Running can be hard enough on a good day. Running with a voice in your head continuously berating you can be exhausting.

Most of us have a running dialogue with ourselves. If you actually stop and listen to this chatter, you may wonder how we do anything else.

Place yourself out for a run. If you are running along and someone runs past you, does your voice in your head encourage you or shoot you down? ‘I’m going too slow, I don’t even run like a runner, I’m never going to be fit enough, I knew I should have stayed at home today, this is a waste of time.’ Sound familiar?

Getting control of the voices in your head is a big step forward. Self-talk unchecked can be exhausting. We don’t need to eliminate self-talk, we just need to turn it into positive self-talk. Once we make positive self-talk a habit our confidence and performances start to change for the better.

In fact, developing positive self-talk is often key for an athlete. Negative self-talk is one of the biggest causes of pre-race nerves and performance anxiety.

An important factor of positive self-talk is that it must be possible, realistic and believable.

So how do you develop a self-talk habit?

To get started with creating a positive self-talk habit, choose a mantra you can use during your training. This could be a simple mantra, such as ‘You feel strong today’, or ‘You are getting faster’ anything positive that you can repeat over and over to yourself.

Third party talk like ‘you’ is much more powerful than ‘I’. ‘You are on top of this’, ‘You always finish strong’ is stronger than ‘I’m on top of this’, ‘I always finish strong’. Our opinion of ourselves goes up and down with our mood, so telling yourself ‘I am strong’ might be followed by a judgemental, ‘Yeah, right’. However, when we use third-person language like ‘You are strong’ we get more benefit, in the same way we do when someone gives us a compliment. If you practice this regularly you will get better at it.

And don’t worry about talking to yourself when you’re out running, you’re in good company. Serena Williams, Padraig Harrington and, most famously, Muhammad Ali are all proponents of self-talk in their training and performance. With this clip from the NFL (National Football League) in the US, you will see that positive self-talk is so ingrained that it is part of the game.

CHANGE YOUR TUNE

Developing this habit starts during practice so you get to the point where it is automatic. Start expanding the dialogue so that you have familiar and comfortable statements for a variety of situations. In sport many things can go wrong, at any stage. Having several mantras can help to get you back on track.

It helps if the phrases and words you choose create a visual picture of yourself doing exactly what you say. The image, along with the words, is a powerful combination that creates a positive message tied to a belief. Over time you will become accustomed to having a more positive soundtrack playing in your head and mantras may take a back seat. However, keep a few in your backpack for the times when you are mentally and physically exhausted.

As Mike Tyson says ‘Everybody has a plan, until they get punched in the mouth’.