High Performance Mindset | Learn from World-Class Leaders, Consultants, Athletes & Coaches about Mindset - 226: Exploring Self-Talk and Performance

Episode Date: January 6, 2019

Judy L. Van Raalte, Ph.D. is professor of psychology at Springfield College, Certified Mental Performance Consultant, and listed in the United States Olympic Committee Sport Psychology Registry. Dr. Van Raalte has presented at conferences in 18 countries, published over 100 articles in peer-reviewed journals on topics such as self-talk, transitions, and professional issues in sport and exercise psychology, and produced more than 20 sport psychology videos. Her research has been funded by The National Institutes of Mental and the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). Dr. Van Raalte served as President of the American Psychological Association's Division of Exercise and Sport Psychology (Division 47) and as the Vice President of the International Society of Sport Psychology. She is a fellow of the American Psychological Association, the Association for Applied Sport Psychology, and the International Society of Sport Psychology.  In this interview, Judy and Cindra talk about: The latest research on self-talk The connection between self-talk and self-esteem The impact of too much thinking Why we should consider what the negative self-talk is telling us How to find the right self-talk for you and others you work with To learn more about Judy’s work, you can visit SupportForSport.org for free evidence-based sport psychology materials) and vbvideo.com for sport psychology videos. You can find a full description of the Podcast at cindrakamphoff.com/judy

Welcome to High Performance Mindset with Dr. Sindra Kampoff. Do you want to reach your full potential, live a life of passion, go after your dreams? Each week we bring you strategies and interviews to help you ignite your mindset. Let's bring on Sindra. Welcome to the High Performance Mindset Podcast. This is your host, Sindra Kampoff, Certified Mental Performance Consultant, Speaker, and Author. And I'm grateful that you're here today to listen to episode 226 with Dr. Judy Van Rolt. Now, the goal of these interviews is to learn from the world's best,

leaders, athletes, coaches, and consultants, all about the topic of mindset to help us reach our potential or be high performers in our field or our sport. Now, typically with two episodes weekly, we explore everything related to mindset. You can learn secrets for a world-class consultant, like in today's episode, or every Tuesday, we also provide a short, powerful message that inspires you to be at your best consistently.

I'm on the radio here in Mankato every week, and we put those episodes on the podcast on Tuesday, so you can look for the next one next Tuesday. Now, if you know that your mindset is essential to your success, then this is the podcast on Tuesday. So you can look for the next one next Tuesday. Now, if you know that your mindset is essential to your success, then this is the podcast for you. Today, I'm looking forward to introducing you to Judy Benrault. She has been one of my idols in the field for a very long time. I remember in graduate school reading much of her research. And every year at the Association for Applied Sports Psychology Conference, I get to

talk with her and learn more about what she's doing. What most impresses me about Judy is her down-to-earth nature, but also the amount of research that she produces in the field is absolutely amazing. So today we focus mostly on her research on self-talk. And I wanted to have Judy on because I wanted to learn her insights in terms of what are the recommendations I should provide to the people that I work with. And I also wanted to pick her brain about recommendations that she might give to others or recommendations that she would provide to other people that she's working with. So Dr. Judy Van Ralt is a professor of psychology at Springfield College. She's also a certified mental performance consultant

and listed on the United States Olympic Committee Sports Psychology Registry. Dr. Van Ralt has presented at conferences in 18 countries. She's published over 100 articles in peer review journals on the topics such as self-talk, transitions, and professional issues in sport and exercise psychology. She's also produced more than 20 sports psychology videos. So her research has been funded by the National Institute of Mental Health and the National Collegiate Athletic Association or the NCAA. She has served as president of the American Psychological Association's Division of Exercise and Sports Psychology, which is Division 47. And she's been a vice president of the International Society of Sports Psychology.

