Self-Talk

In last week’s Athlete CEO: Peak Performance,

Josiah and Erik return to discuss how you can sharpen your mental edge and gain the subsequent performance results. The key from this conversation is the ability to improve your state of mind with intentional self-talk, positive reframing, and candid self-awareness. A positive attitude is not very helpful by itself. Changing deeply ingrained habits is difficult  and it is the reason almost all people don’t change. Brutal honesty and commitment to the ownership over your actions is a prerequisite.  

Reframing

At the championship level of sports against the most elite competition you will face losing and the negativity that can result from it. Athletic ability and good teams can delay addressing negativity but eventually all athletes will face adversity. As Josiah discusses, our brains are wired to be negative:

“When you're dealing with athletes, for instance, there's a lot of failure involved. There's a lot of hard times, turmoil, and it's very easy when you start studying things like negativity bias and what not, we are wired almost to see the negative in everything.”

Josiah is addressing negativity and how it is okay to have negative thoughts because they are inevitable. The question is, what can I do about it? The key is to be intentional and reframe the negativity bias into a positive direction.

Josiah defines reframing as a “method whereby we can redirect our emotions, our words in a positive manner to help improve our performance.” It is not good enough to say to yourself just be positive. Or I can just fix my attitude and think positively. You can't fool yourself, the brain will find its way back to the negative. Focus on what you can control to change your words and redirect your actions.

Josiah advises to stimulate the areas of your brain that bring change: “Okay, so instead of saying, ‘I can't hit right now,’ you say to yourself, and I encourage athletes to say it out loud because the auditory system is so powerful… when you say to yourself, ‘I can get a hit when I get the barrel to the ball, I can do X when I do Y,’ what you're doing is you're reframing that conversation.”

I have seen this negative spiral with NFL pass-catchers. It is easy to get negative and hyperfocus on the failure when a pass is dropped. The quickest way to turn it around is to say to yourself “I catch the ball when I look it all the way into the tuck, or when I focus on the point of the ball.” Anything that redirects to the positive of the process works because catching the ball at the NFL level is 100% mental. Next time you're watching football and a receiver drops a ball watch how he reacts to it.

What can be taken from Psychology that can help performance

Josiah redefines psychology as “understanding why certain people do certain things in certain situations, right? Why does the first-round draft pick get to the big leagues, get to the NFL, and is a bust?” I was the Oakland Raiders next draft pick after the #1 overall draft pick Jamarcus Russell. I later played tight end with Russell Wilson for three seasons in Seattle. The contrast between the psychology of these two players couldn’t be more different. Everyone has a unique path that shapes their frame and evaluating your own is the first step in the process.

“One of the very first things that I would do is I would try to drum up as much self-awareness as I possibly could, so I would sit down and say, "Hey, as a relates to my vocabulary… my lexicon, my daily talk to myself, what does it look like? Am I generally a negative person? I'm a positive person. Am I an optimistic person? What does that look like?" Then I would take a hard look in terms of people I trust and that people that know me and have my best interests in mind and ask them the same question.”

Josiah knows it is necessary to write your current frame down on paper for good, bad, or indifferent. This boils down to taking a hard look at yourself and where you can seek improvement.

When it comes to self-awareness Erik explains “you have to make the decision that I'm willing to start at the first point of accepting responsibility to do the hard work of flipping the mirror on myself and saying, "I may love what I see and I may not like what I see." It can be easy to start the blame game or generate excuses when things don’t work. It is difficult to take ownership and look at what you personally could have done better. A common saying in the NFL is “the film doesn’t lie” and I can say from experience it most definitely does not. Once you are aware of something to improve, what is the plan to actually improve it?  

What are your roots made of?

“When you look at an individual and you see their performance, you see how they live, it's like seeing an apple or a fruit on a tree, right? When you see an apple or a piece of fruit hanging on a tree that is not telling the full story. The full story is the root system, right? What is the root system? The root system can be things like beliefs. It can be things like memories, reactions, actions. It can be words. It can be memories. These things all feed into the trunk of that tree, right?”

Josiah uses the analogy of a tree to illustrate influences on our psychology. The modeling and examples set by the important figures in our life shapes our attitudes and behavior later in life. Critical life events can adjust our trajectories and the memories that accompany them are cemented forever. Verbal programming and the power of words throughout childhood explains much of the mental wiring of every adult today. We end up saying in adulthood much of what we learned when growing up. In order to change this you must go to the roots of the tree.

“So if you want to change that, not only do we have to go back into the root system, but we have to dig even deeper than that and you'll find those three areas: the verbal programming, the critical life events, and the modeling that we saw as kids, as youth, right?”  

Reprogramming years of conditioning in your brain is difficult work but it is not impossible. I’ve seen the best of the best do it in person by being dedicated for long periods of time. Nothing happens overnight and it takes true commitment to stick with the change.