By Jim Freeman
A popular 1991 Saturday Night Live skit "Daily Affirmation with Stuart Smalley" featured comedian Al Franken as a sort of self-help guru and routinely showed his character talking to himself in the mirror and repeating the phrase "I'm good enough, I'm smart enough and doggone it, people like me." However, the sketches would invariably find Stuart also saying to himself "I don't know what I'm doing. They're gonna cancel the show. I'm gonna die homeless and penniless and twenty pounds overweight and no one will ever love me." The sketches were so well-received that they resulted in a spin-off novel and a feature film. The episode featuring Michael Jordan (pictured above) was a particularly entertaining example and can be found on YouTube.
We all talk to ourselves. Some of us may also do it out loud at times but we all have a nearly constant conversation with ourselves taking place in our heads. We talk to ourselves even when we're having conversations with someone else. What sorts of things are we saying to ourselves? What effect are those conversations having on our performance whether it's in the classroom, the boardroom or on the field? Are those conversations positive, helpful, and optimistic? Or do they tend to lead us into more negative and less productive territory? In It Takes What It Takes, Trevor Moawad describes this phenomenon as an "Ad Campaign in Your Brain". In my experience as a coach I've found that a significant percentage of my players have an "ad campaign" runnning inside their heads that is less than positive or productive when it comes to their performance. Players commonly say very critical things to themselves...things they would never repeat to a teammate. Greg Dale (Director of Sports Psychology and Leadership Program at Duke University) writes in It's A Mental Thing!, "Many athletes are much harder on themselves than they are on others because they know they can get away with it and they think it will help push them to avoid making the same mistake again. The reality is this type of self-talk is ultimately detrimental to consistent high level performance because it is detrimental to confidence." Harvey Dorfman states in Coaching the Mental Game, "The athlete must start to listen to himself, understanding that as he expresses these negatives each day, he increases the chances of a negative outcome." Many players that I know have an extremely difficult time gaining any measure of control over their self-talk and remain in a near constant state of being their own worst enemy. What can be done to control or change these internal discussions? Or are they hard-wired with little hope for alteration?
A player's self-identity too often revolves around competence and production. When performance lags behind what the athlete expects or what she believes others may expect then her internal conversations can quickly take a negative turn. Carol Dweck discusses this at length in Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. She outlines two approaches to performance: a fixed mindset versus a growth mindset. A fixed mindset is reflective of a line of thinking that sees our talents and abilities as unchangeable or immutable. The growth mindset takes the exact opposite approach. She describes the fruits of a fixed mindset thusly, "I've seen so many people with this one consuming goal of proving themselves - in the classroom, in their careers, and in their relationships. Every situation calls for a confirmation of their intelligence, personality, or character. Every situation is evaluated: Will I succeed or fail? Will I look smart or dumb? Will I be accepted or rejected? Will I feel like a winner or a loser?" The growth mindset produces a different mentality and is centered around the notion that one's abilities can be developed and improved, that we're not just stuck struggling with the hand we are dealt. Dweck describes the thinking produced by a growth mindset, "...everyone can change and grow through application and experience...a person's true potential is unknown (and unknowable)...it's impossible to foresee what can be accomplished with years of passion, toil, and training." Ultimately an individual with a fixed mindset is left fighting for approval and acceptance while the person with a growth mindset is working to develop and improve. The growth mindset allows for hope, optimisim and belief in the value of learning and work. With this approach we have reason to view our self-talk as not pre-programmed and unchangeable but something that can be controlled and improved upon.
Angela Duckworth points out in her best-selling book Grit that "High-performers and low-performers both have a running internal dialogue - the difference is what they use it to say." In order to perform at a higher level that internal dialogue needs to be helpful instead of detrimental. One self-talk strategy involves replacing negative self-talk with more affirming statements. Mike Voight has authored a series of books on mental toughness and he advises athletes to identify their most common negative thoughts and self-talk statements that occur before and during contests. He then suggests athletes compile a list of those thoughts and statements followed by a list of positive thoughts and statements to replace the negative ones. The next step "entails believing in the productive statements and not the negative ones. Players do this by 'building a case' for why these productive thoughts and statements are true." (Mental Toughness Training for Volleyball) This involves making a list of reasons why the individual has cause to feel confident or optimistic such as "I earned a spot on this team and I deserve to be here." As the case is built for believing in the positive thoughts and statements written down earlier the ad campaign in the player's head shifts to a more helpful one. Voight stresses the need to continue to review and revise the new more positive ad campaign so this productive mindset is able to be sustained.