She's also a fellow of the American Psychological Association, the Association for Applied Sports Psychology, and the International Society of Sports Ecology. Very well established in the field of sports ecology. It's an honor to have her on. So in this episode, Judy and I talk about the latest research on self-talk, the connection between self-talk and self-esteem, the impact of thinking too much, why we should consider what our negative self-talk is telling us, as well as how to find the right self-talk for you and others you're working with. You can find a list of tweets and quotes from this interview at cindracampoff.com slash

Judy. And one of my favorite ones is this question she asks us to consider at the end of the interview. What self-talk helps you get in the right place to perform? Look forward to hearing what you think about Judy's interview. You can always shoot me an email at cindra at cindracampoff.com, or I'm also on Twitter at Mentally Underscore Strong. Look forward to hearing from you. Enjoy the interview. Thank you, Dr. Judy Van Ralt for joining me today on the podcast. I am honored and really excited to be interviewing

you today. Thank you. It's nice to be here. I'm looking forward to talking to you about your research about self-talk. I think there's a lot of value in what you've produced in the field. I'm impressed about how many studies that you have written and conducted. So I'm really looking forward to talking to you about that. Judy, can we start the interview and just telling by telling us a little bit about your passion and what you're doing right now? Sure. I work as a college professor, primarily training graduate students who go out in the world and do applied work, although some are also professors, but many work with teams and athletes and other high performers. And I also do some work with teams and athletes myself.

And then I do research in a number of areas, and especially in self-talk. Yeah, excellent. Tell us a little bit about the types of athletes and teams that you have worked with in the past or that you currently work with. Well, my experience is really diverse. My first sports psychology client was a musician who was having problems at auditions. So although we might not always think of musicians as athletes. That was one. And then in a whole range of sports, gymnastics, fencing, bowling, tennis, swimming and diving, winter sports. So a range of athletes, a range of ages. I think my youngest athlete was six and an older athlete, master's athlete, well into their 40s. So which doesn't take people who are older than 40 off the table,

but a real range. Yeah, excellent. Excellent. And tell us a bit about Judy, just your background and and how you got to Springfield. Sure. As a kid, I competed in sport, but particularly in tennis. And then I was also interested in tennis and how someone who was less skilled player sometimes beats better player. So I became interested in the psychology of sport, I guess, as an athlete. I studied psychology as an undergrad and then went on to graduate school and continued in that area to earn a master's and doctoral degree. And then I got my first job and I'm still working at it. So that's how I got where I am to Springfield College. Oh, that's excellent. So a lot of your work is on self-talk, which, you know, I already mentioned is incredibly impressive, the amount of research that you've done on this topic.

Tell us a little bit about why you decided self-talk. Well, as a person who has played tennis, it's a sport where athletes talk to themselves and you can hear them talking to themselves during matches. So I remember one match where that I was watching with another person and the player missed a ball and screamed out, eat another donut, why don't you? And the person I was with said like, what? And it wasn't even something I noticed or caught my attention. What was that about? And it's like, oh, because the athlete missed the shot, because they were too slow, because they didn't get to the ball, because maybe they had eaten too

many donuts. So eat another donut, why don't you, is a way of saying I need to move more quickly. And so the relationship between what people said to themselves and performance was something that I could see on a regular basis and became curious about. And so that's, I think, the early beginning. And tell us kind of first, right, when we're thinking about self-talk, and we might have some assumptions of the definition, but what would you say your definition of self-talk is so that we're on the same page? That's an excellent question because there are many definitions of self-talk and what the definition is really matters when you're studying it. To my mind, and this has been an evolving definition, but I think one that's pretty

solid now. We started with the talk part of self-talk. So some people say anything that you think or feel or observe, and some of the things you feel aren't talk or don't use language. So those are feelings or images or perceptions, but if it's not in language, then we wouldn't consider it to be self-talk. And then the self part is self-directed. So it's something that you're saying to yourself. Sometimes you say things out loud that sound like they're directed to yourself, but they might be directed to someone else to maybe make them feel sorry for you or to show how confident you are to intimidate them.

So this is a self-directed talk, and it can be something that's said out loud, but we would also consider it self-talk if it's something that you say to yourself using language in your mind. It's something that only you are aware of or can hear. Excellent. You know, and Judy, I'm thinking about some of the stats I've heard, you know, that we talk to ourselves like 80,000 times in a day. Is that accurate? You know, is that based on research or what do you think about that? Well, there was one study that we saw on the internet that had a specific number of how many times people talk to themselves.

