Motivation and Learning Strategies for College Success : A Self-management Approach

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124 CHAPTER 5

or challenging events occur, individuals remind themselves that they

have the ability, skill, or motivation to overcome any adversity. How-

ever, occasionally negative self-talk does play a role in emotion, atti-

tudes, and behavior. The following are some examples of how self-

talk affects students’ emotional responses and behavior.

Student Reflections

When the notion of self-talk was first introduced in class, it sounded

or herself? A week ago I started to analyze my own self-talk. I never

realized how much I talk to myself! I talk to myself about my weight,

my appearance, my academic progress, and life goals. When I am

studying I wonder how I am doing in the subject or how well I will

perform on the exam.

I find many examples of both positive and negative self-talk in my

myself talking to myself, saying how bad I was doing. I was

complaining to myself because I was not in the mood to do the scene.

self-talk was not helping me get the job done.

Anxiety plays a different role in my life than I think it does for

spend more time worrying about how and when I am going to get

the assignment done than I do actually working on the task.

I understand that instructors expect more out of students when they

are given take-home assignments. These assignments make me nervous,

expectations.

funny. After all, what normal person walks around talking to himself

daily life. Recently, I was doing a scene in an acting class and I caught

I stopped myself and just told myself to talk later and not now. My

most other students. I do not experience much test anxiety, but I do

experience task anxiety. When I am given an assignment for a class I

because I do not know whether I can live up to the instructor’s

I am trying to deal with my anxiety by finding out the instructor’s

criteria for grading the assignment. In this way, I feel more in control

of my destiny.

Examples of Negative Self-Talk

Individuals express different types of negative self-talk. The follow-

ing are four common types of self-talk that tend to be found in peo-

ple who are prone to anxiety: the Worrier, the Critic, the Victim, and

the Perfectionist. The Worrier creates anxiety by causing you to antic-

ipate the worst-case scenario; the Critic is the part of you that con-

stantly judges and evaluates your behavior; the Victim makes you feel

helpless and hopeless; and the Perfectionist resembles the Critic, but its

concern is not to put you down, but to push you to do better. Unfor-

tunately, the Perfectionist generates anxiety by telling you that your