The Power (and Practical Use) of Self-talk and Perspective

Dr. Cooper

Welcome to the latest episode of the catalyst health and wellness coaching podcast. My name is Bradford Cooper and I will be your host. How does your perspective on the things you’re facing in life influence the outcome? Well, there are clearly many answers to that question, but today we’ll take a deeper dive into at least a part of the answer to that question. Our guest is Dr Adrian Hase. Dr Hase and I met when we were both speaking at a psychology conference in Germany earlier this year. I was fascinated by the information he shared and frankly thought you would be too. When I mentioned the possibility of joining us on the podcast, he graciously agreed. Dr Hase grew up in Germany and then moved to the Netherlands to pursue his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in psychology and behavioral social sciences. He then moved to the UK where he earned his PhD in sport and exercise psychology at the university of Essex.

Dr. Cooper

He is passionate about cycling, music, and politics, but don’t worry, we kept the conversation focused on the psychology and behavioral sciences. As you know, our focus on evidence based practice means we invite quite a few researchers to join us on the podcast. We want to help you cut through the fads, take a deeper dive into the evidence and I think you’ll be fascinated by the practical aspects of today’s discussion, especially the information he shares about how motivational versus instructional self-talk can be extremely effective in some situations and yet essentially worthless in others. If you’re looking to pursue your wellness coach certification, our last fast track of the year is coming up November 9th and 10th in Colorado. All the details are available at catalystcoachinginstitute.com and if you’d like to have us come to you, we have done that recently. Feel free to reach out to us, we can talk through details. If you have any other questions about the national board certification, your career, really anything coaching related, you can email us anytime at results@catalystcoachinginstitute.com thanks for joining us. Now let’s pick up with Dr Adrian Haze discussing challenge, threat and the impact of the various forms of self-talk on this episode of the catalyst health and wellness coaching podcast.

Dr. Cooper

Well, Dr Haze, it’s great to have you join us. We had a chance to meet at the conference when we were both speaking. So, thanks for jumping on board.

Dr. Hase

Well, thanks for having me.

Dr. Cooper

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Well, set the tone here a little bit. Share with us a little bit about why or how you developed an interest in this concept of challenge threat states.

Dr. Hase

All right. So my dad’s a psychiatrist who talks a lot about, stress medicine and I’ve had a bit of an influence from that side. And I got into the specific challenge and threat theory stuff when I was looking for a PhD vacancy. And I found this advertised vacancy in Essex, where it was about challenge and threat states in athletes. And I read up the little description that it said and I thought, well, this is really interesting and this is really a nice way to look at stress responses. So, that’s when I thought, okay, I’m going to apply to this and hopefully I’ll get accepted. And, I did get accepted. So, that’s when I started my challenge and threat journey and I learned a lot about the theory and, there’s a lot of interesting empirical research that supported this theory.

Dr. Cooper

Yeah. We interviewed Dr Carlaman almost a year ago and she did her PhD work on challenge threat as well. It’s fascinating information. Had you, as you read through it initially, had you seen this taking place in your life, either in athletics or academia or personal connections? How did it resonate with you on a personal level? Or was it just a curiosity on an academic level?

Dr. Hase

Yeah, of course. I mean, when you read the theory, it all seems familiar, in a way because everybody knows the situation where they have the stress response where they feel really inhibited by it and they feel like this is a negative feeling and it just feels threatening, everything about the situation. And then people usually also know situations where it’s really kind of a big deal, what you have to do, but you just get a more adaptive state and the more you deal with the task that you have, to perform much better and you really just focus on the goal and to perform, and then that’s it. So, I think it resonates, yeah with me because, or it resonated with me because I’ve been in those kinds of situations many times as probably everybody has.

Dr. Cooper

Yeah. Very interesting. Well, okay, so without taking this into too deep a dive in the world of academia, can you share with our audience essentially what is challenge threat and where they might see these states occurring in their own lives or the people around them?

