Sticks and Stones
The Influence of Words on success
You are what you eat.
You are what you do repeatedly.
What we do most frequently seems to have an effect on who we are and what we do. Why is this? Humans are creatures of habit and as a result once we repeat certain actions and habitualize them then they are engrained in how we operate. It is essentially a firmware update for our brains. We upload these new lines of code and at that point it can be very difficult to remove.
For the athlete sitting atop the podium clutching his/her gold medal waving to adoring fans these lines of ‘code’ could be extremely useful behavioral software upgrades, pivotal in overcoming high pressure situations. For others it can be that negative thought or creeping self doubt after a bad play or criticism. In the domain of competitive sport we want to internalize and optimize our mental skills training. Athletes often do not have the capacity to reflect on a real time situation and then actively recall the correct coping mechanism to help them deal with their issue. The process is almost instantaneous. Their reaction to the situation has to happen instinctively with no loss of processing power (focus). You can see this skill development over the course of an athletes career. Nobody is born with fully capped mental attributes. We come into this world with a certain ability and there is a ceiling to this too. How hard we work and nurture these traits dictate the growth we will show.
Where performance is concerned we want to be focused on the task at hand, pulling on experiences and skills honed in training. There are a myriad of things that will affect optimal focus often referred to as ‘flow state’. Getting into the right frame of mind to perform is often left to chance in the world of amateur sports. The big game is something that is coming towards them like a freight train rather than them approaching the game. Control is something that elite athletes need in order have that autonomy and decision making authority. This gives them a much stronger attachment to the end result, good and bad, because they had control over the process that brought them there.
It is easy to underestimate the effects of something as innocuous as words but what others tell us is as powerful as what we tell ourselves and in both cases they can affect how we think. In psychology we look at the relationship between thoughts, emotions and behaviors. They each interact with and affect each other. Because of this relationship we have many avenues to venture into to provide support for an athlete and yet a particular notion still persists; people can overestimate their ability to do something that they have done before. While this is true, it is only part of the equation because in the competitive realm certain skills are only as strong as their ability to withstand pressure and stress.
The fatal flaw of most communication systems currently used in esport is that they neglect emotional momentum, in favor of strategic momentum. To be truly successful, a team must simultaneously drive the game forward strategically, while being fueled by a consistent stream of emotional investment. Otherwise, you quite literally see careless gameplay.
- Summer Scott, CLG Director of Team Operations
Attentional control is our ability to block out or filter only relevant information and stimuli. An athlete lowering down the noise of a crowd before a free throw is an example of good attentional control. Each person will have their own internal stimuli to deal with; negative self talk, niggling injury, doubt, lowered confidence or personal issues. These are a fraction of an individuals own thoughts that can affect performance. Throw into the mix the language and talk that is shared in a team; teammates to teammates, coaches to players and coaches to coaches and you have a very dynamic melting pot.
We have already established that our own self talk can affect our emotions and behaviors. What we will see is that how our teammates communicate with us has broad overtures into our current as well as future sense of self.
Team must be able to toe the line between banter and building that unique shared vernacular. Sometimes comments can cross a line and this can test relationships and people’s abilities to adequately communicate and resolve conflicts. What I wanted to look at today was the effects of external attribution but wrapped in the guise of banter. There are a multitude of minimizing statements that could be used as examples, I will list some below.
- ‘Draft Difference’
- ‘I am so bad!’
- ‘Jungle Difference’
- ‘I’m tilted’
- ‘I guess he’s just Faker’
- ‘I am ‘insert champion’, I can’t do anything’
- ‘Coach gap’
- ‘Game is over, go next’ (2 mins into the game)
“Destructive and Negative communication patterns can easily create an imaginary box of confinement as the words you express yourself with will eventually taint your world view — if you continuously express weakness, you’ll eventually start embodying said weakness.”
- Maurice “Amazing” Stückenschneider, MSF League of Legends Coach
Negative self talk as well as semi-self deprecating humor can be used as tools to disarm potentially stressful situations. Used in the right context it can be helpful to address a situation without igniting an emotional powder keg. More frequently it is used as a coping mechanism for people to avoid having to confront situations that could cause them emotional harm.
A carefully placed word or phrase can pick someone up from the floor. They can motivate, drive as well as lift our spirits and energy. Powerful messaging boosts our sense of self and value. Throwaway comments and external attributions release us from what we are accountable over. We need to be able to recognize the part that we play in our life processes. Without that awareness we move from one experience to the next oblivious to how we could possibly have any control over what ‘happened to us’. Our experiences boil down to things that ‘happened to us’ rather than ones that we were in the driving seat for.
Even if we are cognizant of these mechanisms we can still fall victim to the talk of others. Their negative talk has a detrimental effect on us. It may well be a coping mechanism for them, conscious or not. Words have the ability to seed thoughts in people and over time they can grow roots, much harder to remove. While these negative words might not mean much in the moment they can fester and become more poignant further down the line. Words in jest remain so only when that person’s perception matches what is said. In all other cases they can feed into insecurities but the response you get from them might seem like everything is fine.
We enter a room together and we sit down. I tell you to think about anything you want. Let your mind wander. Where does it go? Next I tell you to think about your greatest achievement in life. Remember all the details, the time of year, the weather, the occasion, how you felt and how others around you reacted to it. Finally I tell you to think about anything you want…but do NOT think about a pink elephant! What you will find is that our mind is drawn towards thinking about what we were told to ignore. This is known as ‘Ironic Process Theory’ whereby deliberately trying to suppress certain thoughts make the thought or image itself much more vivid and harder to put to the side. This mechanism becomes stronger as we are under more pressure. Stress increases the likelihood of intrusive thoughts surfacing into our consciousness. Intrusive thoughts can range from ‘Am I good enough?’, ‘Do my teammates like me?’ to ‘I hope I don’t mess up’ and ‘I need to show that I can perform well against this team’. These are all examples of negative thoughts that I have heard from players at some point during the season. The real issue with these types of thoughts is that they are often never shared until they become something much bigger and problematic. They have become more tangible because this is running dialogue that the player has with himself and that the team can subconsciously feed into.
People will view their future prospect as more positive and bright with words that strengthen them. Minimizing comments and throwaway comments have their place in the lexicon of sports and are commonplace in many personal relationships. In long serving relationships there are vast levels of trust accrued in order for such loose language to be acceptable. In sports, seniority and authority dictate what can and can’t be said in the dressing room. The more trust and social currency we can accumulate the more honest and direct we can be in our communications with others. Like most things in life, building strong relationships and maintaining them is a skill that we can develop. If we want to add to the greater good of a collective then filling it with positive words that we repeat over and over again precede and predict our actions/thoughts. The words we tell ourselves combined with the ones we hear from others shape our success.
