Self-talk in Sports

Your mental game is only as strong as the way you talk to yourself.

The way you talk to yourself determines how you feel, mentally. It heavily impacts your focus, confidence, and subsequent actions/general behavior.

If you don’t have productive, healthy self-talk, you can be sure you’re not performing near your potential.

So, let’s go over some basic components of self-talk.

What is self-talk?

It’s how you talk to yourself. Usually it’s the voice in your head, but it can also be out loud. The quality of your self-talk hinges on its tone, frequency, and language.

  • Tone: are you talking to yourself in a panicked or angry way, or are you calm and collected?

  • Frequency: how often are you paying attention to your self-talk? If it’s ignored, it might go down a negative, anxious path. Repeatedly engaging in purposeful self-talk has an incredible effect on your mental game.

  • Language: does your self-talk’s specific wording resonate with you and make sense? Or do you instantly forget it because it isn’t memorable? This is important when you use self-talk to boost your focus, motivation, and confidence.

Think of self-talk as effective or ineffective

  • Effective: your self-talk boosts your performance through enhancing confidence, dialing in your focus, or it’s simply positive in nature. In fact, effective self-talk can also be seen as facilitating “neutral thoughts” because they keep you from having performance damaging thoughts, which many athletes have when they don’t control their self-talk.

  • Ineffective: your self-talk breaks you down, leaving you feeling less confident or more distracted. Ineffective self-talk is common with athletes who don’t practice purposeful self-talk. When you leave it up to chance, your brain gets overprotective. Although it might be useful for survival, it doesn’t help sport performance. The constant worries being repeated in your head leave people feeling being more stressed, not better athletes.

You’ll never be without that voice in your head. The impact it has on your confidence and focus cannot be understated! So, instead of ignoring it or hoping it doesn’t work against you, why not train it?

Talk it over with me during a free introductory call and see if we’d be a good fit for sport psychology training. Click here to schedule!