Contesting the Role of Self-talk in Sport Psychology in Views of Mindfulness, Flow, and Mind Wandering

The purpose of this chapter was to review self-talk with respect to three contrasting phenomena: mindfulness, flow, and mind wandering. On important lesson learned in the first part of this chapter was that mindfulness may help to detect the nature of organic self-talk and let go of non-functional inner speech. With regards to flow, the discussion focused on the degree to which the signature qualities of flow are in conflict with the deliberate, rational, and cognitively demanding nature of strategic and goal-directed self-talk. In the last section, emphasis was placed on the similarities between the uncontrolled nature of unintentional mind wandering and spontaneous self-talk and the controlled and effortful nature of intentional mind wandering and goal-directed self-talk. Overall, it was concluded that this perspective-taking exercise in this chapter can be acknowledged as being paradigmatic, insofar as it has led to a deeper understanding of self-talk, mindfulness, flow and mind wandering.