Being Hard on Yourself?  Try This Instead. - Coach Tip Tuesday

I’ve heard and seen athletes being incredibly hard on themselves over the years.  There are all sorts of manifestations of it, but it’s been something I’ve consistently observed since I became an endurance athlete and coach.  Athletes will say things like “I am disappointed in myself for not meeting my goal” or “I am angry with myself for not getting this workout done” or “I should have done better” or “I feel like an imposter” or “I feel like a failure for not meeting my goal.”

There are all sorts of pieces of advice that can be offered to athletes in this situation, most of them well-intentioned.  “Stay positive!”  “Look on the bright side!”  “You’re not a failure!”  And while quips like this may be well-intentioned, they are not actually helpful in terms of helping someone learn how to navigate the situations that prompt this kind of inner dialogue or this kind of negative self-talk.

Fortunately, there are several tools that can help athletes learn to navigate these kinds of thoughts and when they are being less-than-kind to themselves.  One of the most effective tools I’ve learned and deployed over the years is this:

Speak to yourself like you would speak to a friend.

Zoom Out for Better Perspective

“It’s easier to give advice to a friend than it is to give advice to yourself” is an old adage that many reading this may have heard at one time or another.  And it holds true: Since we are literally inside our own heads all the time, it’s impossible for us to be unbiased when it comes to ourselves.  It’s this being stuck in our own heads that makes it easier for us to be unkind to ourselves - much more unkind than most of us would ever be to another human being.

While it is impossible to actually get outside of our own heads and to be completely unbiased when it comes to our own selves and our own lives, we can leverage tools to help us be slightly less biased and to be more like a third party who is looking at us or our lives.  This is where considering what you would say to another person in the same situation as you becomes valuable.

Because, really.  Think about it.  Recall a situation where you were being hard on yourself and when you had negative thoughts - about the situation, yourself, or both - swirling around in your head.  Those things that you were thinking: Would you have said those same things out loud to another human experiencing the same situation as you?

For instance, imagine that a good friend of yours didn’t get a workout in as planned.  Imagine that your best friend didn’t hit their goal time at their A-Race of the year.  Imagine that your spouse didn’t get a personal best time for a particular distance at a race.  Imagine that your mother chose to defer her race entry to the following year because she wasn’t going to be physically ready in time for race day this year.  What would you say to these people in these situations?

Would you tell someone that they are weak because they didn’t do a workout when it was scheduled?  Would you tell your best friend that all of their training and hard work was pointless because they missed their goal time at a race?  Would you tell your spouse that their training and doing a race wasn’t worth it because they didn’t set a personal best time?  Would you call your mother a failure for deferring her race entry because she recognized that more time to prepare for her goal might help her be successful?

As you think about and work through an exercise like this, you can see very quickly that framing our conversations with ourselves the way we would frame a conversation with someone else is a very useful tool.  Because the truth of the matter is this: Most of us would not - ever! - speak to someone else the same way we speak to ourselves when we’re engaging in negative self-talk.  

The Linguistic Trick That Unlocks Self-Kindness

Changing the pronouns in our internal dialogue from “I” or “me” to “you”, “she”, “he”, or “they” (essentially, whichever third-party pronoun you identify with) is a profoundly simple (yet powerful!) swap.

Consider the self-reflective statements I opened this article with and how they are transformed when we change our grammar and swap the pronouns:

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“I am disappointed in myself for not meeting my goal.” 

becomes

“You should be disappointed in yourself for not meeting your goal.”

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“I am angry with myself for not getting this workout done.”

becomes 

“I am angry with you for not getting your workout done.”

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“I should have done better.”
becomes 

“You should have done better.”

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“I feel like an imposter.”

becomes

“You are an imposter.”

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“I feel like a failure for not meeting my goal.”
becomes

“You are a failure for not meeting your goal.”

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How awful do those same statements sound now that we’ve changed our grammar and pronouns?  They’re pretty cringe-worthy when you actually say them out loud.  In fact, I’d venture to hypothesize that a majority of you reading this would never say such a thing to someone else.  And if you wouldn’t say it to someone else…why would you say it to yourself?  What makes you different (better or worse) than someone else that you get to talk to yourself in such a harsh and unkind way?

Why Switching to Third-Party Grammar Works

When we switch from using first-person pronouns (such as “I” or “me”) to using third-person pronouns (such as “you”, “he”, “she”, or “they”), we are creating space between ourselves and the situation at-hand, which allows us to reduce our emotional reactivity to a given situation.  Using first-person pronouns keeps us too close to a given situation; it keeps us firmly lodged in our own heads.  Using third-party pronouns, on the other hand, is a linguistic trick that allows us to zoom out and create distance between ourselves and our emotional response to a situation.  Creating this space is what allows us to come closer to being a third-party observer of our own lives and allows us to have a broader view of both the situation and our world at-large.

Using self-distanced language like this when considering negative situations or experiences helps us reduce anxiety, feelings of shame, and rumination.  Perhaps most interestingly to endurance athletes, it also leads to better performance overall.  Yes, you can give yourself a better chance at having a strong performance all by switching “I” to “you” when you talk to yourself.  When you do this, you are exercising control over your thoughts, rather than defaulting to the “easy” path of using first-person pronouns and being overly critical of yourself.  Research shows that we are better at making fact-based decisions, that we will stick to tasks for longer periods of time, and that we will demonstrate higher levels of wisdom when we use self-distanced inner dialogue (aka “You” instead of “I”).  That’s a lot of benefit from such a seemingly small change!

The Bottom Line

You will never have more conversations with another human on this planet more than you have with yourself.  Ever.  You are the human who will talk to you the most.  As such, it’s so important to be thoughtful about these conversations that we have with ourselves and to express empathy, kindness, and forgiveness toward ourselves the same way we would toward another person.

The next time you find yourself in a situation where you are beating yourself up, being hard on yourself, engaging in negative self-talk, or ruminating over a situation that you’re unhappy with yourself about, stop.  Ask yourself what advice you would be giving to a friend or someone else close to you if they were having the same experience and/or saying negative things to or about themselves.  Switch the pronouns in your inner dialogue to reflect how you would be speaking to a friend, and see if that doesn’t help you be more empathetic, gentler, and kinder to yourself and help you achieve better performances over time.

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Sources:

Magness, S. (2022). Do Hard Things: Why We Get Resilience Wrong and the Surprising Science of Real Toughness. HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. 

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