Self-Talk, raise up mindset & skills.

Positive self-talk can improve skill levels and mental resilience.

Photography credit Duren Williams

Self-talk (ST) is the verbal conversation we have with ourselves in our own head. When monitored, it can significantly impact sports performance in two ways: boost your mindset and improve your technical skills.

Instructional and Motivational Self-Talk

Contemporary research makes an important distinction between instructional ST which refers to attentional focus, tactical choices and technical information, and motivational ST which refers to confidence building, effort input, positive mindset. (Zinsser, Bunker & Williams, 2001).

In other words, self-talk not only increases your motivation, but it also enhances your attentional focus. When using ST, you experience fewer interfering thoughts and it can be used to trigger automatic execution of some precise behaviors, such as a rapid punch combination.

Directing your attention to the relevant actions improves the quality of your movement or performance. This intentional attitude is viewed as more beneficial for sports requiring fine motor control, such as boxing or MMA, rather than gross motor control, such as running or power lifting.

But be careful! If you start giving yourself too many instructional self-talk cues, you risk overthinking and overanalyzing. The result would be to revert to a more novice-like state where you stop trusting your instincts and highly trained muscle memory. And in fights, hesitation is demise.

Instructional self-talk improves performance for the precision task whereas motivational enhances performance for the power task.

Motivational self-talk boosts athletes’ motivation and encouraged them to put in more effort. Positive self-talk can help you feel more confident and instill in you the belief that your goals are achievable, and when facing a problem, you can find workarounds.

If you experience negative self-talk, try reframing those statements from “I can’t” to “I will try my best.” This subtle shift enhances your mental state during competitions.

There are three broad categories of self-talk:

Self-expression - a spontaneous expression of your thoughts and feelings (“this is so exciting!”)

Interpretive - using your inner voice to think through emotion or experience, for instance:

“I feel nervous before entering the ring, but I know that once the bell rings, I will be calm and focused”. Be aware that negative thoughts aren’t evaluated the same by different people, therefore have a different impact on performance.

Self-regulatory - often used intentionally to give yourself specific instructions (“jab more often”, “turn your opponent”) or self-motivate (“you trained hard for that”, “30 more seconds to go”).

Tips: self-talk can be activated as a reminder of a previous success or be a re-focusing agent.

First, as a reminder of previous success. Think of a time you succeeded at the task you are performing and remind yourself about it. It can be specific like winning a previous fight or more general, for instance, improving your running time over the last eight weeks camp.

Second, re-focusing self-talk. The mind tends to wander during a competition because of unruly crowds or your opponent’s team adjusting the strategy. Whatever the disruption is, you must learn to quickly re-focus on your task at hand.

In conclusion, remember that an effective self-talk strategy, motivational and instructional, can increase confidence, help you gain and maintain an appropriate attentional focus and facilitate performance with automatic execution.