At my London practice I love seeing people for the wide range of things they want to achieve in their life. I love being a coach and helping others achieve their goals. I also love how we can learn to coach ourselves, finding the best mindset and approach to achieve things that previously we may not have achieved.
A lot of coaches work with the concept of positive thinking. Generally the perception is that positive thinking is good for you. How telling yourself ‘I can do this’ is enables you to achieve things that perhaps you thought you couldn’t. I have been using this with our toddler with some great results. However some new research demonstrates that this may not be the best approach when it comes to coaching yourself. Daniel Pink explains all:
Three social scientists explored the differences between what they call “de- clarative” self-talk (‘I can do it’) and “interrogative” self-talk (‘can I do it?’). They began by presenting a group of participants with some anagrams to solve (for example, rearranging the letters in “sauce” to spell “cause.”) But before the participants tackled the problem, the researchers asked one half of them to take a minute to ask themselves whether they could complete the task—and the other half to tell themselves that they would complete the task.
The results? The self-questioning group solved significantly more anagrams than the self-affirming group.
The researchers—Ibrahim Senay and Dolores Albarracin of the University of Illinois, along with Kenji No- guchi of the University of Southern Mississippi—then enlisted a new group to try a variation with a twist of trickery: “We told participants that we were interested in people’s handwriting practices. With this pretence, participants were given a sheet of paper to write 20 times one of the following word pairs: Will I, I will, I, or Will. Then they were asked to work on a series of 10 anagrams in the same way participants in Experiment One did.
The outcome was the same. People “primed” with Will I solved nearly twice as many anagrams as people in the other three groups. In subsequent experiments, the basic pattern held. Those who approached a task with questioning self-talk did better than those who began with affirming self-talk.
“Setting goals and striving to achieve them assumes, by definition, that there is a discrepancy between where you are and want to be. When you doubt, you probably achieve the right mindset,” researcher Albarracin explained in an email to me.
“In addition, asking questions forces you to define if you really want something and probably think about what you want, even in the presence of obstacles.”
Recognising a discrepancy between where you are and where you want to be is key to the creative process. It is the tension between the two that can be the driving force that moves you forward. Instead of just focussing on the problem, which is problem solving, you are aware of the two states (now and to-be) at the same time.
So next time you tell yourself how you can absolutely do something, filling yourself to the brim with positive thinking chuck in some doubt and humility. That’s will enable you to be your own best coach.
Can you do that? Yes, you… well, you’ll have to ask that yourself.
