“A key basketball skill is imagery. The best players “see” situations before they happen so they can be prepared.” Jack Ramsay

One of the most straightforward concepts of sports psychology for basketball is developing positive self-talk.

It’s also one of the hardest mental skills to master. But mastering self-talk has a wide range of benefits as an athlete.

Over the years, research on basketball psychology has shown that self-talk can boost productivity, motivation, and confidence, and even help regulate emotions.

Effects of Self-Talk on Performance

Research suggests that positive self-talk and visualization are linked to success in the basketball mental game.

It has an important role in your success as an athlete and is essential for your recovery when you experience an injury.

Olympic athletes have linked the use of visualization and self-talk to their “best performance ever.” Using these tools can help put you in a confident mindset about your goals and help you see yourself achieving them.

The same holds true with negative self-talk. Negative thinking promotes negative self-talk and imagery that can make a recovery from a sports injury more difficult and hurt your mental game.

Appropriate self-talk and visualization can help succeed!

Change the Message You Send Yourself

It is also important to start listening to the words you use when talking to yourself.

When your inner voice becomes critical, particularly in emotional situations, pause those thoughts and reframe them.

It can be useful to switch from using the first person “I” and instead use your name or another pronoun when thinking about the situation. So instead of saying, “I always get nervous when making the first move,” you could say, “Why do I get nervous when I do just fine!”.

By doing this, you can distance yourself emotionally from what is bothering you, which means you can have more control over the situation and are less likely to feel the anxiety which feeds negative thinking.

Psychologist Martin Seligman founding father of positive psychology conducted an interesting study on self-talk. The purpose of the study was to explore the effects of the athlete’s self-talk style.

Specifically, the researchers explored whether it was possible to predict poorer than expected athletic performance if the athletes explained previous performance with a pessimistic style rather than an optimistic style.

For example, it would be better to say “The last game didn’t go well” (unstable and optimistic) or “I never do well in games like this” (stable and pessimistic).

Although both instructions convey the same meaning, one uses positive words rather than negative ones.

The results of the study revealed that performance deteriorated for athletes who used a pessimistic explanatory style.

In contrast, the performance of the athletes with an optimistic style did not. An optimistic style appears to improve your resilience; your capacity to recover from setbacks.

To make self-talk more effective, develop and apply positive self-talk to your routines and use it consistently.

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