The Absolute Worst Question to Ask Your (Inner) Child and Yet I Did It Every Day (until now)?

How was your day at school?  How was your soccer game?  How was ballet?  As innocent as those questions are and neutral (aren’t we supposed to ask neutral questions?), it sets up the cycle for negative imprinting, which will decrease your child’s self-image.  A person’s self-image is what separates great performers from the rest and determine the person’s future behaviours.  So if you want to help your children (perhaps your inner child. LOL), you will stop asking those questions and replace it with better questions which are discussed below.

I just had the enormous pleasure of attending a live Optimize.me Coaching seminar (I am an Optimize.me lifetime coach member) with Lanny Bassham.  I have 2 of his books, and another by his son Troy Bassham.  Both are Olympic gold medalists and world champions.  What they both teach is how to train the mind. 

Lanny was one of the first mental coaches in sports in the early 1970s. Mental Management is different from sports psychology–he is more interested in what creates optimal performance.  His system comes not from psychologists reading or watching a performance, and telling you to give 110% (overtrying is actually bad for performance). He learned by studying champions, applied, and became champion and has since thought many other worlds and Olympic champions including his son. He teaches three main things:

1. In sports, you have 3 phases of performance: a) Anticipation b) Action c) Reinforcement Phase For each phase you use a different part of your mind:  The Anticipation phase is when you use your conscious mind—so you are thinking of where to hit the golf ball, your stance routine, your breathing, etc.  In the action phase—you use your subconscious mind, you do not think while you are swinging.  Your subconscious mind already has been trained.  Just swing—no thought. Your focus is on the execution of the process (on how you hit the ball), not on the results (it does not where the ball goes).  In the reinforcement phase, you grow your self-image (see point #2).
2. The Reinforcement Phase is Lanny’s contribution to the science of the mind.  The top athletes will tell you 90% of the game is mental, but only spend 5% on mental training. LOL.  He learned that 5% of the best athletes accounted for 95% of the medals.  And the difference between the 5% and the next 5% was not training, it was only the mental state, or self-image.  He learned that 5% had positive self-images and have learned to reinforce and grow their self-image in the reinforcement phase through positive imprinting.
3. The reinforcement stage happens after the performance or the shot.  So in golf, after shooting the ball, the first thing you say to yourself is the most powerful words on your subconscious self-image  So if it is positive, you can say, that’s like me.  If it’s a poor shot, you say, needs work.  Unfortunately, most people say many bad things to themselves after a performance and repeat saying it often even after the performance.  Negative things shrink your self-image, positive words increase the self-image.

How Does Sports Relate to Parenting

According to Lanny who also has a book for parents, 75% of a child’s self-image will be the result of the parent’s “coaching.”  As a parent, I am coaching every minute with my children (now its in my imagination), whether I like it or not.  So, we are affecting our child’s self-image all the time.  Parents are not trained in mental coaching. So we blow it!

Your self-image is your habits and attitudes. “Whether you think you can or you can’t, you are right.” That is self-image and you can change it via imprinting. When you think of a problem, your self-image shrinks. When you think of a solution, your self-image expands. When your self-image expands, you increase the probability of moving towards the solution. The more we think that something will happen, thinking of the solutions, the more likely it will happen. So focus on the positive imprinting.

When we ask a child how was the soccer game, because we live in a negative focused society, the child will probably respond about the things he did wrong, or say, it was O.K. but I missed a tackle.  Or, the child could respond, it was ok, but think about all the things she did wrong.  This immediately brings up a negative imprint on the self-image.  Think of the self-image as a bank.  Every minute of every day, we can either make positive self-image deposits (or positive imprint) and grow our self-image, or we can make a negative self-image deposit (negative imprint) and shrink our self-image.  The choice is ours.

Instead, what we can do is ask a series of three more empowering questions to our child (or ourselves). 

Question 1: What went well in the soccer game today?

Question 2: What did you learn? (Not what you did wrong with the intention of fixing it)

Question 3: What are you going to do about it?  What do you think you should do?

When we ask Questions 1—What went well—we immediately imprint positive memories and reinforces the positive things.  The best thing we can do when we meet people is to trigger a positive imprint.  Not how is your day going?  Rather, I will start asking, what is going well for you today?  In our mastermind groups, we also start out, after our invocation, with a round of new and good, and it always raises the energy of the meeting.  It starts our hour together on a very positive note.

So when do we correct mistakes and think about how to get better?  This is in the planning stage.  When you set your objectives etc.  We do need to evaluate our performance and when we do this in the planning or evaluation stages, we can plan to improve the areas that are considered weaknesses.

I used to suffer from a strong inner critic and negative thinking.  I had started a fitness program while reading Lanny’s books.  I implemented his “that’s like me” when I did well, and “needs work”.  I also starting becoming aware of how I spoke to myself after I did things.  This help me to  change my language to say much more positive things to myself.  In relationships, it’s important that the ratio of positive to negative is 5 to 1.  I think a similar or higher ratio applies to yourself.  Lanny Basham’s work has made a huge difference to improve my positive thinking, my awareness of my inner critic and to grow my self-image.

Action Items:

1. Use your Notes App on your phone to write down what you say to yourself when you catch yourself thinking a negative thought.
2. When you do something right, say to yourself: “that’s like me.”  When you do something that needs improvement, say: “Needs Work.”
3. When you ask someone, how are you? Or how was soccer?  Perhaps you might choose to try to say, What is going well for you today?  Or what did you do well at soccer today? Or what did you do well at school today?
4. What did you do well today?
5. Here is an interview with Lanny Bassham given by Brian Johnson for Optimize.me a few years ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5aBlAtTP34
6. Here is a Optimize.me summary of the notes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhGOariyscM