Inner Coach vs. Inner Critic: Everyone has negative self talk sometimes and that is what we call your inner critic. If you let your inner critic take over, your day will be like the book “Alexander and the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day”. If you can activate your inner coach (by using a tool), you can turn your day around and have a much better day. Speak positively to yourself!
These 2nd graders created "Inner Coach Activators". They wrote their name in the middle of the page and then decorated around it with positive words and pictures that would help get them back into the Green Zone. They were instructed to hang them up somewhere at home where they get ready for school. If they start their morning activating their Inner Coach, their day will be much better! The hope is to increase the amount of positive self talk statements so we have less negative self talk statements.
For the 5th grade students, we did an activity that had them up and moving around the room. They had to write a positive self talk statement and a negative self talk statement on a post it note. They then moved around the room to place the post it note on the correct poster.
What they learned the most from this activity is that a lot of them have the same negative self talk happening and that helped to normalize it. We read aloud all the positive statements and tucked some of the ones we liked away to use ourselves.
One of my favorite songs to play when talking about Inner Coach is this Bruno Mars video:
Another wonderful video that we use to help us think about how our positive thoughts from our inner coach can help us to achieve things that maybe we can't do "YET"