Speak Life to Yourself
On this week's episode of the Building Championship Mindsets podcast, Dr. Amber Selking explores how self-talk significantly impacts our mindset and performance. Our words have the power of life and death. Choosing to engage in positive, constructive self-talk rather than allowing negative thoughts to invade our minds can invigorate performance and reinforce positive mindsets. Dr. Selking shares why we must remain aware of our thoughts and reframe them if we want to cultivate a championship mindset that enhances our overall well-being.
About Building Championship Mindsets
Welcome to “Building Championship Mindsets. | the Podcast!” From the LockerRoom to the BoardRoom, our purpose is to help individuals, teams, and organizations understand and leverage the power of Mindset and Leadership to drive results and achieve sustainable performance excellence.
As a leader in the field of sport and performance psychology, Dr. Amber Selking has been fiercely devoted to optimizing human performance in people and systems throughout her entire career.
Dr. Selking is the founder of Selking Performance Group, a leading performance consulting practice that helps individuals, companies, and sports teams achieve sustainable results. She has served as the Mental Performance Coach for professional & collegiate sport programs across the country including the Denver Broncos, LSU Football, ND Softball, and Notre Dame Football during the winningest five years in program history! She is the Chief Culture & Leadership Development Officer for Lippert, a global, publicly traded manufacturing company whose corporate vision is to change the model of work, demonstrating that business can and should Be a Force for Good in our World. She has also served as an adjunct professor in the Mendoza College of Business at Notre Dame. Dr. Selking holds a Ph.D. in Educational and Counseling Psychology from the University of Missouri, a master’s degree in Sport and Performance Psychology from the University of Denver, and an undergraduate degree in Management Consulting from the University of Notre Dame. At ND, Amber played soccer for the Fighting Irish before an injury ended her career, after which she founded Notre Dame Christian Athletes (NDCA) in the ND Athletic Department. She currently resides in South Bend, Indiana, with her husband, Aaron, daughter Elleeanna Belle, and their Doberman Pinscher, Rockne.
Please get on iTunes to rate us and write a review for us! We are excited to share this content with our audience, and your rates and reviews will enable us to continue sharing quality content. Also, please share the podcast on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and any other social media that you use so that we can continue Building Championship Mindsets around the world! If you are interested in being a sponsor of this podcast, please contact Dr. Selking directly.
Additional Links:
Email Amber to book an engagement or become a podcast partner at drselking@selkingperformance.com
Selking Performance Group (SPG) Website: www.selkingperformance.com
Follow SPG on Twitter: @ChampMindsets
Check us out on Instagram: @champmindsets
Like SPG on Facebook: Selking Performance Group
Check out our EBooks! "A Dream Come True: the Buzz on Greatness" “Winner's Circle"
Check out Dr. Selking’s TEDxTalk entitled, “Think Like a Champion Today” to learn more about the power of your mind to drive excellence in all areas of your life!
Transcript
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to Building Championship Mindsets, the podcast.
Dr. Amber Selking:This is your host, Dr.
Dr. Amber Selking:Amber Selking, where we are in season 15 entitled Sports Psych and Scripture.
Dr. Amber Selking:In this season, we are looking at some fundamental sports psychology principles and how they align with what we know in scripture or the Bible.
Dr. Amber Selking:And so we are all on various faith journeys and walks.
Dr. Amber Selking:But man, this has just been fun to challenge, challenge all of us to figure out how do we think about something that we maybe think a lot about or think very little about in a different way?
Dr. Amber Selking:And that's my hope and intent with this, is that we expand our way of thinking and understanding and grow either as a believer or as a person that can articulate our faith in new and meaningful ways.
Dr. Amber Selking:And then for those of us that might not have a faith at all, start to see just, man, how aligned what we know in faith is to what we know from a scientific perspective.
Dr. Amber Selking:At Selkie and Performance, we are really focused on this idea of mindset and leadership, right?
Dr. Amber Selking:How do we help leaders, athletes, coaches, parents understand how important the leadership of their little worlds are to driving high performance excellence on a consistent basis?
Dr. Amber Selking:And then the fundamentals of mindset and how we think and how every person inside of the system that we're a part of matters to the system's ability to be great, right?