Dr. Haze

Yeah. Okay. So, there’s this theory, um, on challenge and threat states and it basically evolved to the strands of literature. One of them is cognitive appraisal theory and one of them is the physiological toughness literature. And it basically combines these research areas and it says that in any self relevant performance situation where we have to perform adequately to reach, uh, to obtain a developmental that is important for our continued development or wellbeing. In those situations, we have a continuum of stress responses, that ranges from a threat to a challenge states. And, it’s especially important when the response starts in the way we evaluate the situation. And the crucial distinction, compared to the cognitive appraisal literature is that the bio-psycho-social model of challenge threat says that we make these evaluations consciously or subconsciously.

Dr. Hase

So, it says that in any important performance situation, these evaluations happen and we can be aware of them or we can not be aware of them. And, depending on how these evaluations are made, we arrive at a state where we experience a challenge or a threat and that’s determined by the balance of resources that we see in ourselves and the demands that we see in this performance situation. So basically if we evaluate our resources to match or outweigh the demands of the situation, we experienced the challenge state. But if we evaluate our, resources to fall short of the situational demands, then we experienced the threat states. And that’s where the physiological topics literature comes in, which is based on a lot of animal research. So, that’s where these evaluations then trigger a set of physiological responses and they’re mostly described on the cardiovascular level where the cardiovascular system starts a response that is contingent on the performance situation and is also contingent on, what evaluations we make.

Dr. Hase

So when we have a challenge evaluation, our cardiovascular system functions more efficiently and it pumps more blood, but it also dilates the blood vessels in the periphery so that the blood is then distributed more easily throughout the body. And that is basically understood as a way of increasing the energy efficiency or efficiency of the blood distribution. In a threat state, we also have a mild increase in cardiac output, so more blood pumps for a minute. But, we have a constriction of the blood vessels, which basically means that we have cardiovascular strain because the heart and the vasculature work against each other. And the main author of the theory made the point that in the long run, if you experienced this many times, this can be harmful to your cardiovascular system and the cardiovascular diseases can result from that. But in the short term, it’s also been associated with performance. But, yeah, sorry.

Dr. Cooper

No, no, no, no. I’m sorry for interrupting you. So not only does performance drop down, but you actually have some health issues that can result from that when that’s constantly seen as a threat over extended periods of time.

Dr. Hase

Yeah, exactly. And that’s something where Waskiewicz wrote a big book chapter, called challenge threat in health and that’s really interesting to look at. But that has not been studied as far as the performance side of it. So while we have a lot of research that shows that a challenge state relates to better performance than threat states, we don’t have so much research testing that the health outcomes of challenge and threat states and that’s more difficult to test because of course you need to test over longer periods of time, right? Yeah. But there’ve been a lot of studies that tested short term outcomes that can be indicative of longer term changes when they are repeated. And that’s what was summarized in this book chapter. And basically he says that the threat states when experienced repeatedly or too intensely, it can produce not only cardiovascular problems but also mental health problems like depression and anxiety and it can also produce immune problems, because the threat states has also been associated with a cortisol release. And we probably all know that that is not very good for the body over time.

Dr. Cooper

Okay. So it’s your interpretation of, you look at all the things that you have kind of going for you and all the things going against you and you line those up. This is simplicity obviously. And you say, Oh, I don’t have enough. Now how much of that is interpretation and how much, cause you see the same two people facing the same situation with essentially the same skill set, background, history, experience, etc. One person seizes this challenge, the other person sees it as a threat where it’s all about the interpretation. How big a role does that play in how this rolls itself out in life?

Dr. Hase

I mean it’s quite important because there have been a couple of studies by, Dr. Lee Moore, who I’ve collaborated with in the past who has manipulated just the instructions for a task that participants have to perform in the laboratory. And the task was exactly the same for everybody. It’s just that half the sample got a challenge and half the sample got threat instructions. And he found that the people with the challenge instructions not only displayed a cardiovascular response, more consistent with their challenge state, but they also outperformed the other participants and yeah, they had reasonably large groups. So that basically could conclude that, these instructions, which was the only difference between groups that made people underperform or perform at a high level.

Dr. Cooper

So that’s really interesting. Can you give us an example of maybe the difference between the challenge instructions and the threat instructions that made that kind of a difference, not only in performance but in the interpretation?

