The Power of self-talk

This week I want to talk about the importance of what we say to ourselves. No matter how we communicate with others, the way we talk to ourselves, our ’self-talk’, may not be as positive as it could be. This is a very important topic as our personal ‘self-talk’ style, unlike our communication with others, is something we can hide from the rest of the world!!

What do you say to yourself?

The way we talk to ourselves in our heads has a great deal to teach us about what we truly believe about ourselves. If our self-talk is negative, we can draw the conclusion that we have negative feelings about ourselves. These negative thoughts and feelings are dangerous.

Thoughts are repetitive!

The first reason they are dangerous is because what you focus on grows. Apparently, out of our 90,000 daily thoughts, 60,000 are repetitive. In other words, we are thinking the same thing over and over again. This makes it much more important to think carefully and choose exactly what we decide to think about.

Thoughts have an energy of their own!

The second reason is that we project our thoughts out onto the world. There are two ways in which we do this. The first is that we give off subtle messages absolutely all of the time about what we believe about ourselves and the way we wish to be treated to those around us. The awful thing is that these negative things we believe have a habit of being confirmed by those very people. This is partially because of these subtle messages we give out. The other way is that we look for what we ‘think’ is real. So, it is obvious that having healthy, positive, creative, useful thoughts is imperative to our well-being and the way we operate in the world.

Take control of your thoughts

Start to be more consciously aware of what you are thinking. Observe your self-talk and ask yourself, ‘Why was I thinking about this/in that way?’. Ask yourself whether this thought or train of thought or way of thinking helps you or hinders you in your life? If it doesn’t, then CHANGE IT!

Positive self-talk!

When you have, as we all do, a negative thought or you are feeling down, decide to change your thoughts immediately. Start to say NO! to the thoughts that make you feel anything other than good about yourself. Interrupt your unhelpful thoughts as often as you need to and immediately replace them with creative and useful ones. Our minds are very powerful tools, so you may experience some resistance at first to this new way of doing things. Just gently keep replacing the negative with the positive and gradually your mind will catch on. The great thing about having such a powerful tool at our disposal is that we can choose to use it to change our patterns of thinking and indeed all our behaviours!

Thoughts have power and you do too!

hillybarker@gmail.com