How I Talk to Myself

You vs. You. The ever so popular phrase. The uphill battle we all seem to be fighting. In time, I am finding that being a better athlete simply consist of asking myself questions and answering. The me vs. me fight isn’t as brutal and hard as I once believe as a young, hot headed, fired up athlete demanding orders of action to myself. I find my wiser self patiently and objectively analyzing my skill set. Questioning myself and my ability to find a deeper answer on how to permanently improve and not just get through it.

Self-Talk is a useful technique and can be mastered. There is a method to this madness believe it or not. I could go on to continue giving you my opinion. Fortunately, I have read a great study on this topic that I discussed in this weeks video. Take your time to read it thoroughly, or just read the abstract and take my word for it in the video lol.

Link: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3626423/

ABSTRACT:

Although essential for psychology, introspective self-talk has rarely been studied with respect to its effects on behavior. Nevertheless, the interrogative compared with the declarative form of introspective talk may elicit more intrinsically motivated reasons for action, resulting in goal-directed behavior. In Experiment 1, participants were more likely to solve anagrams if they prepared for the task by asking themselves whether they would work on anagrams as opposed to declaring that they would. In the next three experiments, merely writing Will I as opposed to I will as part of an ostensibly unrelated handwriting task produced better anagram-solving performance and stronger intentions to exercise, which suggests that priming the interrogative structure of self-talk is enough to motivate goal-directed behavior. This effect was found to be mediated by the intrinsic motivation for action and moderated by the salience of the word order of the primes.