This article was written by Lindsey Wilson. Lindsey is the Co-Founder of Positive Performance Mental Training Zone. Lindsey played basketball at Iowa State and then played professionally overseas. She has been teaching, writing and speaking about mental training for the last 6 years.

The Truth About Positive Self-Talk

By Lindsey Wilson

There’s a lot out there about positivity and the importance of having a positive mindset: talking to yourself positively, talking to your kids positively, even talking to your pets positively. (Groan… Yes, it’s a thing!)

All this positivity can be a bit much.

And that’s saying a lot, especially coming from someone like me who’s a BIG believer in the power of the glass-is-half-full mentality. The complication with positivity is that it can be hard to distinguish what is actually helpful and what is just, well, fluff.

That’s why I want to talk specifically about self-talk today because, in my opinion, self-talk serves as the basis for so many things in our lives: our beliefs, our outlook, our confidence, how we interact with others, and much, much more. But, I don’t just want to talk about self-talk alone; I also want to dive into the research behind it to make sure this isn’t just another ‘positive self-talk is great’ article. Yay!

Seeing as our focus is athletics, I want to specifically analyze the research looking into the relationship between self-talk and performance. Basically, my big question is:

Is teaching athletes positive self-talk worth it?

So, here we go! This is what I found:

• Positive self-talk can improve confidence.
• Positive self-talk does positively affect performance.
• Self-talk effects motor skill performance more than cognitive performance.
• Self-talk is best scripted ahead of time and practiced.
• Research shows there are differences in what type of statements you should say at different times, but…
• What works for each person is fundamentally a matter of personal preference.
• Addressing yourself by name or ‘you’ is found to be more powerful than ‘I’ statements.
• Self-talk should focus on what you should do rather than what you should not do.

First, before we can talk about self-talk in depth, we need to establish a solid definition. More specifically, we need to be able to answer the following questions:

1. What IS self-talk?
2. What different types of self-talk are there?
3. Are there types that are more helpful in certain situations than others?

These questions get really specific, really fast, so let’s start with a basic overview of self-talk and go from there.

Defining Self-Talk

The Mayo Clinic defines self-talk as “the endless stream of unspoken thoughts that run through your head… [that] can be positive or negative.” Furthermore, “[i]f your thoughts are mostly positive, you’re likely an optimist — someone who practices positive thinking.”

Positive thinking, therefore, is the result of positive self-talk, and those can offer multiple health benefits, such as increased life span and increased immunity.

The Mayo Clinic then gives us examples of both positive and negative self-talk:

Putting Positive Thinking Into Practice

Negative self-talk	Positive Self Talk
I’ve never done it before.	It’s an opportunity to learn something new.
It’s too complicated.	I’ll tackle it from a different angle.
I don’t have the resources.	Necessity is the mother of invention.
I’m too lazy to get this done.	I wasn’t able to fit it into my schedule, but I can re-examine some priorities.
There’s no way it will work.	I can try to make it work.
It’s too radical a change.	Let’s take a chance.
No one bothers to communicate with me.	I’ll see if I can open the channels of communication.
I’m not going to get any better at this.	I’ll give it another try.

The Mayo’s cover-all rule: “Don’t say anything to yourself that you wouldn’t say to anyone else.”

Simple enough right? Not so fast. Let’s dive into this a little deeper…

TYPES Of SELF-TALK

Research shows there are 4 specific categories of performance-based self-talk:

• Calming/relaxing (“Take a deep breath.”)
• Instructional (“Bend your knees.”)
• Motivational (“Yes! Come on, let’s go!”)
• Focus (“Don’t think about anything. Just concentrate.”)

This list got me paying attention. Why? Because these categories are all so different. Even for myself, I can see one type of statement working in a certain situation and not working in another. (Leaving the research aside for a moment, this is where I encourage athletes to build up self-awareness and to practice what works with some trial and error.)

But, back to the research…

WHAT TO SAY, WHEN

In Perspectives on Psychological Science[i], a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, researchers at the University of Thessaly did a meta-analysis on 62 research studies on self-talk. Their analysis revealed that, not only did self-talk improve sports performance, but different self-talk cues work differently in certain situations.