Dr. Amber Selking:How do, how do kids and parents thinking, how are teachers and students thinking?
Dr. Amber Selking:How are coaches and athletes thinking?
Dr. Amber Selking:How are leaders and team members thinking on a day to day basis?
Dr. Amber Selking:And I have the honor of serving as the mental performance coach and high performance consultant to LSU football and head coach Brian Kelly and then as the chief culture and leadership development officer at Lippard.
Dr. Amber Selking:And so I get to do this every day in the sports space and the business space and then 24 hours a day in our home here.
Dr. Amber Selking:We live in South Bend, Indiana with my incredible husband Aaron, and our beautiful daughter Eliana Bell, and our Doby Rockne Mulligan.
Dr. Amber Selking:And so we're applying this stuff to how we live at home on a day to day basis too.
Dr. Amber Selking:And so hopefully the podcasts and the resources that we have out there on our website, self imperformance.com Our book, Winning the Mental Game, the Playbook for Building Championship Mindsets, are really great resources to help you bring this to life in your world on a day to day basis as well.
Dr. Amber Selking: king scripturally at Proverbs: Dr. Amber Selking:So self talk, what is self talk?
Dr. Amber Selking:I Ask this question when I'm in groups and people kind of give me this look and I'm like, you are correct.
Dr. Amber Selking:This is not a trick question.
Dr. Amber Selking:What is self talk?
Dr. Amber Selking:It is the stuff that we say to ourselves, right?
Dr. Amber Selking:The words that we're speaking to ourselves, how we communicate to ourselves.
Dr. Amber Selking:And it's critical to who we are and how we show up on a moment by moment basis.
Dr. Amber Selking:So what we know is that humans have about 70 to 80,000 thoughts a day.
Dr. Amber Selking:And many of us are very unaware of the thoughts that are just rolling through our head.
Dr. Amber Selking:And I always like to say, like, many of us need to stop listening to ourselves and start talking to ourselves.
Dr. Amber Selking:Because those thoughts that are running through our heads when we start thinking about what we're thinking about, a lot of us just listen to that.
Dr. Amber Selking:And sometimes it's not very helpful.
Dr. Amber Selking:In fact, it can be downright degrading or demeaning.
Dr. Amber Selking:And so we need to really get a control and get a handle on the thoughts that we're thinking on a day to day basis and talk to ourselves in meaningful ways.
Dr. Amber Selking:Right?
Dr. Amber Selking:This is kind of the next step in this journey that we've been on through the last five episodes where first we learned, right, that the brain can grow and change based on what we think about.
Dr. Amber Selking:Then we learned that our thoughts affect our emotions, which affect our physiological response, which drives our performance.
Dr. Amber Selking:Then we learned that thoughts are really, really important because repeated thoughts build mindsets.
Dr. Amber Selking:And then last week we learned about how we can actually change the mindsets that we have in our brain, right, by choosing and controlling our thoughts.
Dr. Amber Selking:And that the brain and the mind are different and the mind helps us do that more consistently.
Dr. Amber Selking:And so today, now that we've laid that foundation, it' like, okay, well, self talk then is a really powerful tool that allows us to continue to build healthy, positive, productive mindsets so that we can show up and be who we've been created and called to be in the world.
Dr. Amber Selking:And so again, self talk is really important because of those 70 to 80,000 thoughts a day, are they helping us or hurting us?
Dr. Amber Selking: And what it says in Proverbs: Dr. Amber Selking:So if you talk a lot, you're going to eat that fruit.
Dr. Amber Selking:The question is, are the words that you're saying and the thoughts that you're having that the thoughts that you're thinking to yourself, are they going to bring you life or bring you death?
Dr. Amber Selking:That's the power of the Tongue and really our self talk, while it might not be verbal words that we say out loud, man, they, they're pretty heavy inside of our own brain, aren't they?
Dr. Amber Selking:We've all been there.
Dr. Amber Selking:We know when we beat ourselves up mentally throughout the course of the day and we just keep hammering ourselves.
Dr. Amber Selking:I can see it on the sideline of my players.
Dr. Amber Selking:They might make a bad play, made a mistake.
Dr. Amber Selking:And I can see in the look of their faces, right, how their, how their shoulders hang a little bit, how they either have their heads down or their eyes are just kind of staring off in the distance a little bit.
Dr. Amber Selking:And I can't count the number of times where I've come and I've knelt in front of them and I said, can I say something to you?
Dr. Amber Selking:And they'll look at me with these big eyes and they'll nod their heads slowly and I'll be able to talk to them and give them better self talk, give them better ways of thinking.
Dr. Amber Selking:And I'll tell them, listen, choose right thoughts.
Dr. Amber Selking:Right now is important.
Dr. Amber Selking:What are you saying to yourself?
Dr. Amber Selking:Because the tongue, the thoughts, the self talk has power of life and death.
Dr. Amber Selking:And what you're saying to yourself, how you're thinking right now on the sideline is either going to invigorate you and fuel you to go out there and make a great play on the next drive, or it's going to undermine you and it's going to kill you slowly on the sideline over here.
Dr. Amber Selking:And you are not going to go out there and deliver the gifts that you've been given under these bright lights.
Dr. Amber Selking:And man, in that moment when they are reminded, right, that they can choose and control their thoughts, they've already been trained on this.
Dr. Amber Selking:This isn't new for them.
Dr. Amber Selking:But that reminder that their self talk matters, it's the power of life and death.
Dr. Amber Selking:And as you talk, right, whether you talking out loud, you're giving life to other people too, or death to other people.
Dr. Amber Selking:So is what you're saying to the world around you life or death?
Dr. Amber Selking:And a lot of times with my guys, we'll talk and practice and stuff.
Dr. Amber Selking:And I'm like, would you ever say what you're saying to yourself in your head to your teammates?
Dr. Amber Selking:And they look at me and kind of laugh and say, not a chance.
Dr. Amber Selking:No way.
Dr. Amber Selking:No way would we say to other people what we say to ourselves about ourselves and our own mind.
Dr. Amber Selking:Because it's disrespectful, it's not helpful.
Dr. Amber Selking:The same is true for your own mind, your own life, your own heart.
Dr. Amber Selking:I tell my guys, you gotta be your own best friend inside of your helmet.
Dr. Amber Selking:And so that doesn't mean you let yourself off the hook.
Dr. Amber Selking:That doesn't mean that you don't hold yourself accountable.
Dr. Amber Selking:But that does mean that your self talk is positive, it's powerful, it's productive, it's aligned with who you want to be and what you want to accomplish.
Dr. Amber Selking: talk under control, Proverbs: Dr. Amber Selking:If you're speaking truth, the fruit of truth is goodness, right?
Dr. Amber Selking:If you're speaking death, the fruit of death is barrenness, is devastation, death.
Dr. Amber Selking: that's the power of Proverbs: Dr. Amber Selking:Now, championship mindset training for this week.
Dr. Amber Selking:Guess what?
Dr. Amber Selking:Choose life.
Dr. Amber Selking:Get control of your self talk.
Dr. Amber Selking:Start thinking about what you're thinking about and make sure that the words that you are saying to yourself are aligned with what you would say to your best friend.
Dr. Amber Selking:As you were coaching your best friend through a hard moment or a challenging experience.
Dr. Amber Selking:Say to yourself what you would say to your best friend.
Dr. Amber Selking:That's your championship mindset training for this week, man.
Dr. Amber Selking:Thank you so much for tuning in.
Dr. Amber Selking:Please hit us up on all the social media platforms, let us know what this season has meant to you, how you're applying it, what you're learning, where you're learning, or where you're growing either spiritually or mentally.
Dr. Amber Selking:I'd love to hear it on exa, on Instagram, amp mindsets, on TikTok, on Facebook, @ Selkie Performance Group.
Dr. Amber Selking:And again, if there's anything we can do for you through keynote speaking or one on one performance coaching, or if you would like to join us as a financial sponsor to this podcast, please reach out directly to me, Dr.
Dr. Amber Selking:Selkingelkingperformance.com and then again, lots of free resources on our website, selkingperformance.com thank you so much for tuning in.
Dr. Amber Selking:You've been listening to Building Championship Mindsets, the podcast.
Dr. Amber Selking:This is your host, Dr.
Dr. Amber Selking:Amber Selking.
Dr. Amber Selking:And from the locker room to the boardroom, I just want to challenge you to continue building your championship mindset.
