today i'm going to be talking about the most effective and least effective things you can say
to yourself after making a mistake hi everyone have you ever noticed how you talk to yourself
after you make a mistake or have a setback it's something i call coaching style and it's extremely
important and one of the the biggest things that can lead to a person beating themselves up or
getting down on themselves but before i get into that just a couple of disclaimers to go over
i'm a registered psychologist in the province of british columbia canada
and this video is for informational purposes only it is not intended as a
substitute or replacement for advice from your doctor or mental health professional
now with those things out of the way let's start talking about coaching style now the thing is
we'll all make mistakes nobody's perfect we all will make mistakes we will all have setbacks
where we recognize that we did something wrong or we recognized that things didn't go quite
as we expected now the key is the way you talk to yourself when you have a setback
is extremely important in terms of determining uh what you do with that setback and how you feel
afterwards and and how you're able to move forward afterwards and this is what i call coaching style
you think about what a coach does is a coach uh helps teach an athlete the best way and the most
effective way to perform in a sport well try to think about how you coach yourself and how you
talk to yourself uh throughout life and the thing is we we all have this dialogue that's
going on in our head whether we realize it or not and we're always kind of evaluating ourselves and
always kind of evaluating how we're doing and the way we coach ourselves is critical in terms
of setting ourselves up for future successes or causing us to give up or um or see ourselves as
as ineffective or inconsequential so to explain this idea of coaching style i want you to imagine
a story and i want you to imagine that there is a girl playing softball now this is about an eight
or nine year old girl and she's playing little kids softball and she's out in left field now
it's little kid softball so nothing ever gets hit out to left field and so she's standing
out in left field for most of the afternoon and not really doing very much kind of bored
you know sort of playing with the grass and you know checking out butterflies that are going by
now late in the game it's a close game bases are loaded and a high fly ball gets hit to this little
girl and she gets really excited because she finally gets to do something and so she goes
to settle in under the ball and to catch it and just before she goes to catch it she realizes
that she's misjudged how far the ball was hit and the ball sails over her head and so she runs she
gets the ball she throws it in a few runs score now the coach of her team we'll call him coach a
now coach a comes out of the dugout and he makes a beeline towards this girl and then coach a tends
starts to berate the little girl for the mistake how stupid could you be you blew it uh you you're
gonna cost us the game what were you thinking what is wrong with you you screw up like that
again you're going to be stapled to the bench and the coach proceeds to head back to the dugout well
how do you think that little girl's gonna feel well she's probably gonna feel pretty
awful she's probably she felt bad enough when she made the mistake and now with the coach berating
her she feels even worse about it and so she's probably ashamed and embarrassed and humiliated
and so uh the next day when it comes to softball practice she may tell her parents
you know what i i'm not feeling very well today i don't really want to go to softball practice
and the next week when it comes to the softball game uh you know what i've just got too much
homework to do i i can't make it for the game and the next year when it comes to uh signing up for
softball again she tells her parents no you know what it's it's okay i don't want to play softball
anymore i want to take up uh dance instead and so this little girl stops playing softball
now i want you to imagine the exact same scenarios little girl out in left field nothing's happened
all game she's just kind of you know sitting around waiting for something to happen base is
loaded late in the game high fly ball gets hit to her she gets excited she's going to catch the ball
as she misjudges how far the ball was hit sails over her head she throws it in a few runs score
now this time uh coach comes out to her we'll call him coach b
and coach b walks over to this girl and he says to her look made a mistake it's not great
but it's not the end of the world remember that whenever the ball gets hit to you it
always looks like it's closer than it is so what you want to do is take a few steps back and then
move forward into the ball so you can catch it in front of you and coach b goes back to the dugout
now notice coach b didn't tell this girl hey great job that was super the way you threw the ball in
after you missed it coach b acknowledges that a mistake was made but the difference is coach
b didn't berate the girl coach b didn't beat her up coach b didn't uh humiliate her or mock her or
criticize her mercilessly instead coach b acknowledged that there was a mistake
but then got her to learn ways or got her to recognize ways of learning from the mistake and
so the next time it happens she's able to learn from what happened and get better at softball
now if you were the parent of that little girl who would you rather have as her coach
would you rather it be coach a or would you rather it be coach b well whenever i ask my
clients this question they say well obviously i would rather have coach b coaching my daughter
and then i say okay well well why is that why would you want coach b instead of coach a well
because coach b helps encourage and helps teach my daughter whereas coach a just beats herself up
or beats her up and gets really down on her okay so we all agree that coach b is the better coach
now when you have a setback when you make a mistake
do you tend to be more coach a with yourself or do you tend to be more coach b
well most of the time when i ask my clients that they'll say to me well i tend to be more cojay
and that's really common because somewhere along the line we picked up this idea or this notion
that the the harsher we are with ourselves when we make a mistake them the more we beat ourselves
up when we make a mistake the more likely we are to learn and to grow from that that if we were to
let ourselves off easy then it wouldn't be a learning experience but just like coach a
makes that little girl feel terrible about herself and wants her and makes her want to sort of quit
or not continue with playing softball being coach a with ourselves likewise doesn't help us
learn from the experience doesn't help us learn from mistakes it just ends up making ourselves
feel worse about ourselves and it makes it so that we don't want to try or see no purpose
or point in trying because we're not very good so i see this a lot with people with depression where
they make a mistake something doesn't go exactly the way they want it to go
and they beat themselves up they get really down on themselves and then it's like okay well what's
the point even try i also see it in my clients who have panic attacks and maybe they're going
really well they've learned some panic management skills and they've gone a little while without
having a panic attack and then they have a panic attack and then they get really down on themselves
and beat themselves up because they went so long without having a panic attack and they
they screwed up somehow again being coached with yourself all it's really going to do is
sap your motivation and uh and self-worth whereas being coach b with yourself is gonna
help you acknowledge what the mistake was but help you actually learn from the mistake
so how do you use this information what can you do well one of the things i'll often ask my clients
to do is just pay attention to your coaching style and when you catch yourself being co-jay
to try and think what would be a more coach b way of thinking about this situation
because once you start to recognize how often and how regularly you tend to be
coach a with yourself uh and you start to shift towards more coach b approach that can have a huge
impact on just helping you not be so harsh with yourself but also helping yourself feel better
about the the journey that you're on and the process that you're taking and that you
know what you're gonna make mistakes and that's okay because you can learn from those mistakes
and those mistakes are actually gonna make things better in the long run so i hope you find that
information helpful on coaching style i'd love to hear your thoughts and ideas about this so please
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making it all the way to the end of this video and i will see you in the next one