Don’t Talk Yourself Out of a Great Game!
Do you ever step up to the tee box and think “I hope I don’t hit the ball in the water” and then sure enough, the ball lands right in the water?
By thinking about the water you gave your brain the instruction to focus on the water. The brain doesn’t interpret “don’t” or “no” very well. This conflict in the mind is the one that it focuses on, and sadly, “hit the ball in the water” is the result. This is an example of how you can think or talk yourself into a bad golf game.
Learn to Talk Yourself into a Great Performance!
Internal Dialogue (Self-Talk) It is human nature to have thoughts about our own behaviors. These thoughts can be negative or positive. It is most commonly referred to as self-talk. This self-talk is an internal dialogue that directly relates to our self-perceptions.
Cognitions or thoughts expressed or held in our minds significantly impact performance, positively or negatively. The stability of our performance mindset is revealed in what our internal dialogues contain. The more awareness an individual has of their internal dialogues, the more information the individual has to create change for him or herself. What we think has an effect on HOW we feel, which, in turn, has an effect on WHAT we do. What we feel also influences how we think. Sounds like a vicious cycle. No Worries both are addressable.
Our internal dialogue is also reflective of how we feel. A deeper feeling or self-belief generally connects to our internal dialogue. Thoughts, feelings and behaviors form a triangle that is interlocked and can create a performance-destructive or performance enhancing cycle. It is easier for most people to identify thoughts and behaviors to disrupt the cycle rather then feelings. Most people can identify the physical body experience that connects to their emotions.
Our internal dialogue can be in different forms. It may be a running dialogue of thoughts or phrases as well as individual words. Negative thinking has been shown to have a negative effect on performance. When self-talk is negative, it is connected to negative feelings and when it is positive it creates positive feelings. Negative self-talk produces negative feelings, like anxiety, as well as physical tension, which lead to decreased motor coordination and speed. It engages the sympathetic nervous system and autonomic responses that impede performance. Negative self-talk also takes your focus away from what you should be doing; making it more likely you will miss something important or make a mistake. When we talk negatively to ourselves, it affects other important mental skills such as intensity regulation, stimulus arousal, focus, confidence and concentration. When these happen mental skills deteriorate, performance is likely to suffer, which serves to reinforce negative self-talk and negative self-beliefs (e.g., you prove to yourself that, “I really do stink at this”) creating a vicious cycle that destroys confidence.
Language or verbal skills come from our analytical mind, which means our conscious mind is engaged in some form. Our analytical mind wants things linear and logical as well as focused on conclusion. Having our analytical mind highly engaged when trying to perform fundamental physical actions can impede performance. Many times we are unaware of our self-talk; therefore, it can sabotage our performance without our even realizing it. At its worst, our self-fulfilling prophesies of poor performances in certain situations lead us to label ourselves negatively (self-belief) (e.g., “loser”) which makes it even more difficult to break the negative cycle.
Just as negative self-talk can hurt performance, positive self-talk can improve it. The key to using self-talk for performance-enhancement is to be able to recognize what you say to yourself so that you can control your self-talk and use it to facilitate performance. Staying positive in a negative situation is the hallmark of a superior athlete and is reflective of stable performance mindset elements.
With practice, athletes can learn to change their self-talk so that they will get the maximum benefit from their successes and learn from their failures without being overly self-critical. ??The uses of self-talk are varied. It can be used to improve performance, psych yourself up, cope with anxiety, increase motivation, strengthen confidence, elevate mood, focus your attention, prepare for a competition, break bad habits and acquire new skills. The level of ease or difficulty in turning thoughts around depends on how deeply they are internalized. The deeper they are, the more difficult it will be to turn them around because they are part of our core identity and can result in performance blocks. Deeply internalized performance blocks need to be cleared.
Common Problems with Self-Talk (adapted from USOC, 2002)
• Focusing on the past or future. For example – “I can’t believe I missed the break!” or “If I’m going to win the tournament, I can’t miss this approach shot.” All you can control is what you do in the present.
• Focusing on mistakes or weaknesses. For example, “My start sucked.” or “I hope she doesn’t sink this putt, I suck at putting.” Acknowledge areas in need of improvement in practices, but beating yourself up, especially in competitions, will erode your confidence.
• Focusing only on outcomes. For example, “I have to win” or “I have to beat her.” You can only control your own performance, not the performance of others. Concentrate on what you can do.
• Focusing on things out of your control. For example, “I hate playing in the rain” or “Why did he have to show up – now I’ll never win.” This takes your mind off of what you CAN do to improve your performance.
• Demanding perfection from yourself. For example, “I must win” or “I have to out-drive this guy at the next hole.” This can set you up for frustration and failure.
Take Charge of Your Thinking
First develop a good awareness of your internal dialogues. There will likely be themes in different performance situations and roles because of how they connect to your core self-beliefs. Assess the various situations and get a good understanding of how your thoughts, feelings and behaviors are connected. Then, make a commitment to take charge of how they get in your way and do not support the performance you desire. Learn how to use it to maximize your desired performance. Research has shown that the best athletes are able to stop their negative thinking and quickly change it to more positive and productive thoughts without beating themselves up. Mastering this will enhance performance in all areas of your life.
There are many methods to help take charge of internal dialogues and beginning to empower any performance. There are many different cognitive behavioral methods (CBT) that focus mainly on thoughts as well as methods that focus on the entire picture of the thought, feeling, behavior triangle and work with both the conscious and unconscious mind to clear and reprocess negative dialogues and strengthen self supportive dialogues.
CBT, cognitive restructuring, thought-stopping and thought-replacement techniques are fairly simple and can be learned by almost anyone. However depending on the strength of the connected neural pathways and underlying negative emotion and self-belief that drive the negative dialogue – it can be very challenging to get them turned around without assistance. There are methods around mindfulness and meditation, imagery and visualization that are effective and you can incorporate metaphors.
More complex techniques that work with all levels of the mind are hypnosis, EMDR and neural path therapy. The advantage to these is they can routinely get to the underlying feelings and beliefs that are internalized and connected to the negative self-talk dialogues and performance blocks more easily. These are all techniques that Mind Empowered Sport Performance teaches in our advanced level workshops.
What is most important is that you begin to address any negative self-talk because the brain is always on, always doing and learning something. Each time negative self-talk dialogue engages and isn’t disrupted it is being strengthened. So get the positive self-talk going and start thinking your way to a better golf game, a better performance in almost anything!