In my earlier sporting years, when I found myself in a challenging situation during a rugby game, tennis match, or cycle race, I would often say to myself, “Come on Bob, you can do this” or “Come on Bob, you’re doing well here – just beat that other guy”. I never really knew how, where, or why I developed this type of self-talk, using my name rather than saying, “I can do this” or “I did well there and beat him”. If I had explained this phrasing to other people, they might have thought it was a little unusual. Yet it worked for me, because it helped me feel positive about myself even when I had not succeeded as expected. And now, new research helps explain why.
In a Harvard Business Review article, Pronouns Matter When Psyching Yourself Up, psychology researchers Ozlem Ayduk and Ethan Kross put it simply: “referring to yourself in the second or third person can make a difference”.
“We found that cueing people to reflect on intense emotional experiences using their names and non-first-person pronouns such as ‘you’ or ‘he’ or ‘she’ consistently helped them control their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. For example, in one study we found that participants who silently referred to themselves in the second or third person or used their own names while preparing for a five-minute speech were calmer and more confident and performed better on the task than those who referred to themselves using ‘I’ or ‘me.’”.
There is also an even more effective way to strengthen self-talk:
Saying it out loud.
In the 1920s, Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky spent ten years studying the act of talking to oneself out loud, suggesting that it is one of the most powerful cognitive tools the human brain possesses. Unfortunately, he had no funding to test his theory experimentally, and only more recently have others begun to do so.
Earlier, the well-known developmental psychologist Jean Piaget argued that small children talk to themselves out loud as a sign of cognitive immaturity and that children would eventually grow out of it as they learned to think properly.
Vygotsky argued exactly the opposite. He proposed that this self-directed speech was the most important cognitive event in the entire developmental window, because it was the moment a child first started to use language as a tool to control their own mind.
Those of you who have young children (up to about the age of three) have probably heard them say things like, “Jane did a wee”, or “John did good”, referring to themselves by name rather than using the adult first-person form, as in “I did well”.
In talking out loud and referring to themselves by name, Piaget suggested that the child was not yet able to think. However, Vygotsky’s retort would likely have been, “The child is learning how to think by externalizing the process and listening to themselves do it”.
And more recent studies lend support to Vygotsky’s view.
In addition to the work of Ayduk and Kross, other researchers have found that:
- When people are searching for an object, they tend to find it faster if they say its name out loud rather than look for it silently.
- Brain scans using fMRI suggest that when people reflect on unpleasant experiences, shifting from first-person to third-person language is associated with decreased activity in regions linked to rumination and self-referential distress. Within a second of using their own name instead of the word “I”, people show measurably lower emotional reactivity.
This last point is particularly important for maintaining self-confidence. For instance, when something genuinely upsets you, switch to your own name. Ask, “Why is Bob (your name) feeling this way?” instead of, “Why am I feeling this way?”
These studies offer a fascinating and practical example of how the words we use when talking to ourselves shape our thoughts, feelings, and behaviours. And if we take the child-like step of saying them out loud, the effect may be even stronger.
As I was reading the research, it struck me that, as a sports coach, I had often used this kind of phrasing by commenting on an athlete’s performance using their name. It made me realise that we can, in effect, become our own personal coach in our head: our “Self-Talk Coach”.
I mentioned earlier how I had inadvertently stumbled upon self-talk that uses our names or second- and third-person pronouns such as “you”, “she”, and “he” when playing sport. While writing this, I remembered something else I used to say to myself when training: “Come on boys, you can do this”. This was self-talk. I was not talking to team-mates; I was talking to my legs — “my boys”. I suspect that kind of self-talk sits in the same category as using your own name.
Do you have similar self-talk sayings? If so, keep using them — they may be helping more than you realise — and make them even more powerful by saying them out loud.
The voice you have been told to keep quiet your entire life may, in fact, be one of the oldest and most useful cognitive tools you possess.
In Bob Selden’s soon-to-be-released book, Don’t: How Using the Right Words Will Change Your Life, you’ll also find practical tips on how to phrase your self-talk — and begin to change the life those words create.