Have you ever told yourself that you’re not worthy or you’re not good enough, and you have this negative voice just banging around in your head telling you these things? Well, we’re going to cover how to actually beat the negative self-talk and turn it into one that’s going to empower you. So if that interests you, let’s go.
It’s very important that we monitor our self-talk, and if we’ve got negative self-talk, whether it’s about a relationship, whether it’s about us as a person, whether it’s about our job, whatever it might be, we need to ensure that we’re talking to ourselves in the right way and we’re not bullying ourselves out of doing things.
Now, it can apply, as I said, too many different areas of our life, but let’s just take this example. Imagine this, you’re an office worker, you’ve been there for a few years, you’ve got some really good experience built up, and you’re really quite good at your job. Now, you’re sitting at your desk and an email pops up in your inbox, and it’s about a new job. You read through the email and it starts to excite you because it is a natural progression for you, you have been here for a few years, and you have “earned your stripes” so to speak, so you’re getting quite excited about the job.
Then you head to the kitchen and you get yourself a glass of water, you get your food out of the fridge and you proceed to go sit down at a table and start eating your lunch. Then a work colleague comes up to you and says, “Hey, how about that new job coming up? Geez, that’s a good one, I bet you a lot of people are going to go for that.” This triggers a thought in your mind, “Oh, hang on a second, there’s a lot of people going for this?” And then your mind starts to think about all the different people that will be going for the job, and how good they are and all their best attributes, and then you start thinking about all the bad attributes of yourself.
Has this ever been you? Now, it might not be in the exact example I gave you, but have you ever talked to yourself like that negatively, where you talk yourself down, or you say that you’re not good enough? Or it might be in a relationship, for example, or it might be that you don’t end up getting into a relationship or approaching that person. It could be that quite simply you tell yourself, “You’re never going to be good enough to get anywhere. You’re never going to be successful. You’re never going to get that wealth or richness that you’re after.”
Let’s go through this three-step process that can help us overcome this..
The first step is to be aware. We want to expose the negative self-talk where it lurks in the shadows in our mind because once we start talking to ourselves, it gets ingrained into our subconscious, and it’ll go to work in there while we’re not thinking about it, or we’ll become consumed by the thought, and our mind will travel into all these images of the negativity.
For me, I find a quiet place in the house, just sit on the couch. Then I’ll let my mind think about the negative things, but I take it from a conscious standpoint. So I’m observing my thoughts. Allow the thoughts to come. Don’t resist them, don’t try and hide or run away from them. Just allow them to come. We want to grab them out of our subconscious, or we want to grab them into the spotlight.
Then we write all the negative talk down so we’re aware of all the shit and crap that’s going inside our head on paper. Because remember, what we feed our mind will produce emotion and a feeling, and then how we feel will depict how we’re going to act. We need to get to the root of the actual negative self-talk and rip it out and observe it. Now we’ve got the list of our negative self-talk.
Next, we want to replace the negative self-talk.
Pretend that your friend or family member is coming to you with these very problems or negativity that you have yourself, and then you switch roles. So you’re going to be telling them what you would tell them. How would you tell them to be more positive, or what other solutions or thoughts would you give them to help them so they’re not suffering?
We’ll call them Fred, okay, for this example. So Fred comes up to me and says, “Scott, I’m not good enough for this role. Have you heard Jim’s going to be going for this role as well? There’s no chance I’m going to get this role. Yeah, okay, I’ve been here for a few years, but now there’s going to be three, four, five other people going for it, and what if I go in the interview and then I stuff up the interview? I mess it up, and then it gets out, and then everyone starts going off on me? What am I bloody doing? I’m going to be stuck in this job forever, in this role, hopeless, pathetic, worthless.”
I say to Fred, “Look, mate, you’re amazing. You’ve been in this job for a couple of years now, okay. You’ve got all the experience. Actually, when you read through all the points in the email, it’s every single thing that you’ve been doing. It’s a natural progression for you.” I then tell Fred to write down 10 positive reasons why you will get the job, and focus on those things and pour your energy into those things.
Lastly, reaffirm the positive talk advice. Now, this is where we really hit it home. Every morning we look at the negative self-talk points that we had, and what we’re going to do is weaken those foundations. We’re going to destroy the foundations, and what we’re going to do is we’re going to hit that with the positive talk. With each positive talk, we’re going to smash it, and we’re going to overcome each one. That is our logic, that is our reason, that is our new perspective. And that will build that confidence, that will build that power to smash it down.
We need to get up every morning and work on that.
Write it down or put it in your phone as your screensaver, or put it in your notes, or have it on your desktop. Have it somewhere in your purse or your wallet or whatever you carry. Have it with you so you can refer to it. So if you go for a toilet break during the day, grab out your phone and read the notes. Read the positive self-talk. Be onto it. Smash it down, knock at its foundation.
Depending on how much of an issue this is for you, you really want to go to town on the negative self-talk. It is a war. You’re going to take it down, and you’re going to hit it with all this positive new perspective just like you would if someone was coming to you, that other person coming to you, a loved one, a brother, a family member, best friend, whoever it is, and they’re coming to you with these problems. You know that’s just being hurtful to themselves, that’s not giving any self-love to themselves, and you would give them that positive advice.
So we’re doing the same, but we’ve got to be on it because when it’s ourselves, as I said earlier, you can get trapped. It can hide in its shadows. So when we get caught in thought, and we’re thinking about that negative thing, we’ve got to stop that. Rip it out, get it into the spotlight, and we’re going to replace it, and we’re going to be smashing it. So what we’re uploading into our brain now is the positive thoughts. We’re rewiring that memory. We’re rewiring that perspective.
What happens when we keep the persistence of that thought going into our mind, our mind is now going to realize that, “Oh, hang on a second. This is something I need to pay attention to.” So it will then be repeating that thought. Then we’ll be obsessing. If we’re obsessing over the new positive perspective, that will then become the new reality.