Here is what they found:

• Instructional self-talk (i.e. “Elbow-up”) is most helpful for tasks requiring fine skills or for improving technique.

Motivational self-talk (i.e. “Give it your all”) seems to be more effective in tasks requiring strength or endurance, boosting confidence and psyching-up athletes for competition.

It is a matter of personal preference or what works for each person; but generally, it is advised that self-talk is positively rather than negatively phrased and focuses on what you should do rather than on what you should avoid…”
Antonis Hatzigeorgiadis, researcher at the University of Thessaly

A SMALL TRICK

According to an article in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology[ii], a researcher by the name of Kross and his associates at the University of Michigan did an experiment with one small caveat: participants would either use the word ‘I’ or ‘You/[their name]’ when addressing themselves with their self-talk.

This is what the experiment looked like:

Kross asked volunteers to give a speech. Catch: they were only given five minutes of mental preparation. During the five minutes, he told some to talk to themselves and to address themselves as ‘I’. For the rest of them, their five minutes was spent using ‘you’ or by addressing themselves in the third person (using their own names).

At the close of the study, this is what Kross found:

• People who used ‘I’ said things like ‘Oh, my god, how am I going do this? I can’t prepare a speech in five minutes without notes. It takes days for me to prepare a speech!’
• People who used ‘you’ or their own names said things like, “Ethan, you can do this. You’ve given a ton of speeches before.”

Positive self-talk effects your everyday life. Clearly, the people who used ‘you’ or their names sounded more rational and less emotional—perhaps because they were able to get some distance from themselves.

Truly, it sounds like they are coaching themselves.

SELF-TALK CAN INFLUENCE RESULTS!

Research done out of Waseda University in Japan[iii] shows again that motor skills especially are greatly affected by self-talk. The results of their research show that positive self-talk improved physical performance by 11%.

Their research was based around a simple balancing exercise. Students completed the exercise then were given 30 seconds to rest before completing it a second time. In between the sets, students were told to pay attention to their self-talk. Some students reported having negative self talk; others reported positive self-talk; still another group reported using a combination of positive and negative self-talk.

The results were shocking.

Students that reported using positive self-talk exclusively during those 30 seconds were able to hold their balance a full second longer than those who used exclusively negative or had a mix of both negative and positive self-talk.

The positive self-talk resulted in an average balance time of 9.29 seconds, while the other two groups averaged out at 8.29 seconds. This is more than an 11% increase in performance, really close to the proven 15% increase in athletic performance we see with Positive Performance’s mental training.

CONCLUSION

Based on the above findings it’s obvious that teaching athletes how and when to use positive self-talk—that is, using positive self-talk appropriately—is not only a good time investment, but a worthwhile one.

While talking about positive self-talk can seem merely warm and fuzzy, research shows that it is a powerful, actionable tool in achieving one’s peak performance. And, based on our own work with athletes, here are some simple best practices for self-talk education:

6 TIPS FOR EFFECTIVE POSITIVE SELF-TALK

• Self-talk should be practiced ahead of time (outside of competition).
• While there are best practices, the focus should be less about negative/positive, or good/bad self-talk, and more about what is PRODUCTIVE for athletes in certain situations.
• Individual preferences are okay.
• Self-talk should be focused on what should be done, rather than what should be avoided.
• Different situations might call for different types of self-talk.
• It is difficult to turn off self-talk. For most people, self-talk is going to happen, for the good or the bad, regardless of whether you work on it. Knowing that, you may as well make the monologue in your head helpful… and positive!

Here’s to athletes everywhere, using self-talk as a tool to find their peak performance every time they step onto the playing field.

P.S. Want to pump up your performance even more? Click HERE to learn about our Competition MasteryTM training and get a FREE sample training.

REFERENCES:

[i] Girodo & Wood, 1979; Goodhart, 1986; Mahoney & Avener, 1977; Van Raalte et al., 1994; Weinberg, 1985

[ii] Kross, E., Bruehlman-Senecal, E., Park, J., Burson, A., Dougherty, A., Shablack, H., Bremner, R., Moser, J., & Ayduk, O. (2014). Self-talk as a regulatory mechanism: How you do it matters. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

[iii] Belief in Self-Talk and Dynamic Balance Performance.Kaori Araki (Waseda University, Japan), Joseph K. Mintah (Azusa Pacific University), Mick G. Mack, Sharon Huddleston, Laura Larson, and Kelly Jacobs (University of Northern Iowa).

