Reader, how closely do you watch your words?
I was at a diner not long ago when I overheard two people talking about the same high school basketball game. One guy shook his head and said, “They got destroyed.” The other leaned in and said, “They battled right to the end.” It caught my attention because they were both at the same game, they watched the same plays unfold, and they walked away with the same final score in mind. Yet their stories about the game sounded like they came from two completely different nights.
It reminded me of how often this happens in everyday life. One person tells you the weather is miserable, another says it is refreshing. One parent says the practice was a waste, another calls it a grind that builds toughness. Same events, same facts, but the words we choose to describe them change how we feel about them.
And it got me thinking...
The language we use in sports is powerful, far more powerful than most of us realize. A coach might casually label an athlete “lazy” or “not focused.” A teammate might throw out “you choked” after a mistake. A parent might tell their kid they were “flat” today. Those words stick. They burrow in, sometimes for years, shaping the way an athlete sees themselves. A player who constantly hears “you are not coachable” eventually stops trying to be. It is not that they cannot learn, it is that the story being told about them has been written in permanent ink.
I touched on this a while back in my They Ain’t Coachable episode of The Mental Cast. I argued that most of the time, players are not the problem. The real problem is the way we talk about them, the labels we apply, and the narrow box we put them in. When we change the language, the entire relationship shifts.
The same thing happens with habits. In my newsletter about automaticity, "Traffic Patterns are Ruining My Life", I talked about how we fall into patterns without even realizing it. Words work the same way. A coach gets used to saying, “Run a lap” after every mistake, and before long the phrase is automatic. But what message does that language send? That errors are to be punished instead of corrected. That creativity is dangerous because stepping outside the lines might trigger a consequence.
Parents fall into it too. The classic car ride home often starts with words like, “You should have moved your feet,” or “Why did you miss that?” I get it. Passion gets the best of us. But what if those words were shifted to, “You worked hard out there,” or “I loved your effort”? That tiny change reframes the same situation in a way that fuels growth instead of feeding anxiety.
Athletes can take control of this as well. Create your own cue words that snap you back into focus. Replace the inner monologue of “don’t screw this up” with “lock in.” Say “next play” instead of “I blew it.” Just like a coach’s words can frame the story, so can yours.
I have never forgotten certain words that were said to me when I was younger, both good and bad. One coach once told me I was a “leader,” and for years I tried to live up to that word. Another called me “inconsistent,” and I carried that weight into situations where I should have been confident. The scoreboard fades, but the words remain.
So the challenge is this: what words are you choosing today that might echo in someone’s mind for years to come?