Part 1: Identifying and Reframing Negative Self-Talk

Following our introduction to mindfulness, we now turn to another powerful tool for your mental toolkit: self-talk. You may already engage in self-talk without fully realising just how much of an impact it has on your performance, your confidence, and your overall wellbeing.

What Is Self-Talk?

Self-talk is the ongoing dialogue you have with yourself. These are the internal — and sometimes out-loud — statements, phrases, and cue words that run through your mind throughout training, competition, and everyday life. Some self-talk is automatic, appearing without any conscious effort. Some is more deliberate, used with a specific intention in mind. It can be positive or negative, and it serves different purposes — sometimes instructional, sometimes motivational, sometimes neither.

The key thing to understand is that self-talk is not neutral. What you say to yourself matters enormously.

The Impact of Negative Self-Talk

Negative self-talk includes any internal commentary that is critical, self-doubting, or unhelpful — thoughts that reflect worry, disengagement, fatigue, or distraction. Research is clear that this kind of internal dialogue can increase anxiety, reduce self-confidence, and undermine performance. In fact, many athletes report that their psychological challenges during difficult periods are harder to deal with than the physical ones.

Negative self-talk tends to show up most strongly at predictable moments: when you’re physically uncomfortable or tired, when a task suddenly feels harder, when you’ve made a mistake or are underperforming, or simply when part of you wants to give up. Recognising these triggers is an important part of managing them.

It’s also worth knowing that when things feel difficult emotionally, people tend to engage in more self-talk as a way of trying to process what they’re feeling. Without awareness, this can easily spiral into excessive self-criticism — which research links to higher levels of anxiety and, over time, more serious impacts on mental health.

Step One: Building Awareness

The first and most important step in managing negative self-talk is simply becoming aware of it. This means noticing both how often it happens and what it actually sounds like when it does.

Two practical techniques can help you build this awareness.

Keep a self-talk logbook. After training sessions or competitions, take a few minutes to jot down any negative self-statements you noticed during the session, the situations that seemed to trigger them, and how they made you feel. This doesn’t need to be lengthy — even a few lines is enough. Over time, patterns will emerge that give you genuine insight into your own internal dialogue and the moments when it tends to work against you.

Try the paperclip exercise. For a simpler, in-the-moment approach, start a training session with a few paperclips in one pocket. Every time you catch yourself using negative self-talk, move a paperclip to your other pocket. Count them at the end. This isn’t about judging yourself for the number — it’s purely about building the habit of noticing. You can’t change something you aren’t aware of.

Step Two: Beginning to Reframe

Once you start catching negative self-talk as it happens, the next step is learning to reframe it. The goal here is not to suppress unwanted thoughts — research actually shows that trying to push a thought away can make it more persistent, a phenomenon sometimes called the “ironic effect.” Instead, the aim is to acknowledge the unhelpful thought and then consciously choose a more constructive one to replace it.

Think of it less as silencing your inner critic and more as redirecting it. You’re not pretending the difficult thought didn’t arise — you’re deciding not to let it have the final word.

In the next instalment, we’ll go deeper into the power of positive self-talk and give you specific examples of the kinds of statements that can genuinely help before and during competition.