The most powerful psychological tool you have at your disposal to achieve your triathlon goals is positive self-talk. What you say to yourself when you’re in the pool, on your bike, or in your running shoes affects what you think, how you feel, and how you perform. It also will often determine the quality of your workouts and your results in your races. Whatever you think more of—whether positive or negative—will determine the road you go down.
Yet negativity is rampant in the triathlon world. You hear it during swims, rides, and runs. And it sucks the life and love out training and races. You may be a victim of negative self-talk too. If your talk is negative, your thoughts and feelings will be negative. Negative self-talk involves thinking or saying anything that reflects a lack of confidence and a defeatist attitude, for example, “I’m going to do lousy terribly today,” “I stink,” and “I can’t deal with these conditions.” If you say these things, you’re convincing yourself that you have little chance. With that attitude, you really have no chance because not only is the rest of the field and the course against you, but you are against you too. You’ve become your own worst enemy. Your motivation will disappear, you’ll get nervous, lose focus, feel frustration, anger, and despair, and experience much more pain. You will definitely not be having fun out there.
If your talk is positive, your thoughts and feelings will be positive. Sounds like a good thing to me (and I know it is from first-hand experience!). Don’t say, “I don’t have a chance today.” Say, “I’m going to try my hardest today. I’m going to perform the best I can.” That will get you positive and fired up. By using positive self-talk, you’ll be your own best ally. You show yourself that, despite the fact that the rest of the field may be against you and the course is trying to break you, you’re on your own side.
Positive self-talk helps you in many ways. It increases your motivation to work hard because you believe that your efforts will be rewarded. You’re relaxed and focused because you know you can handle anything that is thrown at you by the course and the weather. Your emotions reflect your positive self-talk with feelings of excitement and joy. Positive self-talk can counter feelings of fatigue. And, as they say, “You will feel no pain” (or at least a lot less).
Most importantly, positive self-talk helps keep your mind strong and your body going, especially when your body starts to weaken. As your body wears down late in workouts and races, it will communicate to your mind that it has had enough—“I get the point! We can stop now.” If your mind listens to your body and responds with negative self-talk—“my body is so tired I can’t go on,” “this hurts too much to continue”—your body will take over your mind, your body and your mind will give up, and you will fail to achieve your goals. Positive self-talk can help your mind assert itself over your body, so when your body is yelling at you to stop, your mind can say, “NO! Keep going. That’s an order!” And your body will almost always keep going.
Positive self-talk is especially valuable when you think your tank is empty. Unless you’re having a Julie Moss moment (recalling her unforgettable 1982 Ironman Hawaii experience where her body simply gave out and only a supreme and inspiring effort enabled her to crawl the last 100 yards and cross the finish), there is always something left. Positive self-talk is the only thing that can take you from where you think there is nothing left to where there is nothing left. It is your greatest tool against fatigue and pain. Positive self-talk will allow you to tap into that final reserve at the end of a race that will allow you to perform your very best. If you can say, “Keep at it. This is what I’ve worked so hard for. I will not give up,” then your body will listen—however reluctantly—and you will cross the finish not only having succeeded against the course and the clock, but also having claimed victory over your greatest challenge—YOU—and there is no greater joy than that!
Training positive self-talk. Positive self-talk is a simple, but not easy, strategy. It’s simple because all you have to do is replace your negative self-talk with positive statements. It’s not easy because you may have developed some poor self-talk habits that are difficult to change. You begin retraining your self-talk by looking at the situations in which you tend to become negative, for example, when you have to do a cold open-water swim, at 60 miles of a bike ride, or in the fifth of ten 800-meter intervals (See Know Your Talk form).
Next, figure out exactly why you become negative in these situations. Common reasons we have found include fatigue, boredom, pain, frustration, and despair. All triathletes have “hot button” issues that trigger negativity. Finding out what yours are is essential to changing your self-talk. Then, monitor what you say to yourself. I’ve found that triathletes tend to rely on favorite negative self-talk when their buttons get pushed, for example, “Gosh, I suck,” “You’re such a loser,” and “What’s the point of even trying.” Realizing what you say and how bad it is for you is an important step in changing your self-talk. For most of the triathletes I’ve worked with there is a consistent pattern of the situations in which negative self-talk arises, the causes of the negativity, and the specific self-talk they express.
Before you go out and face those hot-button situations again, choose some positive self-talk with which you can replace your usual negative self-talk. The positive self-talk should be encouraging, but it must also be realistic. If you say things like, “I love being out here” when you really don’t or “I ‘m feeling so strong” even when you don’t, there’s no way you’ll buy what you’re saying. Acknowledging the hot button, but putting a positive and realistic spin on it will make it more likely you’ll believe what you’re saying, such as “If I keep working hard, good things will happen” and “This really hurts, but its money in the bank for my race.” By putting this new tool in your toolbox before your buttons get pushed, you’ll have more ready access to it and have a better chance of responding more positively.
