How Positive Self-Talk Can Fuel Your Student-Athlete’s Performance P1
I hated every minute of training, but I said, ‘Don’t quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion
- Muhammed Ali
While we don’t always think about it, our inner voice is always present – our greatest friend and biggest critic, boosting or stripping our confidence.
For our student-athletes, coming to grips with self-talk could be the difference between coming home with a medal or feeling the pain of poor performance.
So, what’s going on?
According to author and performance coach Steve Magness, hearing a voice in our heads is perfectly normal, with a whopping 94% of people reporting intrusive thoughts. So, your athlete is not crazy if they think about yelling at the coach or throwing their water bottle at their teammates – just make sure they don’t.
As Magness explains, our inner voice helps us work through possible scenarios – good and bad. Even if we don’t go through with them.
Athletes under stress–readying themselves for the pitch or behind in the last few minutes of the game–put together stories of what may happen. Each voice competes in their heads, with the loudest one getting heard.
And according to psychology, there are plenty of ways of thinking about our inner voice.
Researchers describe a calm, single, inner voice as integrated. It might be the rational one that helps the high-school or college athlete work through what they will say to the captain to get a place on the team or explain to the teacher why they’re late handing in an essay.
On the other hand, when it’s like a prize fight, with multiple voices competing to be heard, our self-talk is referred to as confrontational. It’s less a negotiation – and more a rowdy debate.
And all the voices mean well. They are just trying to keep us healthy and safe, helping us save face when things go wrong, telling us not to do something, because it might go wrong and leave us feeling bad, or encouraging us to have a good time.
Magness says, “Voices allow us to do something about how we feel.” We can think things over and work through the options – engage and negotiate.
So, what’s the problem?
Loud inner thoughts such as “I’m going to mess up,’ or “I shouldn’t even be here” are okay until they’re not. If the voice interrupts the athlete as they walk onto the track, but they center themselves and take position in their lane, looking down the 100m clear and focused, that’s fine.
Yet, when that’s all they can hear, their noisy inner voice telling them they’re not good enough, they’re not ready, and may as well go home, they’ve got a problem. Athletes will only be their best when they remove or reduce the hold of these confidence-sapping thoughts.
How do we use self-talk to calm or silence our inner voice?
The good news is that there are several ways self-talk can help us take control of how we react to the voice inside our heads. Such as:
- Changing our voice – from one of internal failing to another of external flourishing.
With a change of pronoun and a new message, we are on to a winner. We switch from saying,
“I can't keep up with everyone else. I'm just not good enough,”
to
“You're doing great at your own pace. Keep pushing, you're looking strong.”
While the athlete can keep self-talk in their heads, verbalizing out loud can help them reach their stubborn self.
- Knowing what voice to listen to – choosing positive over negative inner talk
Research in sports shows that it’s not just positive self-talk that matters – it’s also vital to reduce negative self-talk.
There is no point in telling yourself,
“You’re doing great; keep pushing,” if it’s followed by
"No matter what I do, it's never enough."
Focus on the positives.
- Stepping back – talking to yourself as though you are talking to a friend.
As Magness says, it’s easier to give advice to a friend or colleague than to yourself. When we are close to an issue, we lack clarity and objectivity, yet we have twenty-twenty vision regarding someone else's problems.
Changing our grammar is critical. Using their name, the athlete creates thinking space.
“Jo, you can turn this around’
“Sam, you’ve been behind before and won. You can do it again!”
Next week in Part II, we will explore what Sports Psychology says about Self-Talk, the steps to practicing Self-Talk and how to make all this work together for your athlete.