W. Timothy Gallwey has written several "Inner Game" books including titles covering tennis, golf and skiing. In all of them he advocates lessening the impact of the conscious (Self 1) by removing judgement from the activity and trusting in the subconscious (Self 2). This means we don't necessarily have to fill our heads with statements like "I'm the best!". Instead Gallwey posits a more functional and neutral strategy. He suggests repeating the phrase "Bounce-Hit" (when playing tennis). "Say the word 'bounce' out loud the instant you see the ball hit the court and the word 'hit' the instant the ball makes contact with the racket - either racket" (The Inner Game of Tennis). Thus the notion of a good swing or a bad swing is taken away and the athlete is allowed to feel the movement with no judgement attached in a state of what Gallwey calls "relaxed concentration". As this occurs more frequently trust is established between Self 1 and Self 2 and "eventually the basic but elusive ingredient for all top performance emerges - self-confidence" (The Inner Game of Tennis).
A similarly neutral and non-judgemental approach to self-talk is discussed in Moawad's book It Takes What It Takes, "No one will be able to influence me like I will be able to influence me. This is particularly true when the words come out of my mouth and start immediately connecting to behaviors. Words become self-fulfilling prophecies. So if I created an internal ad campaign that presents me as a loser no would want to listen to, I would act as if my talents didn't matter. I'd wonder why anyone would want to read this book. And that would make it very difficult to write this book. Instead, my internal ad campaign during this process is a series of neutral statements explaining why I'm writing this book..." A negative ad campaign can cripple performance to the point of obliteration. I have watched the level of play of countless players and teams spiral out of control because of this kind of negative and judgemental thinking. As a result, all the work on skill development and tactics in countless hours of practice is rendered useless. Instead it is possible for performers in all arenas to create a more constructive frame of mind that allows them to trust their training and freely execute in an unconscious, non-judgemental state.
I am often reminded of a particular volleyball player I coached many years ago who really struggled in her attempts to move past mistakes on the court. She was an excellent student and went through her school day routinely scoring very highly on her classroom assignments, quizzes and exams. She didn't get much practice in coping with failure in her academic life. However, a sporting environment is rife with opportunities to practice dealing with mistakes and failure. I am certain that she ascribed a moral judgement to her athletic struggles....it wasn't just a pass that was off the mark...it was a bad pass. In hindsight it is easy to see that her identity was dominated by a fixed mindset approach to her performance. She expected herself to be consistently competent and I'm sure she felt it was expected of her by others as well. At the time we talked about the dehumanizing and unreasonable nature of that kind of thinking. Once she shanked a pass in serve receive, the odds of her continuing to struggle were quite high. She saw herself as having failed and let down her teammates. Her body language was indicative of an internal dialogue that was filled with negativity. We discussed what was happening and settled on a strategy where I would repeat the neutral, non-judgemental phrase "bounce back" when she erred and her competitive spirit waned. After awhile I didn't have to say it anymore. She was saying it to herself. When she made a mistake she would look down and then immediately look up with a focused and determined look in her eyes. She was controlling her self-talk and using it to produce a more consistently productive level of performance. I had much to learn regarding these matters (and many more) but it's one of my earliest memories as a coach concerning the impact of mindset on performance.
Marcus Aurelius (Roman emperor and author of Meditations) once wrote "I can control my thoughts as necessary; then how can I be troubled? What is outside my mind means nothing to it. Absorb that lesson and your feet stand firm." As discussed in prior essays, humans have been wrestling with these issues for thousands of years. Such struggles are not new to us. The human condition has remained constant in such matters and will continue to do so. The good news is that solutions to these problems are readily available and when applied on a consistent basis will yield desirable results. "The point is that you can, in fact, modify your self-talk, and you can learn to not let it interfere with you moving toward your goals. With practice and patience, you can change the way you think, feel, and, most important, act when the going gets rough." (Angela Duckworth, Grit)