And so our research team made a concerted effort to track that study down because it was the only thing that had evidence behind it. And we went back and back and back. It was cited, sometimes associated with Harvard or Stanford, which made it seem really credible. When we finally got to the root of it, it wasn't any research that had been published. It was someone's impressions of something in their lab unrelated to in the field of sports psychology. And that got us really thinking that people don't know the answer to this question. Some recent work that was published really touched on this question using a technique called descriptive experience sampling, where you try to find out what exactly is going

on with people. And we're kind of bad at remembering what we were thinking at the time. You know, why did you do that? And so this method involves beeping people, using a beeper, and having them observe what's going on for them. Some similar research has been conducted over time. It's asked people to talk aloud about what's going on for them. But talking aloud can change what your normal life is like because you don't usually talk aloud all what's going on for them. But talking aloud can change what your normal life

is like because you don't usually talk aloud all the time. Some studies ask people to tell what they're or write down what they're thinking and feeling. That's open-ended. But the open-ended question, what are you thinking or feeling, supp that at that moment, there is something you're thinking or feeling. So descriptive experience sampling is open beginning and open ended. And the open beginning is what, if anything, are you experiencing right now? The study that I'm referring to study people during a competitive golf tournament as well as during their daily lives. And we found huge differences. So some people talk to themselves a lot, probably people like me who study self-talk because it happens for them and they're interested

in it. And then there were other people who were very quiet. Language really wasn't part of what they did. And then some people who had a more quiet mind when they were golfing and talked to themselves more in their daily lives and vice versa. And so there's a very big range of what people do. For us, one of the interesting findings was in the golf tournament, people didn't use a whole lot of intentional self-talk, like bend your knees or follow through. More of their self-talk was sort of reactive or what we've come to call system one self-talk, just their feelings and impressions about what was happening. Okay, excellent. So a big range of the amount of times we talk to ourselves in one day. Would you be able to, you know, give us a range of what that looks like? What do you think? We didn't study someone over the course of an entire day. So what we did is try to get their experience and moments and beat them at random intervals. So while we know there were some people who had kind of zero or one over the multiple times we tested them,

and some people who had many, many responses, I think that putting a number on it would be inaccurate at this point. Yeah, absolutely. And maybe just an assumption instead of really, you know, based on research. Absolutely. Yeah, for sure. So Judy, let's dive into some of this research a little bit more about self-talk. And the first thing that I'm going to is I heard you speak several years ago at ASP, but it might have been maybe four or five years ago. And I remember sitting in the audience and loving what you were talking about related to motivational self-talk

and instructional self-talk. And you were sharing some of the research about what is best. Tell us a bit about that as we kind of dive into this idea of self-talk a little bit more. Yeah, so researchers have been trying to identify what is the best self-talk for athletes to use, and a lot of that research has been conducted in the laboratory.

And I point that out because the laboratory is different from life. So in the laboratory settings, we find pretty consistently that negative self-talk leads to worse performances than positive self-talk and instructional and motivational self-talk both seem to be performance enhancing. And there had been some thought that it might depend upon the task that you're doing. So if you need to run through a wall or you're an American football player that needs to be really fired up, motivational self-talk might help. But if you're doing something that's delicate, requires a lot of fine motor skill, maybe even something like golf putting, that being that fired up might be too much and instructional self-talk could be better. I think the research data shows the key takeaway may be that the self-talk needs to feel

right for the person using it in a particular situation. So the person and the situation matter. And that's why there's not exactly one type of self-talk that's best for everyone. You may even know some people who fire themselves up by saying things like, eat another donut, why don't you? That can help them perform better. And then for other people, that's harmful and being too critical can be depressing and make it hard to perform at a high level. So let's talk a little bit about the difference between motivational instructional self-talk. I'm thinking about like one of your scuba diving studies here where you were looking at the difference there. And I think one of the things that you found was the instructional self-talk, people were more focused and confident, right? So let's talk a little bit about the difference

there and then apply it to that it needs to feel right for the person. But just tell us a bit about the difference between the motivational instructional self-talk. Sure. And we were interested in scuba diving because a lot of our research in sport, you know, it's not life or death situations. It's like, what would be better? Maybe I would go a little faster, jump a little higher. In scuba diving, if you get it wrong, you can die. And so although we weren't killing our participants in our research, we were really looking at can self-talk be effective in extremely important performance situations where there's quite a bit at risk? And what we found in this study, and we found it actually again in a golf putting study, is that instructional self-talk.

