By Brian Willis

Trainers and coaches have long suffered from a common but often misdiagnosed medical condition known as TCS (Trainers Concussion Syndrome). This is a direct result of repeatedly banging their head against the wall in frustration with those students who “Just Don’t Get It”. Well relief can be found in a preventative strategy – Change Your Language. Changing the way you communicate to the people you are entrusted to train, as well as the way you talk to yourself, can result in positive changes in everyone’s performance.

The solution may be one simple strategy:
Communicate in positive terms what you want yourself, or your officers to do.


That may sound overly simplistic, but the reality is that many people in today’s society are conditioned to communicate in negative terms. Instructors, coaches, parents, teachers and peers spend a great deal of time communicating what not to do, instead of using positive terms to directly communicate the desired behavior or outcome.

Some of these negative based statements probably sound familiar: Don’t quit. Don’t stop fighting. Don’t anticipate the gun going off. Don’t jerk at the trigger. Don’t worry. Don’t slip and fall. Don’t think about it. Don’t put your finger on the trigger. Don’t panic. Police Don’t Move.

The first step to positively communicate is to delete two key words from your vocabulary. The word ‘Don’t’ is the most common, potentially most damaging and perhaps THE most important word to delete. The rationale behind this is that when you use the word ‘Don’t’ as part of your feedback, or direction to an officer their mind must first figure out what it is not supposed to do. To accomplish this, the mind drops the word ‘Don’t’ and actually imagines the negative behavior. For example, if you say to an officer on the range “Don’t jerk the trigger.” the mind actually hears “Jerk the trigger.” and the image of that jerking motion becomes the primary thought. The officer then tells himself or herself “Ok. This time, don’t jerk the trigger.” Once again the mind hears “This time jerk the trigger.” and the image of the less desirable behavior of jerking the trigger comes to mind again. When the officer fires the weapon they jerk the trigger just as they imagined, and the cycle of instructor feedback and negative self talk is repeated. This cycle simply increases the chances of continually repeating the negative behavior. The more often this cycle is repeated the more powerfully engrained the negative behavior becomes resulting in a compounding of the negative self talk. Officers start adding descriptive phrases such as “How could I be so stupid”, “I am such an idiot”, “What a loser I am.”, or “What a dumb ass.” before they tell themselves to stop jerking the trigger. This not only engrains the negative behavior but also negatively impacts their self image and self esteem. This vicious cycle can create a great deal of anxiety and frustration for both the trainer and the officer.

The solution then is simple: Tell them what you want them to do. Telling the officer to “Be smooth on the trigger.” or “Focus on a smooth trigger press.” will have a far more positive result especially when the officer follows it up with positive self talk and repeats the positive directions to themselves. When this positive communication occurs the mind will imagine a smooth press of the trigger, which is more likely to be replicated physically when the officer fires their weapon.

Another word to remove from the instructional vocabulary is the word ‘Try’. The word ‘try’ is a word that describes the actions that go into failure. When you think about all the things you ‘tried’ in your lives, you realize that many of them were unsuccessful attempts. The reason for this apparent lack of success is that when you use the word try, the subconscious mind is willing to accept failure. Everyone has heard someone say, “Well, at least I tried.” When communicating with officers instead of saying ‘Try this’ simply remove the word ‘try’ and tell them, in positive terms, what you want them to do.

This brings us back to the basic strategy: Communicate in positive terms what you want yourself, and your officers to do. This will require some work and some conscious effort for most instructors to create the habit of communicating in positive terms. At first you will have to think about what you want the officer to do before you communicate it to them. If you catch yourself giving the direction in negative terms immediately change it to positive terms and restate the direction. Instructional teams can help each other out by monitoring communications and if necessary, give other instructors a quiet reminder about their language. Encourage positive self talk in your officers by helping them understand the power of the conversations they have with and about themselves in the privacy of their own mind.

Making positive communications part of the culture within your training programs will improve performance results and reduce the number of cases of Trainer Concussion Syndrome.