Interrogative Self-Talk

Some people have tendencies to think about the world and the problems and situations that they find themselves in in negative lights. This is commonly referred to the “glass half empty” mental approach. These people tend to be filled with more anxiety and worry that things are going to go wrong and often doubt themselves before taking on a new challenge. Other people look at the world with “the glass half full” mindset. Everything will turn out alright, things really aren’t that bad, and there is a positive and sunny side to everything.

In our reading in Pink and in class today we learned about the idea of buoyancy. This idea is referring to how people recover from rejection and stay afloat in the sales world. The first step of having good buoyancy takes place before the sales attempt is even made. That is, interrogative self-talk. Interrogative self-talk bridges the gap between overly negative and overly positive mental states. In this approach, you are to ask yourself logical questions about the situation you are or are going to be in. Asking yourself these kinds of questions often helps you think about strategic and logical answers that you may have missed if you had looked at the situation from an extremely positive or negative light. This approach now has social science supporting it because it has been proven to work in various experiments.

I have been a competitive swimmer for going on a decade now, and in that competition world I can definitely see how interrogative self-talk has a better outcome than both the overly positive and negative mindsets have. Swimming is very much a mind game, and being very negative can completely psych you out of a race and make you gain time. Being overly positive can hurt your focus and give you unrealistic expectations, ultimately also leading to an add in time instead of dropping time. Ultimately the best approach for swimming is eliminating as many thoughts from your mind as you can, and sometimes in order to get to this blissfully empty-minded state you have to be logical with yourself. Asking yourself questions about your training and your races can help you focus on what is at hand.