So in golf putting, it might be about how you look at the hole or what swing you'll make. And in scuba diving, it was specific directions about how best to clear a mask if it fills with water when you're underwater. But those instructions seem to affect confidence and things related to performance more consistently than motivational self-talk. So motivational self-talk would be things like, I can do it or you can do it, depending on how you like to address yourself. Let's go and come on. So we also found sometimes that self-talk could be disruptive to performance, that adding in self-talk, adding something new could take away from performance. And of the types of self-talk, positive, negative, and instructional self-talk seem to be less disruptive to people, at least in the laboratory tasks.

So motivational is the fire yourself up, give yourself encouragement. And instructional doesn't have so much emotional tone, but more about directions of how to perform. Absolutely. Excellent. Excellent. I appreciate that distinguishing, you know, just help us really understand the difference between motivational and instructional self-talk. You know, I know some of the research also looks at the difference between like negative and positive self-talk. And you mentioned, you know, some of that research suggests that negative self-talk leads to a poor performance. Tell us a little bit about that there. Yeah, I worded it. And thank you for listening so carefully because I said negative self-talk leads to worse performance than positive self-talk.

Because on the internet, you see a lot of, you need to be more positive. And while it sounds like that should be a valuable approach, research has shown that, well, let me start with part one. Negative self-talk. We did some studies with tennis players in actual important tennis competitions, and we looked at the tone of their self-talk, and we found that people who were more negative were more likely to lose matches and to lose points in matches and perform more poorly. We also looked at the positive self-talk and really found no effect. And we think, you know, for some people, positive self-talk is encouraging and helps them to perform better and it's great. Some people, when they're performing terribly,

they try using positive self-talk. So they might use extra positive self-talk to try to help themselves even when it's beyond self-talk help. Then there's another issue about positive self-talk to try to help themselves even when it's beyond self-talk help. Then there's another issue about positive self-talk. And I came across a study that looked at the self-talk that people use, and it was a study on the effectiveness of positive self-talk. And they took people with low self-esteem and higher self-esteem and had them use positive self-talk. And that's important because when people feel shaky with their self-esteem, a lot of folks think, you know what, you need to be more positive. What they found was with the people with high self-esteem, who maybe were performing not as well, when they use positive self-talk, they performed better.

But the people with low self-esteem who were required to use positive self-talk actually performed worse. It was like they didn't feel good about themselves. And then they had to say, you're great, you can do it. And they felt even more uncomfortable. They felt they couldn't do it. And having to say, I'm great and I can do it, didn't help at all. Instructional self-talk in that type of circumstance might have been helpful. This is how you do it and might have helped distract them. But the positive self-talk all the time may not be effective for everyone. Right. That's really, really helpful because, you know, I think sometimes when we maybe look at a study or look at a conclusion or we think, well, this helped me, right? Positive self-talk helped me, that I might just encourage someone else to talk positively like that. So Judy, tell us a little bit about

what do you think we should do in terms of research to practice with that study, given, you know, kind of what you just said that people with high self-esteem, that the positive self-talk seemed to work, whereas the lower self-esteem, it didn't. Yeah, I think one of the things or one of the terms that we've coined in our self-talk research is something we call self-talk dissonance. It's a discomfort that people feel when their self-talk doesn't match up with how they're feeling. You know, so they're saying something, but it doesn't feel right. And so when I'm working with teams and athletes, I might ask them how they're feeling and what makes it better. And then I check in. So if they say, I need to say to myself, I can do it.

I'll check in with them and say, you know, does that feel right for you? Is that something that you think would help you? And then I send them out into the world or their performance situation or their sport and then check back in again. Was that effective for you in that situation? So the self-talk that works for one person may not be right for another. And the self-talk that works, for example, in practice, when someone's tired and really need to push themselves and highly motivate themselves might be different than the self-talk they need in a competition when they're already fired up and motivated. Absolutely. So both between people

and between situations, it can vary. Okay. Between people and situations. Okay. Absolutely. And so, Judy, one other question I had about some of the research that you've done, and you mentioned the system one self-talk versus system two. Tell us what the difference is between those two ideas and why you decided to name them system one and system two. Sure. When we were looking at this wide range of self-talk and all the different categories of self-talk, we started to think about exactly what was going on with self-talk. And actually, I had a graduate student who was working on a project and he looked really confused. And we didn't find the categories that confusing, positive self-talk, negative self-talk, instructional self-talk. It seemed pretty clear. We were looking at the

