Helping our Athletes Develop Confidence Through Self Talk

“We believe what we tell ourselves.”
–Zig Ziglar

Helping our athletes develop confidence is a work in progress.  I like for athletes to be proactive with their confidence as opposed to waiting for confidence to arrive. I wrote previously about developing a confidence resume and helping our athletes identify personal victories and strengths to create their confidence resumes. In addition, I want my athletes to talk to themselves powerfully and positively.  I want to encourage positive self-talk.

We are constantly talking to ourselves. Recent research has postulated you have on average 6,200 thoughts a day.  Thoughts impact our feelings and feelings impact our behavior. So, getting in touch with what our athletes are thinking can help us help them.

So how can we influence our athletes’ positive self-talk? Well, we can start by listening to the words they use and asking questions.

I bet we have all heard statements from our athletes like:

• “I’ll never get this; it is too hard.”
• “Oh, I’m so nervous, I don’t think I can do this.”
• “I always skate poorly in this rink.”
• “I can’t jump in this corner.”

The verbal landscape is full of information.  We have to really listen and help them interrupt the story they are telling themselves. You can hear the doubt, resignation and fixed mindset in, “I’ll never get this, it’s too hard.”  Routing out the doubt and challenging it is important to maintain confidence. Remind them of the learning process and how they have succeeded in the past to master difficult skills.  Suggest they change their self talk to, “This is a hard skill but I’ve gotten hard skills before and I’ll do it again.” It recognizes the difficulty but draws on past success and ends with a positive affirmation.”

Saying “I always skate poorly in this rink” may reflect an overgeneralization based on one disappointing performance in a particular rink.  The story athletes tell themselves is very powerful so we need to challenge them to provide the evidence.

 Athletes thinking “I’m so nervous,” and then equating that to not being able to perform well gives us an insight into how they view “being nervous”.  It’s viewed as something to be avoided or negative. But we know nerves are a natural and essential part of performance. We can help them reframe the nerves as something to be embraced, as an indication that they are ready for the “fight”.  The nerves also say we care about what we are going to do; it means something to us. It’s accepting the butterflies and getting them to fly in formation.

Finally, “I can’t jump in this corner” offers us an opportunity to refute the limited self-belief that jumping well only occurs in certain corners. Again, ask for the evidence and refute the thinking by saying, “All corners are equal opportunity zones for great jumps”. 

By listening carefully, we can help them unpack the messages they may be telling themselves. We can help them to challenge or reframe the thoughts. We can also help them to see the impact those thoughts are having on their performance. You know your athletes best and you may see patterns in their thinking. Maybe they like to blame others, maybe there is always an excuse, maybe they are determined to only accept perfection, etc. You are in a position to help them evaluate whether those patterns of thinking are serving them well or if there is evidence to support their thinking.  

The Most Important Question

Ask your athletes point-blank: does thinking this way help you perform better? I want athletes to be in the driver’s seat and choosing how they will think is in their control. Getting them to stop and ask themselves: is this thinking helping me get to where I want to go? If no, then they can choose to think differently. A common refrain is to “control the controllables”. Helping our athletes achieve this thinking is important for building confidence.

I’d like to share an abbreviated version of a recent conversation with a young skater.    

• Skater: “I don’t want to work on the scratch spin, it’s like a terrifying monster!”
• Coach: “Wow! I didn’t know you felt that way, what makes it so scary?”
• Skater: “It doesn’t make sense; I used to do it before the virus but now I don’t understand it.”
• Coach: “Okay, we can work through it together, but I want to ask you what you would do if you were walking outside and saw a terrifying monster?”
• Skater: “I’d run!”
• Coach: “Yes, I would too! When we are scared we want to run and hide, our muscles get tense, we don’t think as clearly, our heart may race or we may feel a burst of energy. Let me ask you something. Do you like challenges? 
• Skater: “Yes, I do”.
• Coach: “What if you could see the scratch spin as a challenge. I love a challenge and you just said you do too. We can make a plan on how we can rise to the challenge and confront the “terrifying monster”.

The conversation continued and we took a break from the spin but I was intent on leaving her with these thoughts:

• It’s all hard until it’s easy and that’s okay
• It’s also okay to feel uncomfortable or scared  
• Choose to see it as a challenge rather than a threat
• Ask for help
• Stay in the game and keep working on it 
• Persistence and hard work will slay the “terrifying monster”

To wrap up the lesson, I gave her the choice to pick the final skill.  Much to my surprise, she chose “the scratch spin”. Wow! I didn’t expect that but was really proud of her choice. By choosing to face the scary stuff and see it as a challenge to be met, she changed the story in her mind.  She also earned some coin for her confidence bank.

What story do you tell yourself that you would like to change?