wrenching mistake. Constructive self-talk takes the excessive positivity out of the equation, but it still leads to the results you want.

Here are some guidelines for creating or transforming self-talk to be constructive:

  • Use “do” language

    • A familiar statement comes to mind to elucidate its importance: don’t think of a pink elephant. What happens? You think of a pink elephant.

    • Using “do” language, for example “keep your head up” gives the mind something productive to focus on. Using “don’t” language, like “don’t mess up” leaves the mind focusing on cues that diminish the quality of your self-talk.

  • Make it specific

    • Making your language specific - what to focus on, or why you should feel confident - will leave you in a better headspace than leaving it vague.

  • Challenge-based

    • As opposed to threat-based, frame your self-talk as a challenge. “This is going to be a challenging match-up” compared to “they’re going to dominate us” greatly impacts our outlook on the match-up. It influences confidence, focus, and ultimately, performance.

  • Present-tense

    • Quality self-talk is usually rooted in the present. The only exceptions are when you’re learning from the past (but not dwelling), and planning for the future (without falling into anxiety and worry).

Training your self-talk to be higher quality is a skill. This means it requires practice and won’t be perfect right away. It’s essential that you’re practicing steps 1 and 2, where you become aware of low-quality thoughts then improve the quality through these guidelines, in practice. Don’t wait for games and big competitions to try this out - it won’t work out well, just like a quarterback wouldn’t throw the ball in a different way during games despite never having done it in practice.

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The Sweet Spot of Stress, and How to Reach it