The 10 Essentials: Essential #4

The fourth Essential is learning to Control Mental Talk. What you say to yourself matters. Your internal dialogue can absolutely make or break your athletic performance. In fact, it has more impact on your performance in a single competition moment than anything else. However, it’s also the aspect that athletes spend the least amount of time developing. They would rather focus more on the physical and technical aspects of their sport.

Take one day to pay attention to what you are telling yourself during a training session. We bet you’ll be surprised at how negative your mental talk can be. Our goal isn’t to turn all of your mental talk into positive, feel good statements. It’s to help you replace the unhelpful statements with those that are beneficial to you. Especially in those pressure moments that matter the most! Let’s take a look at our top 2 tips for controlling your mental talk.

Replace Don’ts with Do’s.

Your brain does a really poor job of recognizing the word “don’t.” Want to test it out? Don’t think of a pink elephant. What did you think about? Yup…a pink elephant. The reason for this is your brain is…lazy. You telling it “don’t drop the ball” leads it to focusing on dropping the ball; which is exactly the one thing you want to NOT do. Since your brain is going to conserve calories and not do any extra work, it won’t try to think of one of the multiple things it could do instead of dropping the ball. Essentially, you are sending your brain towards the cliff and it is not going to change course on its own. Instead, you need to do the work to decide what you DO need to do in those situations. “Don’t drop the ball” becomes “strong hands.” “Don’t strike out” becomes “See ball, hit ball.” Flip your don’ts into do’s so your brain is focusing on the right thing.

Add in YET.

The other most common unhelpful thought involves the word “can’t.” “I can’t do this.” “We can’t score.” “They can’t be beat.” Talk about a downer! It makes it really hard to do things, especially things that are difficult when we are defeated by can’t. One simple fix is to add in the word YET to the end of that can’t statement. That little word adds in hope and gives you room to move towards that difficult thing. “I can’t do this YET.” It reminds you that you can keep working until you CAN do it.

These two key changes in how you talk to yourself will make a massive change in your overall performance.

Simple recap: Change don’ts to do’s and add in yet.