Dr. Hase

Yeah. So in Dr. Morris 2013 publication, he basically wrote that the challenge instructions encouraged participants to perceive the task as a challenge to be met and overcome and to think of themselves as someone capable of meeting that challenge and highlighted that previous participants have performed well on the task. In contrast, the threat instructions focused on the task high degree of difficulty and emphasize that previous participants had struggled to perform well on the task.

Dr. Cooper

Wow. So folks listening to this, especially if you’re a wellness coach or you’re heading that way, think of that in the context of what you’re doing on a daily basis. If you help your clients see the opportunity to see that this is a challenge, see that they can reach it, see where their opportunities are to draw from. Think of the difference in the outcome. Think of the difference in their overall perspective versus the other side of saying, well, you know, this is going to be really tough and I don’t know if you can do it. So incredible application of what we’re talking about every day. This is great stuff. Dr. Hazes why does the personal interpretation between the two, just expanding on what we just talked about, why does the personal interpretation between the two matter to us in everyday life?

Dr. Hase

Yeah. Because basically, these challenge and threat states occur in all the situations that are important for us for a career or just for our wellbeing. We always have motivated performance situations, that we have to master, to keep on while developing or to keep sustaining a good mood. And I think it’s important to know about these stress responses just so you can be aware of a threat state when it occurs. And basically you can tell yourself, okay, look, I’m feeling bad and that I might underperform, but this is not something out of the ordinary. Everybody can experience this and it’s a continuum. So it’s not like everything is lost. If I try hard to regulate emotions now or to focus on the target now I can at least get a little better and I think oftentimes people tend to, or some people tend to catastrophize when they are in a negative, stressful response and they can say, okay, this is it. There’s no way I’m going to win this. And I think it’s very important to be able to differentiate and I think knowledge of the theory of challenge threat states helps with that.

Dr. Cooper

Yeah. I think you’re right. I think just knowing that this exists can change the way you approach anything. So you’re saying this just to be clear, we’re not just talking about athletes here, we’re talking about anything. It can be a relationship with your teenager. It can be the way you approach that bill that comes in the mail today. It can be the request from your boss. This could be any aspect of life. Am I hearing you correctly?

Dr. Hase

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I’ve done my PhD in sports psychology, but a lot of the research and the literature has done with undergraduate students because that’s very common in academia anyway. But also there’ve been studies using pilots or using medical students with surgery tasks or there’s been a study on, university students, having a course exam and people in challenge states having better grades than people in threat states on the final course outcomes. So yeah, it’s not at all just restricted to sports, but it can be any important performance situation. And, the bio psycho social model of challenge and threat basically defines these situations as situations where you have a self relevant goal on the line. There’s some sort of evaluative standard and there’s some sort of standard that you have to perform, match or surpass in order to attain your goal. And, that can be many different situations.

Dr. Cooper

I love it. I love it. All right. Your research was on the concept of self-talk. So let’s set that stage a little bit. Can you tell us about the various types of self-talk and how we may want to use that in the different aspects of our lives?

Dr. Hase

Yeah, so there’s been an entire literature on self talk and there are many different types of self talk that have been described. For instance, positive has been separated from negative self talk. There’s organic self-talk versus strategic self talk. So, more naturally occurring self talk. I mean everybody knows that sometimes we just say things to ourselves in our heads or out loud. That’s also another distinction, whether it’s silent or audible. And there is the distinction of motivational and instructional self-talk. And I’ve dedicated to study of my PhD to that, to testing whether a relative to a controlled self-talk intervention, whether strategic, motivational or strategic instructional self talk, put people in a challenge state. Because basically what we’ve found in the literature is that the effects of a motivational and an instructional self talk and those of a challenge state overlap, considerably. So, they had both associated with the improved performance and they’re associated with more facilitative interpretations of anxiety. And there’s been this overlap that we found that was really asking a question or begging the question of does the intervention of motivational or instructional self-talk promot a challenge state in people.

Dr. Cooper

So self talk, just like the challenge threat concept, self-talk is not just something for athletes. Can you throw some other ideas out about how people could use it on a practical level in their daily lives?

