Coach or Critic?

Often when we talk to ourselves, we can go into a negative zone fairly quickly. Sometimes this is necessary and we all need a good talking to at times. There’s little point in being our own cheerleader when its objectively clear that we need to raise our game or make changes in something that we’ve been doing.

While we all know that our default negative self-talk isn’t always helpful or effective, we also intuit that positivity isn’t the answer either.

From my experience the answer is in how we communicate the hard (and necessary) things to ourselves. So, not avoiding the difficult conversations and self-assessment but getting better these.

A way of distinguishing between useful and less useful self-talk is to ask:

Am I being a coach or a critic right now?

Coaches:

• Focus more on the future - how can I do this again and better?

• Use the past as a learning tool - how does this failure help me?

• Have ideas about how to improve or avoid making the same mistakes again - is this constructive and creative?

• Don’t tend to judge you as a person - focus more on actions and less on traits.

Critics:

• Focus more on the past - not interested in how you could tackle this again.

• Don’t tend to have any ideas - not agile in their thinking.

• Don’t welcome questions - too attached to fixed ideas.

• Can be judgmental (and mean)!

And the follow on question from this is: Who would you rather talk to??