We all talk to ourselves.
Often the talk is silent and internal. Often our self talk is made from the same thoughts that we had yesterday and that we will have tomorrow. Often we don’t even notice our self talk but we ignore it at our peril because the thoughts in our self-talk create feelings and those feelings create physical actions and reactions; self-talk influences both anxiety and confidence or simply put, a negative thought creates a negative feeling which creates a negative action or reaction and as we have about 60,00
0 thoughts a day it’s important to minimise the negative ones.
We tend to look for external causes of our negative actions and yet the cause goes back to our thoughts, our self-talk. We are all more critical of ourselves than we are to those we love; we undermine our own confidence, we doubt our abilities and focus on our ‘failures’ – things we would never do to those we love.
Learning to flip self-talk over to positive, like all new learning, requires a relaxed and focused mind, awareness and practice.
A good starting point, when you recognise your negative self-talk is to calm your mind and ask yourself some new questions because new questions will provide you with new answers. Creating a positive affirmation to repeat to yourself is a great way of changing the focus of your mindset from negative to positive and is a technique often used in sport psychology.
Affirmations are powerful and positive statements which through repetition, strengthen an intention deeply and are able to bypass your rational conscious mind in order to be assimilated into your emotional unconscious mind. The wonderful thing about the unconscious mind is that it doesn’t know the difference between reality and imagination so it will accept whatever thought it is repeatedly exposed to.
So if there’s a action or reaction that you want to change in yourself, learn to relax your mind, listen in to your self-talk and ask yourself if you would talk in the same way to someone you loved. Ask yourself some new questions to challenge your negative self-talk and create a powerful and motivating affirmation to begin repeating because . . .
your thoughts create your feelings which create your actions and reactions