Self-Talk & Inner Speech

I hate golf. Mainly due the fact that I lack even a trace amount of natural ability when it comes to playing it. There was a time when I did try to get into it, but there just wasn’t a fit. One of the things that stays with me from my experience(s), was putting. I’d be going to take – what should have been the final shot – with the ball 2-yards from the hole, and all that would be going through my mind were all the reasons why I should miss. Admittedly, I wasn’t very good at golf, and there were theoretically a lot of reasons why I could miss but sinking such a shot was well within my range of abilities; an untrained novice could make such a shot using the wrong end of the club. But I was always running through the reasons to fail, and as a result, I often did, creating goal discrepancies i.e. not achieving things I was more than capable of doing.

Negative self-talk can lead to anxiety (both cognitive and somatic) and is often a feature in the pre-conflict phase of a violent incident, when you are starting to formulate and implement a solution to your situation. It doesn’t matter if you already have a plan in place to act – unfortunately many people don’t – this will be when you start to question the validity of it. Your failures in training will start to come back to haunt you, you will question your ability to generate enough power, move fast enough, etc. Every reason to fail will visit you, this is natural. The golfer, Lee Trevino, was once asked about the pressure he felt when a tournament came down to a single shot that would determine whether he’d win or lose it. He replied that it was nothing compared to his early career, when he was playing for money he didn’t have by betting on each hole. There can be a big difference between not winning, and failing; especially when consequences are involved. In this article I want to talk about how we can combat negative self-talk, when facing aggressors and/or dangerous situations, without becoming over-confident or arrogant regarding our abilities.

It has long been recognized that our Inner Speech (IS) can affect both emotional and behavioral outcomes, as well as our self-narratives, which are used to create our identity. Self-talk (ST), is used to interpret our emotional state and help us mediate and “talk back” to it; it’s one of the ways we can manage and control our emotions. Often though, this dialogue only goes one way i.e. we become adrenalized, our emotional state changes, and we feel/interpret and give words to this state by saying, “I’m scared”, “I feel afraid”, etc. By interpreting our emotional state negatively, we may start an internal dialogue which is largely negative and end up becoming paralyzed by our own words. Fortunately, most negative talk is predictable, and one of the ways we can deal with it is to have positive pre-built answers to the questions we ask ourselves; and reassurances to our answers, if we start to question them e.g. we may question our ability to generate enough power in a strike, and/or question if we’ll be able to deliver it without it being blocked/intercepted, etc. We may even go as far as imagining our aggressor’s response to it, and how badly this will play out for us. Before we’ve even thrown the punch, we’ve written a script, with an unsuccessful outcome. Although this is a cognitive process, it is reinforced by our emotional state – when not in physical pain, our fear system doesn’t want us to engage in any action that may alter/change this e.g. even if we know it is inevitable that we are going to be punched i.e. experience “future” pain, our fear system will tell us not to do anything “now”.

There are two tools I use to affect my Inner Speech and influence my self-talk. These are: visualization and externalization. Running through scenarios in your head, both from a first- and third-party perspective i.e. what it would look like to you, and what it would like to somebody observing you interacting in the incident, etc., is a powerful tool that allows you to prepare for real-life confrontations and write positive outcomes into your “new” scripts. It also allows you to create new dialogue for your self-talk, that can replace the negative self-talk you may otherwise be inclined to use. Externalization involves having a checklist of steps and processes you run through, which helps you to avoid creating negative scripts in the moment. These can involve physical actions, such as stepping back, moving off-line, shifting weight, putting hands up in a placating manner, etc., as well as verbal steps, such as asking what you can do to sort things out/make things better, etc. Visualizing yourself doing these things will also reinforce this. In short, you are becoming an actor performing a role, rather than an individual calculating the costs and consequences of every action you make and word you say, in that moment. Fortunately, for most of us, the types of dangerous interactions we are likely to be engaged in are predictable and limited, and as we run through scenarios in our head, it is likely that we will find ourselves dealing with them in a very similar manner i.e. we don’t need a million different scripts for dealing with aggressive individuals, but a few variations on one or two simple/basic ones.   

 We have to acknowledge that it is possible for us, despite all our skills and abilities, to talk ourselves out of an inevitable fight before it’s even begun. When I lift weights there are a million reasons why I may not make a lift; it’s very easy to come up with excuses why today isn’t the day to up the weight, etc. If I think about the lift, I know it won’t happen. When I go for it, I can’t think about it/analyze it, etc. I just have to do it, and rely on my training to make it happen. If you can throw a good strong punch on the pads, there is no mechanical reason that you can’t replicate it against an aggressor coming towards you. The punch is the same, the only difference is the potential consequences associated with it; once these are dealt with and cease to be a concern then the punch, returns to just being a punch again.