Dr. Hase

Yeah, I mean basically, I think we all use self talk in the daily tasks that we do. And sometimes it might not be goal directed and not relevant, but other times it might be relevant to a goal that we’re trying to achieve. And it might be that self talk is a hindrance or helps us put on a good performance. But it’s definitely something that you could implement in your office job or in an academic context. It’s not something that is just limited to sports. Yeah. Instructional self talk is defined by the content or these types are defined by the contents of the self talk. So we can either say something that is relevant to how you execute the tasks that you have to do and technical information or you can do what you probably know as pushing yourself or hyping yourself up. You can say something more motivational and try to maximize your efforts and your motivation to perform well.

Dr. Cooper

Any findings around, and this is a little bit of a stretch, but I’m just gonna throw it out for grins. Any findings that using something too frequently begins to lose its effect? So for example, motivational self-talk, come on Brad, you got this, you can do this. Come on, you can do it. If I’m using that, you know, 12 times throughout the day instead of just for that one big one that I needed, pull it out. Have you found that it loses its effectiveness when you’re using it too much, whereas maybe instructional self-talk is effective over time. It doesn’t wear down. Any distinction between those two in terms of frequency of use or when you pull it out of your pocket to put into play?

Dr. Hase

I’m not sure about that. I think what’s more important is that, it’s appropriate to the context. So what we found in our study was that motivational and instructional self-talk didn’t have a main effect on challenge and threat state, but they had an interaction with challenge and threat state on performance, which means that when someone was in a threat state, and received the instructional self-talk instructions, they had an easier time performing on the level of other people in the instructional self-talk group who were in the challenge state. So, instructional self-talk appeared to reduce the differences between a threat and a challenge state. Thus either helping those in a threat state or, making those in a challenge state worse. But I think the possible interpretation would be that, someone in the threat state is not really focused on the targets, on relevant cues and instructional self talk helps them refocus on relevance or cues that they need to focus on.

Dr. Hase

And conversely, the motivational self talk group, had bigger differences between threat and challenge participants. Threatened and the challenged participants, relative to the control self-talk group where it seems that if you tell someone in a threat state to use motivational self talk or, I mean maybe even if you as a coach get the motivational self talk and motivational cues that might not be as effective. Because when you’re feeling bad, you don’t want to say to yourself, Oh, I’m good, I can do this, I’m going to make it. But maybe you just think, okay, I’m feeling really bad, but let’s just focus on this and this and just need to focus on my swing rides or yeah, whatever technical instruction you might need. So, we found that in the motivational self talk group relative to the control self talk, the differences were exacerbated between the challenge and the threat state. So, that’s something that coaches might want to keep in mind. So it’s not so much that a cue can be overused, but rather than it might be misused in a certain situation.

Dr. Cooper

Wow. All right. So let me resay that to make sure I’m getting the message here. Cause this sounds like a key element. If I’m in that challenge state, then the motivational self-talk can be effective. Nothing’s always effective, but it can be effective in that state if I’ve already kind of flipped the switch and I’m in that threat state. I’m kinda, you know, struggling through that. At that point the instructional is far more valuable on average than the motivational self-talk or coach directed talk. Is that right?

Dr. Hase

Yeah, that’s about the main message that we got from that study. And, I mean what we did find was that, motivational self-talk had a main effect. There was a main effect for self talk where a motivational self talk was better than the control self talk. So it has a general positive effect but the effect of instructional self talk if you can do more importance for threatened participants whereas motivational self-talk, appeared to be very beneficial for challenged participants and then, less so for threatened participants. Even though there was a main effect showing that it was effective for everybody.

Dr. Cooper

That is really powerful. That’s a message that we need to get out there cause you know, coaches stand on the sidelines and their athletes are struggling. Oh come on you got this, come on. And that sounds like that’s the wrong message at that moment. It’s not the wrong message. It’s the wrong message at that moment. Wow. Very cool. Very cool. All right. Let’s flip the mirror around a little bit. We’re turning to you a little bit. How has the research that you’ve gone through and you’ve fully submerged in it for several years, how has that influenced you personally? In what ways are you utilizing your knowledge of self-talk or challenge threat in your own life, not just as a researcher, but in things that you’re doing differently on a daily basis in relationships or athletics or career pursuits or whatever it might be?

