The Power Of Positivity

Performance psychologist Dr Josephine Perry reveals how to raise your game with mantras and self-praise

With just three little words you can paint some powerful pictures. “She said yes” brings us a feeling of joy, an un-squashable smile and a shiny diamond ring; “We did everything” invokes doctors’ scrubs, a lonely waiting room and many tears to come; ‘Bus Replacement Service’ induces dread.

Advertisers are well attuned to this power. In the UK we grew up knowing to cross a road we must ‘Stop, Look, Listen.’ Aussies grew up having to ‘Slip, Slop, Slap’, and across the world most of us know that Nike wants us to ‘Just Do It’. Great speeches are full of three-word statements, whether it’s Obama with his 'Yes we can' or Shakespeare’s ‘Friends, Romans, Countrymen,' These phrases that shape our culture are powerful for a purpose. Our brains have a craving for rhythm, simplicity and patterns. Three, the smallest number required to make a pattern, is easy to digest, making us more likely to remember it.

THE MAGIC NUMBER

This knowledge about the power of three is something that elite athletes use regularly. They use it when they talk themselves into high performance. Researchers have found it makes a massive difference. When they have run experiments to see the impact of using motivational self-talk, like these three-word mantras, they have found people last much longer on fitness tests before they hit exhaustion. One study found this time to exhaustion increased by 18 per cent, another by almost 40 per cent, indicating that simply repeating a phrase like 'Push through this' helps with perseverance. Other studies found the behaviours of athletes towards the end of time trials, when they were really fatigued, changed when they used motivational self-talk, and they were also able to produce significantly more power.