research studies. And he finally expressed his confusion. And he said, he had two questions for the group. One is, if we already know everything that we know, then why would we talk to ourselves? And the second question is, when we talk to ourselves, who is talking to whom? I don't know if his grammar included whom, but I'm going to give him credit for that. And so those were really interesting questions and stopped the project we were working on cold and really sent us back deep dive into our thinking about how humans function, how the human brain works. These are ideas that the ancient Greeks considered, that Freud considered, and probably most importantly and recently, Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize winner, who took the ideas that had been studied through history about how humans think and tried to take the core aspects of those ideas, not associated maybe with Freud's views of the unconscious and sexual behavior, but the pure ideas that applied across all these thinkers throughout history,

and named them System 1 and System 2 so that they didn't have values attached to them. And System 1 is kind of our gut feelings and impressions, maybe with regard to self-talk, it's like you score the goal and you're like, yeah, or something goes wrong and you say a word that I won't now say on your show or on your podcast. And system two, in contrast, is the intentional use of thought or in our case, self-talk. So when you say, I want to be more aggressive and I'm going to, I've got to go in hard and I'm going to tell myself to bend my knees and follow through or

change my performance in some way. So system one, you might think of as the spontaneous gut feelings talk that emerges. And system two is what you intentionally use. And some people may find that over time and with practice, intentionally approaching something in a particular way can then become automatic over time or more like a system one thing. So people who maybe swear with words not safe for work, they learn to use alternative language and have that come out of their mouths automatically so they're not punished when they're competing. Excellent, excellent. So good clarification there. You know, in terms of some of your research about System 1 and System 2 self-talk, tell us, you know, how we might incorporate some of the research findings into our practice. Tell us a

bit more about what you found, the difference between those two. Yeah, so almost all of the sports psychology research is focused on system two self-talk, you know, that we ask people to say particular things to themselves, and then we look at how that affects their performance or maybe their mood or their confidence. But it's, we ask them to intentionally say something. And there's some research out there that suggests that you have a certain amount of cognitive resources that if you do a whole lot of thinking, then you can kind of tire yourself out, like as if your mind is in some ways like your muscles. If you do a whole lot of work, then you don't have a lot of mental energy left. Some people, for example, find that they can

work better in the morning because they feel smarter. Or some people start slow throughout the day and they can work better at night because that's when they have the most mental energy. And so the idea is that if we intentionally use a whole lot of self-talk or other things, that sometimes we can tire out or use up the mental energy that we have. And so lots and lots of directions for yourself when you're performing a sports skill, for example, might actually make it hard to perform it well. And so based on this theoretical idea, the take-home might be to have a few key words that motivate you to use self-talk. Another thought is that in competition, people have a lot on their plate. They have a lot they're

thinking about and doing. And because there's a lot of mental energy related to competing, maybe more self-talk in practices and maybe less self-talk in competition because you want your energy to go towards performing. Absolutely. And I've seen that in the real world where athletes have thought about the competition too much, you know, the day before, the morning of, and then perhaps they're either too anxious or they're just drained, you know, and they can't really concentrate as much as they typically can. You really hit on a great point with that observation. People sometimes ask me, so self-talk, that's the most important thing that I should always do. And although I've spent a lot of time studying self-talk, I would say, you know, no. I would say if you can do you and perform in a

flow state or, you know, be in the zone, then perform away. That's a great place to be and having lots and lots of thoughts distracting you from your performance might not be helpful. But every now and then, you're not in the zone, or I would say maybe most of the time you're not in the zone and just performing. And in those cases, the right types of self-talk for you and the right type for the situation you're in can be helpful to get you back on track performing the way that you would like to perform. Absolutely. Excellent. Excellent. And one other question I had before we kind of dive into kind of how we apply this to the real

world. When you were talking about system one and system two, Judy, I remember in one of your research studies, you talked about some questions we might ask our system two, like, does self-talk match my arousal level? And when is self-talk too much? And should I try to do something new? Are those questions helpful for the practitioner or for the performer? Or what are your thoughts on how those might be useful? So the system two self-talk, again, is the self-talk people are intentionally using. One of the real problem areas I've seen in applied work is athletes who are nervous and they're hyped up and other people tell them, you know, you need to calm down. You got to tell yourself to calm down. And when you're