Dr. Hase

Yeah, so I really like cycling. I cycle a lot, cycling is my favorite sport for exercising and I know the feeling of, you know, you approach a climb or something and you just don’t see yourself excelling or going fast over it. And I think it’s been the research or the literature that has helped me to recognize this, these thoughts and this bad stress state and to say, okay, you’re just going to push yourself through this. And it doesn’t have to be a fine performance. It doesn’t have to be excellent, but this is normal. And, even though we feel bad today, just pushing yourself on this climb will maybe have a good effect tomorrow or a week from now just as training. So I think definitely it helped me analyze my arousal differently, or my emotions in a sporting situation and also in other situations it’s given me a much more neutral or objective look on motivated performance situations or I might not feel very well, but yeah, I know that also through the research of other researchers that for instance, the reappraisal can be very helpful with that where you recognize the feelings, or the physical physiological arousal that you have that feels uncomfortable and then say, look, this is just, this is natural.

Dr. Hase

This is an indicator that you take the situation seriously and, you can use this to your advantage. And, especially in sporting situations where your body needs to be, you know, you need to hit the on switch on your body and you need to go in an active mode. So, in those situations, it’s not bad to have a high heart rate and just sorta know that your body is ready to perform. The challenge threat research has helped me with that, the self-talk research as well. I mean, I try to, when I notice myself saying negative things, I tried to be aware of that. Maybe frame it as something more constructive. Yeah. As we mentioned earlier, it’s very good to be aware of these things. I think that’s already the first step forward.

Dr. Cooper

Yeah, I agree with you. I think just someone just hearing this interview with you on their next run or interaction with someone or request from a boss, they’ll be more effective. It’s that self reflection of saying, okay, hang on 10 seconds am I in a threat or a challenge state here and what does that mean going forward? So like you say, just the knowledge of it can change the outcome in subtle ways. Yeah. Interesting. All right. So a lot of folks in our audience are either health and wellness coaches or they’re heading in that direction. So let’s talk to a potential example that would fit into that arena. Let’s say someone’s looking to make healthier food choices more regularly in their life. How could they utilize either the challenge threat perspective you’ve talked about and or the self-talk strategies to improve their outcomes in terms of those healthier food choices.

Dr. Hase

Food choices are something very interesting because a lot of us maybe start on a very impulsive basis. And myself included, I just kind of feel the urge to buy unhealthy things. I mean that’s not bad if you buy them, but if you want to change your habits and that sense, you could definitely use the challenge and threats research to your advantage where you, if you find yourself eating something unhealthy and giving into your urges, you could say, okay, this is not the end. This is just me being, or I mean your reaction afterwards might be out of it threat state where you feel like you’re failing and you feel like you just don’t have enough resources to cope with the demands of this goal pursuit of changing your diets.

Dr. Hase

And in that situation, yeah, you could say, look, this is not the end of it all. It’s just the tiny dip in performance, but it can get back up there. And others, I mean just like these instructions that they’ve used in the experimental research, you can appeal to your resources by saying, look, others have done the same thing before me. This is nothing revolutionary. But, others have the same struggle and it’s difficult, but I have the resource and food to overcome this and I’m believing that the demands are too high is just the fallacy or it’s not true. So yeah, we could use the instructional framing to help people. We’re looking to make healthier food choices and we could use a self talk, show them research as well by saying maybe if someone is struggling, maybe we give them instructional instructions. Each time an instructional self talk cue where if they go to the grocery store, they say, okay, it has to have zero sugar. Like just use the zero sugar as the cue for buying. My thing is look at the look at the label and see if it has zero sugar. I mean whatever the goals are and I’m sure that the health and wellness professionals will have smaller goals that they try to implement with their clients. I think that they can remind the clients all of those small goals or the steps to take towards those small goals and turn them into a instructional self talk cues if the clients are struggling.

