The Smart but Scattered Guide to Success: How to Use Your Brain's Executive Skills to Keep Up, Stay Calm, and Get Organized at Work and at Home by Peg Dawson & Richard Guare

Author:Peg Dawson & Richard Guare [Dawson, Peg]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781462523665
Publisher: Guilford Publications
Published: 2015-12-22T00:00:00+00:00

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LET’S TALK ABOUT SELF-TALK

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One strategy that has been shown to be particularly effective in helping individuals achieve a greater sense of well-being, higher self-esteem, better control over emotions, and improved performance in anxiety-provoking situations is self-talk. Here’s a glimpse at what the research says about this powerful strategy:

• A lot of research has involved training athletes to talk to themselves as a way to improve athletic performance. Some of this research has looked at different kinds of self-talk and finds benefits to each. For instance, one study focused on getting rugby players to jump as high as they could in practice sessions and compared the use of motivational self-talk (“I can jump higher”) with use of instructional self-talk (“Bend and drive”). Compared with a non-self-talk control group, both groups jumped with greater force, and the motivational self-talk group also jumped higher than the control group.

• Another study using athletes explored the benefits of having novice teen volleyball players give themselves detailed instructions during practice sessions (for example, “When I throw the ball, the arm goes back, over the head, look at the target and hit the ball”). Volleyball coaches viewed videotapes of both groups at the end of 4 weeks of practice and rated players on a variety of volleyball skills. The self-talk group averaged 44 of 50 quality points, while the non-self-talk group averaged only 35.

• A third study that employed athletes compared self-talk with self-feedback (self-appraising performance after the fact). This study found that adult tennis players who engaged in instructional self-talk or instructional self-talk plus self-feedback performed better than a control group that used neither. Furthermore, the group that used self-instruction plus self-feedback rated the efficacy of the intervention higher than the self-instruction-only group did.

• A number of studies teach individuals to change what they say to themselves, either by contradicting negative self-talk and replacing it with positive self-talk (for example, change the self-talk from “Today is going terribly; nothing has gone right” to “Wasn’t that sunrise this morning amazing? I’m happy I was up in time to see it”) or by changing a negative feeling with a more positive term. For example, people who were experiencing anticipatory anxiety in advance of a public speaking engagement or a difficult meeting with a boss were instructed to think of the anxiety as excitement and to say out loud “I’m excited” or to instruct themselves to “get excited.” Compared with a group that was taught to “calm down,” the reappraisal group were seen as more excited and performed better. This reappraisal moved them from a threat mind-set to an opportunity mind-set.

• Recently, some research has focused on how people engage in self-talk—that is, the language they use to talk to themselves. This research has found that when people either talk to themselves by name (Peg, take five deep breaths before you make that phone call) or talk to themselves in the second person (You can do this!), people with social anxiety handle the situation better than if they use first-person pronouns.

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