"Be good to yourself"

The 1980's American rock band, Journey released their hit song, "Be Good to Yourself" in 1986, which ended up being their last Top 10 hit on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100.  The song was a bit of self-affirmation for the group's lead singer, Steve Perry - the chorus said it all:

"Be good to yourself, when nobody else will."

There was another self-affirmation that became famous this past week.  Three year-old Ayaan's mother taught him to recite the following self-affirmation every morning when he was just two years old:

"I am smart.  I am blessed.  I can do anything."

This past week, his mother observed him saying those same words to himself while he was walking to school.  She recorded Ayaan on her cell phone, and the video went viral.

It turns out that 80's rock musicians and three year-old toddlers can teach us something that we should apply in our own lives.  Self-affirmation is formally defined (thank you Merriam-Webster) as the act of affirming (stating positively, validating, and confirming) one's own worthiness and value as an individual for beneficial effect.  There are countless studies in the field of psychology (see "self-affirmation theory") that strongly support what both Steve Perry, three year-old Ayaan, and countless others have - yes, even Saturday Night Live's Stuart Smalley - have learned firsthand.  Using self-affirmations on a daily basis increase our sense of self-confidence, self-worth, and self-esteem.  Self-affirmations reduce the adverse effects of stress and improve our health.  Daily self-affirmations can help us be more successful in school and at work.

According to research performed by Dr. David Creswell at Carnegie Mellon University, daily self-affirmations can improve problem-solving under stressful conditions.  According to Creswell, "An emerging set of published studies suggest that a brief self-affirmation activity at the beginning of a school term can boost academic grade-point averages in underperforming kids at the end of the semester."

There was another interesting study involving a technique called "self-monitoring" (a form of self-affirmation) in a group of "unskilled league bowlers" (on a side note, if you've never been bowling, it's a game that certainly requires a level of skill to be able to compete on a regular basis).  Basically, a group of 133 women who bowled in a weekly league competition were assigned to one of four groups - Positive Self-monitoring, Negative Self-monitoring, Instruction, and Control.  All of the subjects, except those in the Control group, received a free 20-30 minute bowling lesson from a professional bowler at the start of the study.  The bowlers in the Positive Self-monitoring group rated themselves after each frame (a complete game in bowling consists of 10 "frames" where the bowler has two chances to knock down all of the bowling pins) on what they were taught using the following scale: 1 = good, 2 = very good, and 3 = excellent.  Importantly, these bowlers were instructed to rate themselves only when they felt that they had performed the skills well.  Conversely, the bowlers in the Negative Self-monitoring group were asked to focus on the errors that they made and rated themselves with a different scale: 1 = terrible, 2 = very poor, and 3 = poor.  Those bowlers in the Instruction group received the bowling lesson but did not rate themselves, while those in the Control group didn't get the lesson and were told just to submit their scores after each game. 

So, what happened at the end of the study?  The bowlers in the Positive Self-monitoring group significantly improved their scores from baseline AND outperformed all of the others groups.  On average, those bowlers (recall that they were unskilled bowlers) in the Positive Self-monitoring group increased their bowling average by 11 pins per game over and beyond the slight improvements noted in the Negative Self-monitoring and Instruction only groups (the bowlers in the Control group did not improve at all).  On a side note, some of the bowlers in this study were "skilled" - these groups did not significantly improve, regardless of their group assignment.  In other words, as the investigators in this study concluded, "these findings indicate that positive self-monitoring affects behavior most favorably under those circumstances in which people are learning something new, difficult, or perceived as difficult" (and perhaps not when they are trying to refine an already well-developed skill).

Let's summarize what we've discussed so far.  Self-affirmation improves our self-esteem, our mood, our health, our ability to learn a new skill, and our chances of success.  How best can we use self-affirmation, then, in our daily lives?  As it turns out, there's some great research here too.  The language that we use to refer to ourselves appears to be really crucial.  For example, using non-first-pronouns (here's a link for a quick refresher, but basically first pronouns include "I", "me", and "we") and our own name in our self-affirmation is better.  For example, if I want to do well in my next 5K run, I should talk to myself beforehand and say something like this:

"Okay, Derek.  You've trained hard for this.  Now it's time to show what Derek can do."

In other words, we should be taking a "fly on the wall" perspective and observe our own selves from a distance (this is known as self-distance, which refers to "instances in which people focus specifically on the self from a distanced perspective").  The evidence is fairly compelling.  Talking to ourselves in the second- and third-person actually improves our chances for success!  Based on what this last set of studies have shown then, Ayaan's mother should have taught him to re-phrase his daily self-affirmation in the following manner: "Ayaan is smart.  Ayaan is blessed.  Ayaan can do anything!"

If you are not using self-affirmations, you should try them out.  Remember, "Be good to yourself."  More importantly, remember to tell yourself that you are good.  Thanks, as always, for listening!