Teaching Your Athletes How to Talk to Themselves

Sarah Otey, PositiveSports.net
 

We all know that physical skills are essential for athletic performance.  What is less well known is that mental skills are just as essential. 

One of the most important mental skills is 'self talk', a term we use to describe the mental dialog athletes have with themselves about their performance.  We know from sport psychology that the athlete’s style of self talk is an important mediator between events that happen on the field and the athlete’s physical and emotional response to those events.  

Coaches and parents can help young athletes improve their performance and have a more enjoyable experience by teaching positive self talk as a fundamental skill.  Here are four steps to follow.

1. The first step in changing an athlete’s self-talk patterns is awareness.  Ask your athletes to keep a self-talk log on one practice day and one competition day.  Ask them to indicate their thoughts prior to, during, and following both practice and competition.
2. Identify, in their logs, irrational or distorted self-talk.  Examples of harmful self-talk include perfectionism (“I must do this perfectly”), personalization (“if I had made that play, we wouldn’t have lost”), blaming (“if it wasn’t windy, rainy, etc”), and one-trial generalizations (“I never play well at night”).  None of these examples of self-talk help the athlete improve for future performances, and oftentimes this negative self-talk may even impair performance.
3. Help your athletes replace irrational self-talk with more productive self-talk.  Athletes should be taught to identify when they are engaging in negative self-talk and encouraged to use a “buzz word” to stop those negative thoughts.  They can also be taught to change negative self-talk to informational self-talk.  Coaches and parents can achieve this by “countering assumptions”; demonstrate to the athlete why their negative self-talk is inaccurate (“you can’t say you never play well at night when we have only had one night game”).  
4. Finally, coaches can pair imagery with verbal cues to facilitate positive self-talk.  Ask the athlete to imagine certain on-field scenarios, and discuss possible responses to those scenarios.  Identify “buzz words” to remind the athlete to think positively and productively in response to certain situations.

Self-talk is an often overlooked but exceedingly important psychological skill for athletes.  Most young athletes are not aware enough to identify and overcome negative self talk on their own, so it is up to coaches and parents to teach and guide the process.