feeling really anxious, calming down is hard and calming down is very different from how you might feel right now. So the question, does the self-talk match my arousal level, is helpful. Calm doesn't really match how you feel fired up or anxious. There was a study that a research group did. It wasn't with sport, but it was with performance. And they had people who were feeling anxious about performing either think to themselves, I'm excited or I am calm. So the idea was to translate instead of I'm nervous, I'm excited. Those are both kind of high energy states matching arousal or to think I'm calm because I'm nervous, I'm excited. Those are both kind of high energy states matching arousal, or to think I'm calm because I'm too fired up, so to calm down. And what they found was that the people who shifted from I'm nervous to I'm excited, they performed better than the people

who were working hard to shift from I'm excited to, or I'm nervous to I'm calm. And so if you can find a way to just move yourself a little bit in a positive direction or a direction that makes sense, like it's normal to feel excited, or it's normal to feel a little nervous before a big competition. That means you care. Then that's helpful. So that's, does the self-talk match the arousal level is about that. How much is too much is a great question because sometimes, and I'm going to generalize and say Americans, if some is good, then more must be better. So if a little self-talk is good, then using it all the time is better. And I would suggest that the amount that feels right for you in that context is the right amount. And the last question, should I try something new? I love people trying something new because that can give you a new way to think about your sport and performance. That's one of the things that's exciting about self-talk. It can be still self-talk and something new, but trying something new is a great thing to do in practice.

In competition, you often want to stick with what you're comfortable with and what's worked well. So you're not distracted by your self-talk, but you can really use your mental energy to perform. Excellent. Thank you, Judy. So let's now think about how do we apply some of these findings. And one of the main themes that I'm really hearing from you is that the self-talk needs to feel right for the person and the situation. And so I think that's kind of one kind of main idea I'm taking from this. Tell us what other recommendations on self-talk that you might have for those people

who are listening. So they might be, you know, performers, athletes, coaches, consultants, business people. What are some recommendations that you'd provide for us? I think I would start by saying that self-talk and intentionally using self-talk, it isn't for everyone, but it can be an excellent tool for many people. So it may be something to try out, something that's fun to experiment with. I also think that before you do a lot of experimenting with self-talk yourself, you might want to just notice, do your own, I guess I would say, experience sampling. You don't need a beeper, but just maybe notice for yourself what happens for you throughout your day, your normal day. And then if you're participating in a sport or business or other type of performance situation, what's going on with you? I like to work with people from a position of strength. So to use the approaches that they're

already using, that they're comfortable with, that feel right for them. That means sometimes when I work with athletes that their self-talk is more X-rated or aggressive than mine is. Some people find humor as part of their self-talk can make it enjoyable. And for other people, it's distracting. So I think a little background research that you can do and then to start thinking about what's right for you and what might be helpful in different situations. When is a quieter mind more appropriate and when could self-talk just be that extra boost that you need to get you over the hump or to the next level? Excellent.

And, you know, one of the questions I'm thinking about is, you know, let's say there's somebody who's listening who says, well, I have a lot of self-talk that's not helpful. Maybe that might be categorized as negative or, you know, limiting. What is your thoughts on how we might address that? Or, you know, what's your perspective on that? Do you think it's helpful to take more of a mindful approach or a cognitive behavioral approach? What are your thoughts on that? Thank you for providing two excellent approaches. I think it depends on the person. So one of the things I like to look at is when someone says I have a lot of negative self-talk or problematic self-talk, I like to find out about when and where it's occurring.

