The Self Talk Treadmill

I’m off to Baltimore for a Federal sentencing conference. But I’m still looking back to last week’s coaching certification class for my son’s clay shooting team. And I wanted to share another life lesson from that conference. Most sports lessons are life lessons in disguise after all.

A big part of the curriculum dealt with how to correct the athlete’s mistakes while also preserving the athlete’s enjoyment of the sport. We were told to lead our critique by telling the athlete about something he did correctly. Then we discuss some item or items we noticed that needs to be addressed. And we encourage the athlete to keep a written log of observations from practice and competition. According to the research from our manual, we lose about 50% of what we hear if we do not write it down.

The clay shooting community strikes me as a fairly conservative and old-school crowd. So, this was not new-age, millennial froo froo, stuff. However, perhaps unwittingly, we were being taught a fairly “zen” concept. The idea here is that we notice the athlete’s actions and point them out. The actual shot is forgotten, but the observations are what we take away. “Today, I learned that I need to follow through after the shot and that my footwork is good.” We don’t take away from the experience, “I’m the greatest clay shooter ever” or “I really suck at clay shooting.”

There is something in this for the practice of law and for life. What if I kept a little log of what I learned after I file a brief, after an oral argument, or a client consultation? Then I would notice the experience, making habits out of what went well, and correcting for things I could do better.

It might help us to climb down from the negative self talk treadmill. What do I mean by this? When we move beyond the level of noticing behavior to the level of self-criticism, we either over-inflate our value (“I’m a tremendous trial lawyer”) or we short circuit the likelihood of better performance. Better to notice what we are doing, let go of the behavior that misses the mark, embrace right action, and keep up with the lessons along the way.