The absolute power of talking to yourself

There’s no greater power than talking to your inner self

We all have a superpower we never were aware of: self-talk. It was always there, since the day we understood we can speak to ourselves, but not everybody always used it as the powerful tool that it is. This pattern has to stop: from today on you should use self-talk better, and here’s how to do it.

Let’s start by explaining what we are really talking about: self-talk is, in a way, the voice of your consciousness. It could be in your head, the majority of it actually is, or you could express it out loud, in any case as long as you are talking with yourself it is self-talk. Usually, we experience self-talk by fragmented and unformed thoughts that pass through our minds or that we speak up to ourselves, and since they have no direction, no reach, no destination, then they are just for ourselves, so that’s why we call it “self-talk”.

You could think that it is not a big deal, but it actually is. Many researchers studied this phenomenon, revealing relevant insights about this powerful tool. Van Raalte, for example, tried to understand how many times we perform self-talk, how much of it is internal and how much external. It came up that our internal self-talk is six times more developed than the verbal/external one: predictable, but still amazing!

This is not everything. Self-talk was also classified by some researchers in four major categories: motivational self-talk, instructional self-talk, positive self-talk and negative self-talk.

The first two are usually more developed in sports, where people need to talk to themselves to get motivated or to remember how a certain movement has to be performed to achieve perfectionism. In this regard, James Hardy, an expert in sport psychology at Bangor University, said that instructional self-talk is generally more effective than motivational self-talk in the majority of sports, but things change when the skills are more “endurance-based”.

The latter two are more common in our everyday life, and have more impact on our life than we imagine, since they can modify our perception of the surroundings, besides helping us to cope with the struggles… or to make them worse. We also use instructional and motivational self-talk, for example, if we want to cook for the first time a cake we never made we tend to repeat in our mind, or out loud, the things we need to do. This is an example of instructional self-talk. Or maybe we have an important meeting, so we need to motivate ourselves, to tell ourselves everything is going to be all right. This is motivational self-talk.

Basically we use motivational, instructional and positive self-talk to improve and boost our focus and performances, especially in those activities we don’t feel that confident.

Furthermore, it has been discovered that negative self-talk could bring positive results in some specific situations. In many sports, the players may interpret negative self-talk as a motivational train that boosts their performances in the short run. However, these are usually isolated cases and work only for some people, so it is to be discouraged since, as Jason Moser said, it can “become chronic over time”.

As a matter of fact, negative self-talk, if not treated correctly and used carefully, can turn into rumination, and become easily repetitive and obsessive, getting each time worse and worse. For this reason, there is a technique many suggest to use in order to break out from this path of destruction: the third-person self-talk.

Unlike normal self-talk, this ability allows you to see yourself from an external point of view, so you can neutralize the negative self-talk thanks to the compassion people naturally feel towards other living beings.

Self-talking in the third person can be a powerful tool to better control your emotions because of the clarity, objectivity and most of all the empathy you feel for yourself. Practically you learn to treat yourself as if you were another person.

Besides its benefits, this technique might not work for everyone, since being able to talk to yourself in third-person requires more awareness than the usual first-person. Also, we tend to think of ourselves as first-person so it is really difficult to train and change our focus point, but given the advantages that come from it I think it might be worth the effort.

The choice is on you.