Sometimes it's reasonable to be frustrated and angry with yourself because you did stink. And saying that to yourself or letting that out allows the athlete to move on. So I'm not overwhelmingly opposed to that, but I hear what you're asking about. You're talking about the person who's stuck in negativity and they feel like it's kind of dragging them down that they have all these negative thoughts in their mind. So with the system two self-talk idea in place, I want to touch on the benefits. We can intentionally change what we think about and how we respond. And that cognitive behavioral approach is one where we know that our thoughts can affect our feelings and feelings can affect our behavior and our behavior can affect our thoughts. And it

goes around in a circle, all of them affecting each other. And so if your negative self-talk is affecting how you feel and causing you to perform worse, then you can change your talk and intentionally change it. And that can lead to a reduction in that negative self-talk and a nice outcome. But it takes work to change what you say. And anyone who's had a swear jar is familiar with the challenge associated with it. So before we do the deep dive into changing that behavior, another approach might be to look at that negative self-talk and find out what it's telling you. You know, maybe you're frustrated, or is this not the right thing for you to be learning? Do you need some more information so that you can perform it better? Do you need more

sleep? So before we dismiss the negative self-talk out of hand, we might take the information from it and change the context and situation so that we're not negative anymore. And finally, the mindfulness technique that is, it's reasonable to have a thought. It's okay to be negative. You're not a good or bad person because of it, but to let that negative thought just drift away and focus more time and energy on what you're trying to accomplish can also be helpful for people, often for people who practice it. That tends to be something that can be hard to develop when it comes to really negative thoughts and feelings, but also something that's worthwhile so that people aren't dragged down by their negative talk.

Thank you for answering that, Judy. And I was also thinking a little bit about how some athletes I've worked with, maybe more football players or aggressive sports might say, well, actually, the negative self-talk really helps me, right? Like thinking about what could go wrong or thinking about if I don't perform well or thinking about the consequences pumps me up and it gets me fired up and it gets me, you know, ready to kind of go to battle. Have you experienced any of that, you know, as a practitioner or a researcher? What's your thoughts on could negative self-talk be helpful sometimes? You know, we conducted one study where we had athletes say their self-talk aloud.

And when they were finished, we had them read back over, listen to their self-talk and categorize what they had listened to it and categorize what they had heard. And then we had researchers listen to the same self-talk and we needed them to listen to it because good shot, if it's written out, could be good shot or it could be good shot. So we had them listen to it and categorize it. We found the researchers' impressions of whether it was positive or negative were quite different from the actual athletes. And we also had the researchers read written transcripts. What the researchers perceived self-talk to be and what the athletes themselves said or the performers themselves said about that self-talk was rather different. So I believe that it's important to respect the wisdom of the people performing and hear what they have to say about what helps them. And also, that can be tiring over time and make performance

and make sport less fun, less appealing, and, you know, eventually make it hard to perform effectively. Excellent. Thank you. So when we think about applying these findings even a step further, what would, you know, you suggest maybe a coach do who maybe they're, you know, leading a team and they see their athletes wanting to incorporate some ideas of self-talk? Yeah, so I think it's something that they might address. there's some great team unity in sharing self-talk and using similar phrases that make sense to the team. So, you know, a team who might say something like, flip the switch. You know, we won that game, but we have to get ready for the next one. And they share a language that informs each athlete

and then becomes part of the culture. We need to get ready for the next game now, or it's time to leave our day behind and get ready to compete together as a team. So I think team phrases, team slogans, types of encouragement that people can use as a group are really helpful. And then sometimes it can be an approach that a sports psychologist might use with a team, a team captain or a coach to talk to each person about what they like to hear from their teammates and what works for them so that the athlete who uses negative self-talk or fire himself up understands that that's great for him, but it might not be as helpful for another teammate. So that teammates can help each other and people can also individualize what will help and work for them best. And for some people,

it might be not really much self-talk. It might be, or something extremely minimal, one, you know, just one word might be enough. And I'm also thinking about how we can apply this to the business world. And we've been talking a lot about sport here, but I'm assuming your recommendations would be similar to somebody who, let's say, is getting ready to do a big presentation at work or a job interview to help them think about what would work for them. Is there any other thoughts that you would suggest or share for someone in the business world about how to apply these findings? Yeah, so I think some of the ideas apply really well across performance domains. So giving a big presentation, asking for a raise, you know, what are

the things I'm going to focus on, and more motivational for people who may need a little extra burst of energy can also help. Nice. And Judy, can you tell us about a time where you applied these findings to yourself personally? Sure. I would say for myself, I'm like many performers in that on game day, it can be easy to be nervous and have a lot of thoughts and I woulda, shoulda, coulda. And I'm thinking particularly about a competition where I had played a tennis match against a better tennis player, and I had won the match. Then this was the next time we were playing each other again. Although I was happy I had won previously, it would be on the line for me to prove that I had deserved that spot. And I was feeling nervous and I should win. And