Athlete Coach-Ability Checklist

I originally made contact with Lindsey after finding her Athlete Coach-Ability Checklist.

I like this resource because:

• There are concrete actionable steps for your athletes to take to improve their coach-ability
• It’s another voice (not yours, not their parents) that just so happens to be a former professional basketball player
• It helps your athletes be more self-aware of things they may not even know they are doing (rolling their eyes for instance!)

The checklist has been downloaded over 3000 times by coaches all across the country! Better yet, it’s FREE and comes in a nice, printable PDF format that you can share with your team. Click here to download it.

These thoughts on clutch performance are from Spencer Wood Icebox Athlete Sports Performance Resources. Click that link to see his Mental Toughness Edge website. There are some articles on mental training and other resources as well.

According to a study based on professional athletes in the NBA, NFL, and NHL, the following eight traits were found to constitute the ultimate athlete:

1. Ability to work hard and sustain intensity.
2. Competitiveness.
3. Athletic ability.
4. Sacrifice for the team.
5. Coping with criticism, failure, and success.
6. Clutch performance, poise, and focus.
7. Ability to execute game strategy.Passion
8. for the sport and commitment to excellence.

Five of the above traits are mainly mental attributes.

There isn’t a coach in America who would say that mental skills and toughness isn’t critical to clutch performance. But how many coaches devote fifty percent of their time developing mental skills?

Misconception that mental skill and toughness only need to be worked on if there’s something wrong.

We must give our athletes an actual skill set to work on. A crisp definition of what is expected.

Mental Toughness = The Four C’s:

1. Composure.
2. Concentration.
3. Confidence.
4. Commitment.

What happens to the brain under stress?

Perceived threat leads to a fight or flight reaction.

1. It’s important for our athletes to realize that this process is common.
2. Not too many athletes are going to acknowledge they’re nervous.
3. Take time to talk with your athletes about what happens to your mind and body in clutch situations.

Four things occur in clutch situations:

How does this effect performance?

Emotion Arousal (EA):

1. Coming out of the locker room before a game, or coming out of a key timeout in a clutch situation, an athlete’s emotional arousal level increases.
2. As emotional arousal increases, performance potential increases. However at a certain level, emotional arousal reaches a level where performance potential is maxed (as identified by the dotted line in figure 1).
3. Once this level of optimum emotional arousal is passed, performance potential tanks.

4. Different players may perform best at different levels of emotional arousal.
5. Some young coaches pride themselves on their ability to jack up their team without knowing that two of their studs may play better at a level two or three of emotional arousal.
6. Ray Allen for example seems to perform best at a very low emotional arousal level. You could have a player with an emotional arousal level of three who looks like they don’t even care.
7. There is nothing on Earth that you should let take you out of your optimal arousal zone.

Determining a player’s optimal EA level:

1. It is critical to ask the athlete what EA level they think they perform best at.
2. Ask your athletes to think back to the three or four best games of their career, and there will be some continuity to the level of arousal they were at during those performances.
3. Also challenge your players in practice. Manipulate their arousal levels and see at what level they perform the best.
4. Don’t confuse arousal level and intensity. Intensity must always remain high for optimal performance.

Maintaining optimal emotional arousal

1. There is a big difference between finding a players emotional arousal level and maintaining that level.
2. Once an athlete has identified their level, teammates and coaches can help the player reach that level before a game
3. It is up to the athlete to not let anything take them out of their optimal emotional arousal zone.

Mistake Management:

Take out the trash:

These thoughts on clutch performance are from Spencer Wood Icebox Sports Performance Resources.