Dr. Cooper

Now in terms of the training aspect of this, you mentioned Dr Moore’s studies. It was literally on the spot instructions going into the study, you and I talked about the fact that just the knowledge of the understanding that the challenge threat exists, the value of instructional versus motivational self-talk is differentiated. Have you seen any patterns of, look Brad, it’s a five minute training thing. Or have you seen people get better at it as you do it daily for two weeks? Anything you’re aware of that might give us a sense of when the training in challenge threats and self-talk starts to level out? Is it pretty quick once they have an understanding of it?

Dr. Hase

When we published our self talk article, we got the feedback that we should have had a longer self-talk and training periods. So I think with self talk I think it takes a good while. So people would usually say a couple of weeks to train this to many years to get more effective. So I think this is really something that people should use habitually or why they shouldn’t think about it. Um, because of course it draws on cognitive resources if people have to think or focus on verbalizing the self talk cues, in a performance situation. But if you’ve practiced it for a couple of weeks and that so much of it’s fully internalized or automatized, then I think, yeah, there might be a plateau where it’s effective. But it doesn’t get any more effective. But, um, I think it takes a good bit of time. Yeah. A good bit of time to get its maximum effects. And I think it should be, the focus should be on getting it fully automatized so that the client doesn’t have to think about these things anymore, but just automatically says an instructional cue or a motivational cue in certain situations.

Dr. Cooper

Okay. So let’s talk about cueing for a second. One of my PhD studies looked at self-talk related to mental toughness levels and most of the athletes would sit there and tell you, I know I should be using self-talk. I believe in it. I understand the value of it. And I get in that mile race, I get in that 5k and I forget. Are there certain cues that in the moment when the intensity is on, the spotlight’s going that you found can be helpful in reminding folks or let’s take it out of athletics. And you know, your teenage daughter says something and you’re like, it’s driving me crazy that you immediately remember the self-talk. You remember the challenge, Hey, I love my daughter. I want to have a relationship and start using that self-talk versus just responding. Have you seen any ways to effectively cue it in the midst of the endorphins kicking in and the pressure’s on and those kinds of things?

Dr. Hase

I don’t really know about that, but I would say if an athlete says that they forget about it in the important performance situation, that that’s of course that’s something that can happen. But in that case, I would just say keep on training people practicing it and at some point you won’t forget anymore. Yeah, I would just recommend to keep on practicing it and maybe at a not so important competition, be a bit more focused on practicing the self talk to you. So maybe if you have a regional competition that’s not so important, maybe you can say, okay, I will focus on getting this self talk for you right and then, I’ll focus on the competition. Whereas if you have a really important competition, it might be that you can’t afford to focus on it. But, I think, yeah, you can probably, move continuously from training with absolutely no competitive pressure to the most important competition with the maximum pressure and you could practice the self talk to use throughout the different stages of competition or training.

Dr. Cooper

Okay. Good. Good. All right. Just a couple more, whatever message you come up with about health and wellness and your research, you know, the consistency between the two will magically appear on everybody’s cell phone home screen. What would it say? What would be that one sentence or one phrase that you’d want to share with the world if you had the opportunity related to your background, your research?

Dr. Hase

Well, it would be a long message, but get to the bookstore, get to the internet and read about scientific findings first. Yeah. But I guess it sounds cliche or it sounds cheesy, but, impossible is nothing is a very good attitude to have, even though it’s not true. I mean, some things are impossible, but, I really like the slogan. I think it was Adidas back in the day who used that as an advertising slogan. And that really should be your attitude when training and when I’m trying to perform because, oftentimes the mindset is we need the most important limiting factor in your performance. Of course, there are some limits to your body. That oftentimes our mind makes us believe that those limits are much more than they actually are.

Dr. Cooper

You know, let’s spin off that for a second. One of the focal areas, one of the things we try to emphasize in this podcast is the evidence based practices. So much in health and wellness is off in the deep end. You know, it’s just crazy stuff. It’s headlines, it’s fads, that kind of stuff. And so I like what you said about get into the research. How can someone who is not in academia, how can someone who hasn’t spent three, four, five, six years pursuing a PhD, what practical advice would you have for them to dig into the research while avoiding just the headlines that are out there?

