Stop Listening To Yourself, Start Talking To Yourself

Language is a fundamental human trait that separates us from animals. Not only can we communicate with each other but we think in language. It is the way we communicate with ourselves.

Language allows us to understand the world in a far more complex way than animals can. Language gives us nuance and detail. Language infers meaning. But this comes at a cost.

We have between 16,000 and 60,000 thoughts per day. The problem is 80% of our thoughts are negative, and 95% of them are repetitive (National Science Foundation 2005).

80% of the things we worry about never happen, and of the 15% that do, 80% of the time we can handle it (Cornell University 2005).

This means that 97% of the negative thoughts we have are baseless and just come from our negative biases.

This bias is a hangover from our very well build survival mechanism. Our brain is designed to keep us safe and that includes being hyper sensitive to negativity, including detecting potential threats, not just real ones.

To compound that, negative thoughts are 4x more powerful than positive thoughts in influencing our behaviour. And spoken thoughts can be 10x more powerful than thoughts we do not verbalise.

This can have a profound influence on our performance. This way of thinking is not designed to unlock our potential, it is designed to keep us safe. That means no taking risks, no stepping into harm's way. But for us to achieve high performance we must embrace risks and failure. Avoidance thinking which results from this survival brain is really unhelpful for high performance.

So what can you do. Well the language we use is fundamental to shifting this perspective. The language we use gives meaning to our feelings of fear, anxiety and doubt. Language allows us to make sense of these feelings and develop a logic for them. So we need to be mindful of the language we use with ourselves.

1. First remind yourself, regularly, that 97% of the things you worry about are unfounded. Second stop listening to yourself and start talking to yourself.

2. Plan what you want to say in performance. Have a plan to combat the negative thoughts. For example, rather than I better not miss this, we might say, keep my eye on the ball. Rather than saying I can't catch, say everyone drops the ball, I can bounce back.

3. Do not say negative things out loud.

If we use language that is neutral or positive to frame an event we can begin to erode the negative feelings associated with an event.

Here is a question for you. If a team mate made a mistake what would you say to them? Imagine they drop an easy catch? How would you talk to them? Now imagine you drop an easy pass. How would you talk to yourself? Is there a difference? The consequences for the team are the same. The only difference is we feel our standing in the team, our reputation or our value is under threat because of this mistake. And because of this we get very negative. And use negative language.

Why are we such good team mates to our team mates but such poor team mates to ourselves? Would we and the team be better off if we were better team mates to ourselves? The language we use to think matters. Stop listening to yourself and start talking to yourself to direct your focus to the actions you need to be executing.