Self Talk for Performance Paddling

Self Talk is:

• your own voice inside your head
• your most powerful suporter
• your worst detractor
• essential to get right if you want to perform at your best
• the only way you get through those tough races, and training sessions, when everything seams to be against you

Self-Talk can be Instructional or Motivational

Self Talk: Instructional

• These are the prepared phrases, cues or prompts that you use to:
  • Maintain good technique
  • Do the right things at the right time
  • Remember to Breathe
    
• They will be things like:
  • Reach to the Catch
  • Pull the paddle straight
  • Vertical Paddle
  • Breathe dammit (In the voice of Star Treks Dr. McCoy)
  • Stomach, Shoulders, Superman (It will make sense if you have read that section :-o)
• They can be liberally sprinkled like candy at any stage of a race to remind you to stay on top of your technique.

They will be discussed at length in the Skills posts

Self Talk: Motivational

• These are the prepared phrases, cues or prompts that:
  • You use to keep yourself going when things get hard
  • They are like a little toolkit that you develop over time and can use when needed
  • Each of the phrases is created by you, in response to reflection and conscious decision to improve or survive in a specific circumstance
  • They need to be practiced
  • You need to KNOW that they are truth!
    
• They will be things like:
  • Trust the training. You can do this!!
  • You’ve finished much longer races. You can do this in your sleep
  • Your new paddle will make you 12% faster (sometimes we tactically lie to ourselves and choose to believe it)
  • I would rather die than be beaten by my wife, AGAIN!!!
    
• Your self talk is personal to you. It might be serious, funny, cryptic, long, short or anything else that works.

Mind Training is still hard work but worth it

I can’t give you a list of perfect Motivational Self Talk as it has to be personal and the real power of them is the Thought and Intent that you put into them when creating them.

They really are a beautiful thing when you work on them.

So there are steps we will follow, to create Motivational Self Talk. Each of them will take some time and only after they are complete will you come away with a fully functional toolkit BUT You can work on a couple of the big ticket items from end to end to give you a quick win.

Quick Wins

My quick win was working on not giving up when I was behind my peers in races

• I worked through the following steps and pretty much discovered that “shame” motivated me. It was actually one of my major reasons for just quitting when I was having a bad day. I learned to try to use the negative emotions as a positive and so flipped the “Shame” on it’s head by developing this self talk phrase: “What will you think of yourself tommorow”
  
• This keyed into the much longer lasting feelings of shame that would haunt me if I quit.
• Everyone is different and what works for you will be deeply personal
• A shrink might also have a field day with my Self Talk phrases

The core of your Performance Tookit will be

• Personal Performance Statement
• Self Talk
• Why it Matters
• Limiting Beliefs you want to overcome

You Can have a quick go at writing these right now and then develop them over time

The Steps to developing powerful Self Talk

In the following posts we will walk through these steps:

• Goals
• Hopes
• Fears
• Cue Words
• How we handle adversity
• How we want to handle adversity
• Feelings when things went well
• Feelings went things went bad
• Strengths
• Weaknesses
• Motivation
  • Intrinsic Motivation
  • Extrinsic Motivation
• What we feel happy and grateful for
• Training Partners; Who works well with you and who does not
• Do you have an idea of your Performance Sweet Spot
• Blame
• Gratitude
• Breathing and Choosing your Emotions
• Remembering to stop and enjoying the view sometimes
• Toolkit Draft Version
• and more… 🙂