Dr. Hase

Yeah. So there are some nice resources out there on the internet for instance, dietary choices or dietary supplements. I really like, uh, examined.com because they have a free database on, basically all the dietary supplements you can think of and what scientific evidence there is behind them. And they make a nice overview, with a table. Usually I’m saying what outcome variables are there and how were they affected by the supplement. And I guess that there are more resources like this out there on the internet. Of course not everybody can let everybody has access to those scientific journals and they’re really expensive to read usually. Luckily there are open access journals, like plus one nowadays. Which everybody can read. So I recommend just getting into those and sometimes just a review article or the introduction section to an article will tell you a lot about what’s been done previously in the science world.

Dr. Hase

Apart from that, stay skeptical. Stay skeptical. I mean, usually I’m just just trying to look at the incentive system behind the product or behind the system because usually it’s quite easy to figure out whether a company has money to make off of certain products. And if only that company says, Oh, there’s scientific support for our product. But then if you Google that supplement or whatever it is and nothing else comes up, then of course you can be a bit more skeptical than if you go on onto a third party websites like examine.com and find, okay, there’s actually been 10 studies done and six of them found a positive effects. I mean that would be much better.

Dr. Cooper

Very good. So examine.com very good. All right, last question. Any final words of wisdom for our audience that you want to throw out that I haven’t teed up effectively enough with the right question?

Dr. Hase

The human body is a lot like a battery, yeah, go out there and do as much exercise, well as much as you can or as much as it’s fun. But I mean I think also just by practicing you can get much better. And, sometimes a challenge state can occur just by doing the same thing that has been threatening to you for a 10th time, for being threatening nine times before. I mean sometimes you just need those, those negative experiences. And I think sometimes you can also take something away from a threat state. So I think it’s important to grow after a maladaptive stress experience like, if that state’s in a competition and definitely focus on the development, on the growth and not so much on the outcome of that one competition or the experience of that one threat state. So don’t get lost in it, but rather try to use it for your vision. Try to think constructively.

Dr. Cooper

Excellent. Excellent. So, engaging that self reflection process after the competition or life event of whatever it might be of saying, okay, how did I interpret it? Is that somewhat of what you’re recommending there?

Dr. Hase

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I mean you can always think about the challenges threat states before that motivated performance situation, but you can always think about them afterwards as well. And maybe, think about, okay, did I really accurately evaluate my resources and if so, what can I work on and if not, how can I pay attention to, to evaluate them better in the future?

Dr. Cooper

Interesting. Interesting. Very good. Well, Dr. Hayes I really appreciate you joining us. How can folks stay in touch with you or follow your findings going forward? Do you have a Twitter account or an email you want to throw out for folks?

Dr. Hase

I have a research account. So, yeah, you can find me as Adrian Haze on there and track my scientific output there.

Dr. Cooper

Excellent. Excellent. Well, I really appreciate you joining us. So many insights on this stuff. I’ve covered my page with notes here and will definitely get this out and thanks again.

Dr. Hase

Yeah, thanks a lot for inviting me.

Dr. Cooper

Such interesting insights and so applicable for both our own lives and our client’s lives. Did you catch that part about when do you use motivational self-talk versus instructional self-talk? Fascinating. Thank you. Again to Dr. Adrian Haze. Great, great insights. One of the resources I haven’t mentioned in a while is our recommended book list. These are not our books. These are just books that we’ve read that we’ve used as our own resources. You can find all of them under the resources tab at catalystcoachinginstitute.com people ask us all the time during the certification trainings or during the online CEU programs about additional reading. What else is out there, how can they build on what we’re talking about and so we put that list together and you can find it there.

Dr. Cooper

Thank you so much to all of you who support the podcast by sharing it with friends, posting positive reviews, and obviously sending us the encouraging emails you’ve been sending. We really, really appreciate it. If we can help you with anything related to coaching or your career plans, please feel free to contact us anytime at results@catalystcoachinginstitute.com. In the meantime, let’s keep pursuing better both in our own lives and helping those around us do the same as much as the concept of best life gets tossed around in the wellness world best. Well, it can often feel out of reach, but better. That’s just one step away, isn’t it, folks? So what’s my better today? Make it a great rest of your day and I’ll speak with you soon. On the next episode of the catalyst health and wellness coaching podcast.