I never criticize a player until they are first convinced
of my unconditional confidence in their abilities.

--John Robinson

While training or competing we often carry on conversations with ourselves. This dialog may be positive, where we coach ourselves by recognizing how great we're doing and by encouraging ourselves to keep up the good work or push even harder. However, for many athletes, it is not uncommon for the voice of the "Inner Critic" to drown-out that of the "Inner Coach".

What we tell ourselves significantly impacts our performance. Therefore, our challenge is to listen to our Inner Coach and ignore our Inner Critic. In this first part of a two-part article, we'll examine the origins of the Inner Critic. We'll explore three of seven typical ways by which the Inner Critic tries to convince us to believe we are no good. Finally, we'll look at ways to silence the critic and turn-up the volume of the Inner Coach.

Psychologists call the process by which we adopt other people's ideas as our own, internalization. Internalization is the psychological equivalent of eating and digesting. When we drink a protein shake, our body breaks down its ingredients into smaller elements like proteins, carbohydrates, vitamins and minerals. It then absorbs these elements and uses them to build muscle, fuel activity, and regulate important physiological functions. In a sense, the protein shake becomes us and at some point it is difficult to determine where the shake ends and where we begin.

When we internalize another person's ideas, we take their words, beliefs, and perceptions and make them our own. This is not necessarily bad. When the ideas we internalize are positive, we come to view ourselves in a positive light.

Most of us remember a coach who motivated us to train, believed in our ability to excel, and applauded our achievements. If we continued to hear his or her words of praise frequently enough and over a long enough period of time, we began to think of the coach's encouraging voice as our own. Internalizing this coach's positive opinions allowed us to believe we would succeed.

Internalization becomes problematic, however, when the statements we heard from those we respected were negative, scolding, discouraging, or humiliating. We might also have internalized a coach (or parent, teacher, teammate, etc.) who yelled, "You're never going to win running that way", who asked, "Who ever said you could swim?" or who humiliated us by announcing, "I'm so embarrassed by the way you played today." Repeatedly hearing criticism over a long enough time span could have caused us to treat these critical thoughts as our own and believe they were valid.

Unfortunately, the Inner Critic often grows stronger by using seven different tactics to continue to intimidate and discourage us. The first three are filtering, catastrophizing and personalization. Fortunately, there are tools and techniques we can use to make our thoughts more positive and productive.

Filtering is the act of focusing on negative detail while ignoring positive aspects of ourselves or our situation. For example, we might, at the beginning of a season, complete a triathlon a bit slower than our best time the previous year. Our Inner Critic might tell us, "Your training must be terrible. What happened to you? You're an awful athlete." At no time do we acknowledged that this was our first race of the season, or that we still finished with our fastest time for this particular course. Filtering almost always includes words like terrible, awful, and worst.

Stopping filtering involves shifting our focus to the opposite of what our Inner Critic suggests. For example, if we criticize ourselves for struggling to finish a triathlon, we can focus on some part of the race that we did particularly well, perhaps one of the three legs where were we swam, cycled, or ran better than in the past. We can give ourselves credit for staying mentally tough enough to finish. If a real weakness or problem does exist, we can place our attention on creating strategies for future success rather than obsessing on the negative.

At times the Inner Critic catastrophizes telling us that the worst will happen. Typically, this occurs when we hear about someone else's bad situation or experience and start asking, "What if this happens to me?" For example, many triathletes competing at Wildflower for the first time have heard horror stories about the hills. Old-timers love to tell these tales. When Newbies catastrophize, they begin to think "What if the hills are too much for me?" "What if I get to Heart Rate Hill and collapse?" Catastrophizing thoughts typically begin with "what if."

Catastrophizing is just our Inner Critic telling us scary stories. Our challenge is to recognize that they are simply stories - and to separate fact from fiction. To do so we can ask ourselves, what are the odds that this horrible thing will happen? How likely am I to be attacked by a shark during the swim leg of a race? How many people keel over from cardiac arrest during the run? If we need to we can do research to find out. Once we realize how totally unwarranted our fears are, we can discard them.

When our Inner Critic resorts to personalization it coaxes us into comparing ourselves to others. For example, before a race we might size-up everyone in the transition area and based solely on appearance decide they are quicker, better trained, or more athletic than us. By matching our weaker points to others with what we assume are corresponding strong points, we demoralize ourselves. Humans are far too complex for simplistic comparisons to have any meaning and since ninety percent of athletic performance is mental it makes no sense to compare our insides to somebody else's outsides.

Quieting the Inner Critic and listening to our Inner Coach is one of the greatest things we can do to improve our performance. Doing it requires three steps: Become Aware, Challenge, and Expand. First, we must become aware of the tactics our Inner Critic employs. Then, we must challenge its limiting criticism. Finally, we must expand our positive thinking. This process and the remaining four tactics of the Inner Critic are covered in next month's second half of this article.