you know, what did it all mean? And so my self-talk tends to be focused on enjoying the moment. And I reflect sometimes in my self-talk on quotation, like Billie Jean King had said, pressure is a privilege, that to get to compete is special. And most people don't get to compete in the way that you're competing. And so I looked around at the beautiful sport venue that I was competing at and thought, pressure is a privilege. It's a privilege to be here. This is fun. Took a moment and then went and played the match. So for me, minimal self-talk and self-talk at the right time can really be helpful. Great story. What about a story or an example of an athlete or performer that you've worked with and how they've applied some of your research findings?

So I'm going to mention a basketball player. He was a very successful free throw shooter, and I was checking in about how things were going with that. One of the approaches I use is to focus on things that people do well, their strengths. Sometimes it's easy to work on our weaknesses, but maintaining our strengths can be an excellent strategy because that's what we're best at. So I checked in with him. He had been extremely successful with his free throws. And I asked, you know, so what do you do when you take a free throw?

And he said, I just walk up to the line, look at the hoop and say, yeah. I love it. So that's a pretty good approach or a good approach for him in that circumstance. Excellent. Excellent. I think that's a really important point from your conversation that I'm really taking home today and taking with me is just the idea of that self-talk really depends on the person, the situation, and helping them figure out what works best for them. Absolutely. Yeah. So Judy, one of the final questions I have for you is, you know, when I think about just your line of research on self-talk and how powerful it is,

how extensive it is, tell us what keeps you going. You know, why do you do this work that you do? Yeah, it's an interesting question that I'm going to give you a slightly off-the-track answer, which is, this is a question why I have been asked with, as a parent of youth athletes, but you know, why are you spending so much time and so much energy on youth sport? And there's no guarantee they'll get a college scholarship or be a professional athlete at the end. So why are you doing it? And the answer to the question was, this moment is why. Right now, spending time with them, working hard, learning something new and competing. So for me, the why is the moment to be in the moment with them in their athletic careers. And for me,

to be in the moment with the research to get to ask interesting questions that athletes and other performers bring and to really dive deeply in it and understand it better. That alone is a why to do this work. And then I guess I would say, just like in sport, there's other prizes like learning new things and being able to apply it in a way that's helpful for people moving forward. So I think those are the big whys for me. Thank you. Well, Judy, I am so grateful and honored that you've been on the podcast to share your wisdom. I'm just so grateful that you took some time in your busy schedule. And I want to share with you some things I got from the interview so that people can listen and also think about what did they learn from you today. So

number one, I really heard the importance of making sure that the self-talk feels right for the person given the situation. I heard you say that many times today when we were talking about the different research studies. I appreciated the one that you shared about how when a person has high self-esteem, that positive self-talk was actually beneficial. But when they had low self-esteem, then they performed worse when they chose the positive self-talk. So I thought that was really powerful. And then you also said how sometimes instructional self-talk seems to be less disruptive. But again, helping the person think about what's beneficial to them, and really your

point about how does it make you feel, and does the self-talk feel right to you? I thought that was really powerful, and then towards the end when you were talking about how changing your behavior and changing your self-talk does take work, and just to make sure that even when we're helping someone do that, to check back with them. And perhaps maybe the negative self-talk might have helped that person in that one particular moment, but perhaps it doesn't work or help in the long run. So making sure we check back with them.

So Judy, I'm just so grateful that you were here today. Do you have any final advice or comments for those people who are listening? I think your summary hit the key points, but I would say be curious about self-talk. Find out what works best for you under different kinds of circumstances and remember to enjoy the ride. Excellent. And how could people reach out to you if they're interested or tell us a bit more about what's the best ways to ask you questions from here? Sure the best way to reach me is by my email address at Springfield College and not surprisingly I'm the only Judy Van Ralt there so searching my name or jvanraal at springfieldcollege.edu will get to me. Excellent, Judy. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Thank you. Great to talk to you. And thanks for inviting me to your podcast. Thank you for listening to High Performance Mindset. If you like today's podcast, make a comment, share it with a friend and join the conversation on Twitter at Mentally Strong. For more inspiration and to receive Sindra's free weekly videos, check out DrSindra.com.