In 2010, LeBron James famously sat down with ESPN for The Decision, a television special to announce who the best basketball player in the world would join as a free agent. LeBron had conversations with six franchises and had spent the summer changing his mind on where to play. In the end, he selected the Miami Heat to form a super team with Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh. This paid off with back-to-back NBA championships in 2012 and 2013. This decision was the most anticipated event in sports for a long time. Months of scrutiny and pressure was placed on LeBron.
who felt emotionally conflicted about the consequences that his actions would have. There was guilt in the prospect of leaving his beloved Cleveland Cavaliers, but there was also a deep desire to finally win NBA championships, after years of frustration being a one-man team. He would have wrestled with endless inner dialogue about what to do, causing him months of stress and sleepless nights. But when it finally came down to it, LeBron rationalized his decision by saying this, One thing I didn't want to do was make an emotional decision. I wanted to do what was best for LeBron James, and do what makes LeBron James happy.
And it's in this simple statement that if we scratch beneath the surface of it, we come to realize how important an athlete's self-talk is, both for decision-making, but also ultimately performing their absolute best. At face value, this statement from LeBron could be seen as arrogant and egotistical because he's referring to himself in the third person. But here's the thing, this may actually be the best strategy for this particular situation.
You see, psychologist Ethan Cross studied this exact statement from LeBron and through his research has found that talking about ourselves in the third person can actually be an effective strategy. to better control our thoughts feelings and behavior cross's researchers found that shift in talking about ourselves from the first person to the third person creates something called self distancing it basically tricks your brain into seeing yourself as another person literally like a friend and here's the thing when you think about it a lot of our self-talk can be overwhelmingly negative when we fail at something we instinctively say to ourselves i'm stupid or i'm useless and those are just things that we wouldn't dare say to a friend if they experience the same thing we would say to them don't worry about it or you'll nail it next time. There's this thing that pretty much all psychologists and therapists say, and that's would you talk to someone else the way that you talk to yourself? And of course, the answer is hell no. So switching your I pronoun to your own name in your own mind removes you from yourself in some way.
And because of that, you're going to think about situations, scenarios and events in a far more objective way. When we use the I pronoun, it creates a tendency to be overly stressed and to over pressurize situations. But using the third person by saying your own name just slows things down a little.
and allows a sense of detachment so you're not going to get as worked up by the same situations. So for LeBron, this simple shift in his own self-talk allowed him to put aside all emotion and think what is it that LeBron James wants most in the world. And the answer was to win championships. And then that made his decision to go to Miami seem so easy.
It helps you stop falling into those easy mental traps where you're riding high one minute and then you're crashing to the floor the next. So why is this? Why is our mind so good at creating doubts when we need confidence more than ever?
Well, let's run through a quick test. Just follow my instructions. Whatever you do, don't think of a pink elephant.
Did a pink elephant pop into your mind? Yeah, it does for everyone. And the point is, sometimes when our self-talk is trying to help us, it can actually just be a hindrance.
So what the very best athletes do is eliminate don't self-talk. What I mean by this are those times during a pressurized situation where we instinctively focus on avoiding negative outcomes rather than focusing on achieving positive ones. And this causes our self-talk to be things like, don't miss that shot or don't screw up.
But because of the pressure of the situation, our brain sometimes doesn't get the full context, and we'll end up just over-focusing on the core of the instruction. And the next thing you know, your brain is flooding with thoughts about what will happen if you miss or fail. And this then makes it more difficult to concentrate on the task at hand, and obviously you'll probably mess it up.
So what do the best athletes do to avoid this? Well, let's talk about Muhammad Ali. His talk to the camera was often beyond entertaining, but it was his talk to himself that made him the superstar boxer he became. This is a clip before his famous Rumble in the Jungle bout. with world heavyweight champion George Foreman in 1974. For context, Ali was the underdog for this fight.
He was seven years older than Foreman and people feared Ali was just not the same athlete anymore. And here's what he has to say. Sticking. Keep dancing and sticking. Sidestepping.
Bouncing off the ropes. Dancing and sticking. Beat him all night.
Time out by seven rounds. I'll be dancing all night. Everything Ali says here is what he intends to do. there are no don'ts. It would be easy for him to think don't pounce too early or don't let your guard down.
But if you're in the ring with the man with the heaviest hits in the game, then your brain may sloppily take those words on board and do the exact opposite. Instead, everything that he said was facilitating his plan of what he was going to do come fight night. And sure enough, Ali did all those things and was only off by one round with his prediction as he knocked out a tired foreman in round eight.
Replacing don'ts with dos is what the very best athletes in the world make sure is at the heart of their self-talk. It allows them to drive towards success and achievement, rather than veer off in an attempt to just avoid defeat or failure. But what if the pressure is too much?
You're super stressed and no matter what you do, you can't talk yourself into those do's. Well, as a last technique of elite self-talk, let's talk about the snowball. Sean White. In 2018, he headed into the Winter Olympics as possibly the most famous Winter Olympian in American history. He was the poster boy of winter sports, one of the few celebrity names, and was a two-time Olympic gold medalist.
But only a few months before the 2018 Games, White suffered a freak accident in training, which required him to have 62 stitches in his face. This, of course, massively interrupted his preparations, and there was a chance that he could miss the Games entirely. But he managed to get fit in time to compete, despite not being in perfect form or condition. And after a solid performance, White's fate came down to the last run of the competition.
He had to nail it to win gold and become a three-time Olympic champion. At the top of the halfpipe, there were a million thoughts running through his head. There were doubts about whether he'd put in sufficient training because of his injury, and there were fears that if he took home any other medal than gold, that would tarnish his legacy.
But suddenly, all those racing thoughts stopped. Because just as he was about to drop and start his run, White said to himself in his head two simple words, who cares? And with that, he then put in a near-perfect run to land the gold medal. and go down in history as one of the greatest winter olympians of all time and what's the lesson here well in sports it's all too easy to get too worked up yes we want to succeed and put in our best performance but buying into all that pressure can often make us way too stressed and worked up it's usually when we're carefree that we put in peak performances when we're in that flow state where there are no worries you're not thinking about the outcome you're just there in the present moment doing what it is that you love so sean white's self-talk of who cares just allowed him to unload a huge weight of stress on his shoulders He became less tense and his mind became quiet and it was this inner peace that allowed him to ultimately put in that peak performance What self-talk techniques do you use to help you perform your best? Let me know in the comments below and if you want to find out more about how to handle pressure when it matters most Then check out this next video here