Click the link below to see his Mental Toughness Edge website. There are some articles on mental training and other resources as well. Mental Toughness Edge

Developing a Mental Skills & Toughness Training Plan of Action

By Spencer Wood

Ask any athlete, coach or sports fan ‘of all the athletic attributes, which is the most important?’ Even the most casual athlete, coach or sports fan will provide an answer that in some way relates to the mental toughness, potential and power locked away in our mind. Yet, for so many coaches and athletes, unlocking the incredible athletic potential and power held in our minds is sometimes as much a mystery as it is a source of constant heartache and frustration. Many teams and individual athletes know what it feels like to bring their ‘A’ game against one program one day, and then almost unexplainably, they bring their ‘C’ or ‘D’ game against the very next program. Even worse, for those athletes who have experienced a major performance or skills slump in a big game or even over the course of a season – the frustration can feel like a slow death. Unfortunately, far too many coaches and athletes know this feeling all too well. For the progressive coach the response to these challenges is more than just extra running or longer practices.

While extra running, longer drills and additional conditioning can build certain aspects of mental toughness, and under a select few conditions may be suitable response for a lack of effort, games are not always won or lost because of a lack of effort. Games are often won or lost due to a lack of execution vs. lack of effort. The smart response then is to develop a mental skills and toughness training program that pinpoints the particular components of mental toughness that resulted in a lack of execution FOR EACH ATHLETE. Better still, coaches who proactively put such a plan in place before the start of the season will experience greater consistency and a significant competitive edge.

So how does a coach and team begin to implement a mental skills and toughness training program for clutch performance? It has been said that “sometimes things do not go according to plan because a plan did not exist in the first place.” For mental skills this plan begins with an honest assessment of each athlete’s mental skills and toughness strengths and weaknesses. But what kind of mental skills and toughness traits should you assess? While a seemingly endless stream of words and phrases can be used to broadly describe mental skills and athletic toughness traits, a useful summary traces each of these traits to one of more of the 4 C’s of Peak Performance – Composure, Concentration, Confidence and Commitment.

The 4 C’s of Peak Performance

Together, these “4 C’s of Peak Performance,” Composure, Concentration, Confidence, and Commitment – work like a model of a 3 leg stool. The first 3 C’s of Peak Performance – Composure, Concentration, and Confidence are like the legs of the stool. Lose one or more legs and the integrity and balance of the stool is compromised. Translation – our performance suffers. And the 4th C of Peak Performance – Commitment – is the seat or platform of the stool that takes our weight and sustains us. No commitment or motivation, no stool. Each of these 4 C’s of Peak Performance profoundly affects the others. Developing tremendous composure allows us to better perform our concentration skills. A composed athlete who is able to effectively concentrate whenever necessary, will be a confident and highly effective athlete. And finally, a fully committed athlete will have harnessed the necessary drive and motivation to passionately pursue their mental and physical potential – committing to the necessary physical and mental training, maximizing their composure, concentration and confidence, and striving for Peak Performance. The “4 C’s Stool” diagram illustrates this Peak Performance Model.

4 C’s of Peak Performance

The Peak Performance Assessment examines current levels of practice and competitive composure, concentration, confidence and commitment, in addition to a number of other factors that can profoundly affect each of the 4 C’s of Peak Performance. These questions are scored on a scale from 1-10. A score of 1 = a “strongly disagree/very low” score. A score of 9 = a “strongly agree/very high” score. A score of 10 is a very rare “near perfect” score and should only be used sparingly. Encourage each of your players to complete the Peak Performance Assessment with complete honesty. Great athletes are great because they work on their strengths AND their weaknesses.Only complete honesty will allow your players to objectively identify these strengths and weaknesses before they are able to effectively improve these skills. The coach should also complete an assessment on each player, and should be compared with the player’s self-assessment in a one-on-one meeting with each player.

Any question with a score below a 7 should send up a ‘red flag’ and you should strongly consider working on this weakness with the athlete in question and turning the weakness into a future goal for improvement.

Developing a mental skills and toughness training plan for your team will certainly involve a time commitment. But this critical skill set will add a new, challenging and fun component to your practice schedule. In addition, the more you continue to train your team’s competitive mental muscle and refine your player’s mental training skills, the closer you will come to your team’s real potential. The pay-off in consistent peak performance, individual player improvement and your overall win column can be significant.

