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Help children notice the thoughts that shape confidence and performance. This animated Power Up® lesson explores helpful and unhelpful self-talk, common thinking traps and the Thought Wheel, giving children a practical way to develop more accurate and useful responses.
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In this module, you will be introduced to self-talk as a strategy to improve your skill development and manage your emotions and ability to focus on performance situations. You will identify both helpful and unhelpful thinking patterns and how these may impact you physically, emotionally and behaviourally. This section will also discuss the different ways self-talk can be used to improve your performance. Further, you will be encouraged to develop realistic and helpful thinking patterns related to your experiences prior to, during and after practice or performance situations.
We all experience conversations in our heads. This is called internal dialogue and it means that our cognitive thoughts and internal voice can influence how we feel and behave in both practice and competition.
This internal dialogue can be both helpful and unhelpful. For example, in a performance situation, positive cognitions can help us push that ‘little bit extra’ to achieve our best, whereas unhelpful cognitions can contribute to performance anxiety that can negatively impact performance. The skills covered in this section are relatively complex and require practice and support from your parents and coaches/teachers to implement.
Power Up! has adopted the use of cognitive strategies for the specific purpose of performance enhancement, teaching you to manage unhelpful thinking patterns to develop and reinforce positive thinking patterns.
By identifying your own self-talk patterns, you will be able to gain a better understanding of how your thoughts can affect how you feel and behave. The exercises may also help you to utilise self-talk in a variety of situations and contexts, such as in relation to other events and throughout times when you may be experiencing stress, anxiety or when more attention and focus is required, for example.
This Power Up® module helps children aged 10 to 16 understand self-talk, the internal dialogue that can influence how they feel, focus and behave before, during and after performance.
The animation moves from everyday competition thoughts into helpful and unhelpful thinking patterns, then introduces common cognitive distortions such as all-or-nothing thinking, overgeneralising, negative filtering and blaming.
Rather than simply telling children to 'think positive', the lesson teaches them to notice a thought, acknowledge it and then work towards a response that is more accurate and useful.
This is Lesson 2 in the six-module Power Up® performance psychology course. It can also be purchased and completed on its own.
Self-talk changes through practice. Support from a parent, coach or teacher can help children notice patterns and test different responses in real performance situations.
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