Positive self-talk: When you shift your inner dialogue from negative to positive to boost your mental health and outlook on life.
The theory behind positive self-talk as it relates to athletic performance: Overcoming negative thoughts will decrease anxiety levels, create excitement, and lead you to a successful athletic performance.
Positive self-talk can be our advocate or our biggest enemy. Effective use of self-talk can improve your performance by helping you regulate your feelings, thoughts, and conserve your energy about the race you have coming up. Positive self-talk can improve your confidence, your focus, performance and motivate you. What motivates you can make you become more productive!
How can you take negative self-talk and make it positive when your emotions and nerves are at an all time high before an upcoming race? Here are some examples below how taking a negative thought and turning it into a positive can be motivating.
Negative Self-talk | Positive Self-Talk |
This distance is new to me. | This is an opportunity to learn something. |
This workout is too complicated. I am never going to finish! | I’ll tackle it from a different angle. I know I can do this; I have trained hard! |
What if I fail? | What if this works out? |
This is not how I normally do it. | Let’s take a chance. |
I’m not going to get any better at this. | I’ll give it another try. |
This is difficult. | Let’s break this into smaller steps. |
Everyone is better than me. | Being with experienced people will push me. |
Talking to yourself negatively will almost ALWAYS result in a poor performance. You have set yourself up for failure before you even tried. Learning to spin that negative self-talk gives you a chance to try your hand at something you're fearful of. Regardless of the result of the experience, the point is – you had the experience!!! This will only set you up for future success.
So, next time you are struggling with negative thoughts, try your best to look for a silver-lining. The more you practice positive self-talk, the more it will become a habit.