IMO, one of the most important life lessons coaches can teach their athletes is the lesson of refusing to make or accept excuses. I have assembled some quotes in this article that I hope will help as you work with your athletes to eliminate the use of excuses in your program.

Excuses allow us to stay in our comfort zones.  But for growth and improvement to take place, we have to move out of our comfort zones.  By refusing to accept the option of making an excuse, you hold your athletes accountable and force them to move out of their comfort zone to complete the skill, drill, play, workout, or whatever your objective is–and then take responsibility for the results.

If your athletes know that you will not accept excuses, they are more likely to strive to find a way to succeed through perseverance and extended effort rather than giving up on themselves and their teammates too soon by taking the easy way out of looking for an excuse.  Many times, we find success on the other side of simply making one more intelligent effort.

A No Excuse team rule also teaches the lesson of not being afraid to accept failures and defeats and not feeling the need for rationalizing with an excuse.  Setbacks and mistakes are a part of the improvement process, and as such should not be feared, but rather learned from.  No one can learn from mistakes if they offer an excuse because they are attempting to cover up the mistake rather than embracing the opportunity to learn from it and get better.

 

I hope that you can find a few words in here that you can apply to your program!

Excuses are the nails used to build a house of failure. ~Don Wilder and Bill Rechin

Don’t make excuses – make good. ~Elbert Hubbard

He who excuses himself accuses himself. ~Gabriel Meurier

Several excuses are always less convincing than one. ~Aldous Huxley

Maybe you don’t like your job, maybe you didn’t get enough sleep, well nobody likes their job, nobody got enough sleep. Maybe you just had the worst day of your life, but you know, there’s no escape, there’s no excuse, so just suck up and be nice. ~Ani Difranco

How strange to use “You only live once” as an excuse to throw it away. ~Bill Copeland

Don’t do what you’ll have to find an excuse for. ~Proverb

No one ever excused his way to success. ~Dave Del Dotto

Excuses are the tools with which persons with no purpose in view build for themselves great monuments of nothing. ~Steven Grayhm

And oftentimes excusing of a fault. Doth make the fault the worse by the excuse. ~William Shakespeare

A lie is an excuse guarded. ~Jonathan Swift

Hold yourself responsible for a higher standard than anyone else expects of you. Never excuse yourself. ~Henry Ward Beecher

Whoever wants to be a judge of human nature should study people’s excuses. ~Hebbel

There is no such thing as a list of reasons. There is either one sufficient reason or a list of excuses. ~Robert Brault

We have more ability than will power, and it is often an excuse to ourselves that we imagine that things are impossible. ~François de la Rochefoucauld

Difficulty is the excuse history never accepts. ~Edward R. Murrow

Pessimism is an excuse for not trying and a guarantee to a personal failure. ~Bill Clinton

I attribute my success to this: I never gave or took an excuse. ~Florence Nightingale

We are all manufacturers – some make good, others make trouble, and still others make excuses. ~Author Unknown

One of the most important tasks of a manager is to eliminate his people’s excuses for failure. ~Robert Townsend

Success is a tale of obstacles overcome, and for every obstacle overcome, an excuse not used. ~Robert Brault

An excuse is a skin of a reason stuffed with a lie. ~Billy Sunday

Bad men excuse their faults; good men abandon them. ~Author Unknown

He that is good for making excuses is seldom good for anything else. ~Benjamin Franklin

It is wise to direct your anger towards problems – not people, to focus your energies on answers – not excuses. ~William Arthur Ward

It is better to offer no excuse than a bad one. ~George Washington

We have forty million reasons for failure, but not a single excuse. ~Rudyard Kipling

The person who really wants to do something finds a way; the other person finds an excuse. ~Author Unknown

If you always make excuses to not follow through you deserve the weight of anxiety on your chest. ~Author Unknown

Justifying a fault doubles it. ~French Proverb

A man can fail many times, but he isn’t a failure until he begins to blame somebody else. ~John Burroughs

The best day of your life is the one on which you decide your life is your own. No apologies or excuses. No one to lean on, rely on, or blame. The gift is yours – it is an amazing journey – and you alone are responsible for the quality of it. This is the day your life really begins. ~Bob Moawa

Never ruin an apology with an excuse. ~Kimberly Johnson