At this point, training yourself to use positive self-talk depends on your ongoing commitment to it and focus on it. Because negative self-talk may be so ingrained, you’ll have to constantly remind yourself to be positive. Realizing when the hot-button situations are approaching will prepare you for your buttons gets to pushed and help you focus on what you say when it happens. At first, you will probably “fall off the wagon” and slip back to your old, negative ways, but just accept it as part of the process and return to being positive when you realize it. With time and persistence, you’ll see a gradual shift away from negativity and toward positive self-talk until you realize that you just went through one of those hot-button situations and you stayed psyched.
Balance the scales. When I work with triathletes, I have them chart the number of positive and negative things they say during training and races. In most cases, the negatives far outnumber the positives. In an ideal world, I would love to eliminate all negatives and have triathletes only express positives. But this is the real world and any triathlete who cares about the sport is going to think negatively sometimes.
In dealing with this reality, you should try to balance the scales. If you’re going to be negative when you make mistakes and perform poorly, you should also be positive when you perform well. The immediate goal is to increase the positives. This means rewarding yourself when you perform well. If you beat yourself up over an error, why shouldn’t you pat yourself on the back when you get it right. Unfortunately, too many triathletes are very tough on themselves and beat themselves up when they fail to live up to their extremely high expectations, but don’t congratulate themselves when they do. Tell yourself “ nice effort” when you gave a nice effort. Give yourself a “job well done” when you have done the job well. You worked hard and you deserve a reward.
Once you’ve balanced the scales by increasing your positives, your next goal is to tip the scales in the positive direction by reducing the negatives. Ask why you’re so hard on yourself when you perform poorly. The best triathletes in the world don’t always perform their best. Why shouldn’t it be okay for you to have down periods in your performances?
This step of tipping the scales toward positives is so important because of some recent research that found that negative experiences such as negative self-talk, negative body language, and negative emotions carry more weight than positive experiences. In fact, it takes 12 positive experiences to equal one negative experience. What this means is that for every negative express you make about yourself, whether saying something negative or screaming in frustration, you must express yourself positively 12 times to counteract that one negative expression.
Ultimately, you want to tip the scale heavily in the positive direction. Sure, you’re going to say some negative things periodically. That’s just part of being human and being a triathlete (no, you can’t be one or the other). You get tired, sick, and injured. You get frustrated, angry, depressed. The conditions get the better of you. So you get down on yourself once in a while. But you generally respond well to the situations that used to push your buttons and the preponderance of what say is positive.
Using negative thinking positively. As I mentioned earlier, even though I very much emphasize being positive at all times, the fact is, you can’t always be positive. You don’t always perform as well as you want and there is going to be some negative thinking. This awareness was brought home to me USAT national team training camp at which I worked not long ago. During the training camp, I was constantly emphasizing to the athletes about being positive and not being negative. One night at dinner, several of the triathletes came up to me and said that sometimes things do just stink and you can’t be positive. I realized that negative thinking is normal when you don’t perform well and some negative thinking is healthy. It means you care about performing poorly and want to perform better. Negative thinking can be motivating as well because it’s no fun to perform poorly and lose. I got to thinking about how triathletes could use negative thinking in a positive way. I came up with an important distinction that will determine whether negative thinking helps or hurts your triathlon efforts.
There are two types of negative thinking: give-up negative thinking and fire-up negative thinking. Give-up negative thinking involves feelings of loss and despair and helplessness, for example, “It’s over. I can’t finish.” You dwell on past mistakes and failures. It hurts your motivation and confidence, and it takes your focus away from continuing to give your best effort. Your intensity also drops because, basically, you’re surrendering and accepting defeat. There is never a place in triathlon for give-up negative thinking.
In contrast, fire-up negative thinking involves feelings of anger and energy, of being psyched up, for example, “I’m doing so badly. I hate performing this way” (said with anger and intensity). You look to doing better in the future because you hate performing poorly. Fire-up negative thinking increases your motivation to fight and turn things around. Your intensity goes up and you’re bursting with energy. Your focus is on continuing to work hard and not let the training or race beat you.
Fire-up negative thinking can be a positive way to turn your performance around. If you’re going to be negative, make sure you use fire-up negative thinking. Don’t use it too much though. Negative thinking and negative emotions require a lot of energy and that energy should be put in a more positive direction for your training and races. Also, it doesn’t feel very good to be angry all of the time.
