Self-talk is that part of our everyday dialogue that is associated with the interpretation of our thoughts and the actions that follow as a result of it. Inner speech is a characteristic of humankind (Fields, 2002). In simpler words, self-talk can be understood as the chat that you have with yourself as an individual, during various situations.
Self-talk plays a major role in the way we take action, thus influencing our performance at work and in life accordingly. It also plays an important role in self-regulation. For example,when you say “I have had two cookies. This is enough for me”.
Self talk helps us to regulate our emotions, aids better planning and problem-solving skills. Also termed as inner speech, self-talk leads one towards self awareness and self reflection. Self-talk can be a cue word, a brief phrase or a statement.
The first step to reframe our self-talk is to identify our negative inner voice.
What is negative self-talk?
Negative self-talk is usually our autopilot mode of reaction and it can be changed. For example, “She left my message on Seen, and never replied. I think she finds me boring” – one of the common ways in which we rely on our assumptions to shape our emotions and reactions is through this kind of self-talk. Negative self-talk can often be our automatic and immediate reaction to anything we face everyday. But with mindful observation, and pacing ourselves while experiencing thoughts, we can rewire our negative self-talk.
This can have a significant impact on our behavioral performance in various aspects of our life.
Functions of self-talk:
In an athletic context, the functions of self-talk are said to serve two important purposes – instructional and motivational. Sometimes athletes use deliberate statements to instruct themselves towards taking action that would fuel their performance. Then there are other scenarios where a conscious approach to alter self-talk in a motivational tonality is required. A few significant reasons for self-talk to occur can be in the contexts of self-criticism, self-reinforcement, and self-management.
In common practice, sports psychologists work on decreasing the amount of negative self-talk used by their athletes with the help of proven cognitive techniques. However, as a common individual, we can also work on identifying our self-talk patterns and how it influences our behaviors constantly.
Where does one start?
The first step in gaining control of self-talk is to develop awareness of negative self-talk
Within this step of the process, there are two important aspects to be observed:
- The awareness around use of the negative self-talk
- The actual content of the negative self-talk
One has to acknowledge that some aspect of their behavior is being influenced by the use of inner dialogues. With this awareness, we can probe deeper into why we are indulging in that kind of self-talk. As a sequential action to this, we can start noticing what we are actually telling ourselves in these statements. Further we go deeper into identifying the action that it leads us to perform. In many situations, all of these could be happening as a quick process, leaving us helpless to change the way it is occurring. But please be assured that this process of changing your own self-talk takes some time. Every small step towards awareness and acknowledging it helps immensely.
What are some of the situations that trigger negative self-talk for athletes?
- Pain, discomfort, injury: Typically the onset of physical discomfort
- Unsuccessful actions on the field
- Negative comparisons to others’ performance
- Losing focus in the middle of the game
- Lack of motivation to participate
- Increase in ‘perceptions’ of the task difficulty
What are some of the common negative self-talk statements that are used by athletes?
“I’m going to lose”
“I am not going to reach my goal”
“I want to stop”
“I can’t keep going”
Research also points out that when an individual does not have the required self-awareness (i.e., are low in dispositional self-consciousness; Fenigstein, Scheier, & Buss, 1975), it could be a cause for their lack of awareness of the use and content
of negative self-talk.
To conclude, although this article talks about the various possibilities of negative self-talk from an athlete’s point of view, we can derive multiple similarities of when this phenomenon occurs in a non-athletic person’s life as well. Working consciously on your self-talk patterns can help improve your academic performance, workplace well-being and also personal relationships. Moderating your self-talk is possible and useful to enable optimal performance.
To know more about this topic and be part of our growing community invested in self-growth and self-awareness, please follow me on Instagram and LinkedIn.
https://www.instagram.com/keerthanaswaminathan/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/keerthana-swaminathan-33831482
References:
Hardy, James & Roberts, Ross & Hardy, Lew. (2009). Awareness and Motivation to Change Negative Self-Talk. Sport Psychologist. 23. 435-450. 10.1123/tsp.23.4.435.
Negative Self-Talk During Sport Performance: Relationships with Pre-Competition Anxiety and Goal-Performance Discrepancies