"Effects of Self-Talk: A Systematic Review" - David Tod, James Hardy, and Emily Oliver, Aberystwyth University, Aberystwyth; Bangor University, Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology, 2011, 33, 666-687.
First, it would probably be helpful to clarify what self-talk is. Quite simply, its your inner monologue. What is you brain tell you right now? Perhaps while you're reading this, you've already thought to yourself "I wonder what happened since I last checked facebook 5 minutes ago". Can you deliberately tell yourself something (either in your head or with your voice), and have an impact on your behaviour? The conventional notion is that self-talk has a major impact on all aspects of a person's life, and has a major impact in sport. I re-read through my sport psych notes from university, and one slide says this:
When I took the applied sport psych course, I did my term paper on John McEnroe, and how his extremely negative self-talk (he was a maladaptive perfectionist), was what caused his game to turn terrible and result in his crazy outbursts of anger (youtube him, entertainment gold!). I proposed various strategies of self-talk, like "thought stopping", to manage his negative self-talk to prevent his plummeting performance.
"YOU CANNOT BE SERIOUS!!"
So, easy. Self-talk = an important part of performance. Easy. But, thanks to science, there's also many, many dimensions, types, strategies, concepts within self-talk. And that's where a nice literature review comes in. Like this one. Has self-talk really been found to massively impact performance? Are there types that have more impact than others?The answer to almost everything is, "well, kinda".
To be brief, the authors found that 75% of their studies showed that positive self-talk had some sort of positive effect on performance levels. The trouble is, there are so many aspects to self-talk, that the authors note that its efficacy is pretty situational. What task are you performing? What type of athlete are you? What type of self-talk are you employing? Is it REALLY the self-talk that having the influence?
One way to organize them was into two types of self-talk. "Instructional self-talk", and "motivational self-talk". They both had differing impact depending on the task. Instructional self-talk had a more common positive effect in precision-based tasks (ones that require technical execution of a physical task). So.... "keep your knees bent to be ready to pass if the serve comes to me". Motivational self-talk was more positive with condition-based tasks (ones that are physical outputs of a task), as in "YOU CAN DO THIS RUN FASTERRRRRR!"
One interesting thing to note, is that of the few studies that looked at the impact of negative self-talk on performance, none of them found it had any impact on performance. This is important, because my John McEnroe case above suggests that's not entirely true. Surely his thoughts of "I'm such a jerk, I can't believe I messed up that shot", contributed to his consistent unraveling. One cannot argue against anecdotal evidence. Scientifically, it sounds like you can call yourself a jerk, and it won't impact your performance. But does that feel like the case? You can decide for yourself on that one.
If you're racing and your facial expression is that, perhaps its time for some positive self-talk?
So, how does this apply to orienteering?
I don't really know what goes on in your head during a race. I can barely remember what goes on in my head during a race. If you ask me what I was thinking when I started going in the wrong direction in the WOC final, I have no idea. But, it seems like it would be useful to have a plan if that happens again. Unfortunately, this study tends to focus more on the execution of a phsyical skill, and orienteering is kind of a mish-mash of everything.
But, let's try and get some orienteering specific conclusions out of this. The authors note that, "the existing evidence base does suggest that self-talk has beneficial effects on cognition (in particular, concentration and focus-related variables), cognitive anxiety, and technical execution of movement skills.... verbal cuses could be used to increase focus as well as direct and redirect performer's attention". I think this is a solid support for the notion of reminding oneself of important tasks during the race. Things like "Focus on my bearings!", "Attack the control", "Simplify simplify simplify", are all reminders of re-focusing your attention on the important tasks instead of un-important ones ("There's a rock in my shoe!").
Another useful point, the authors suggest that skill level has is a big variable in the efficacy of self-talk, where it may be particularly more relevant for beginners. That goes along with the idea of talking oneself through the movements. I wonder if self-talk's useful-ness might also increase in times of extreme lost-ed-ness for all orienteers. Times when you need to back-up, goes WAY back to basics, and talk yourself through the mess you've gotten into.
One last thing, remember last entry's discussion on anxiety. Well, its back! "The beneficial effect of self-talk on cognitive anxiety is consistent with theoretical assertions that self-talk lies at the core of anxiety and findings that reducing negative or anxious self-talk results in less anxious states". Perhaps we have found some ways to decrease our anxiety. Self-talk --> Lowered anxiety --> Higher running economy --> Better navigation? Hm....
In closing, I'll admit this didn't provide any specific self-talk things you could do while orienteering. Its an overview of the efficacy of self-talk, and perhaps something you might want to explore. So, here's something I like to do, whenever I made a mistake and had a bad leg, I'd punch the control, tell myself to "Brush that off, and move on", and literally physically brush off my shoulder. I do it enough times that now just the action of brushing off my should associates it with the thought, and I can effectively put it behind me and move on.
And if that wasn't helpful, here's the 11th Doctor's Theme, it always gets me jacked up:
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