The person who you spend the most time is with yourself, so it is vital that you first treat yourself well through having the right self-talk. Remember that your thoughts and words have so much power that they affect how you feel. How you feel affects how you behave. Your behaviors are what determine your future. To give yourself a better advantage, develop the right self-talk that works for you. It enhances your overall well-being that includes your physical and mental health and gives you higher satisfaction in your life.
It is a coping tool that can help you in difficult times so you can be your best. The goal of self-talk is to reinforce the greatness within you. The things you hear the most is what you ultimately believe that makes up your reality. What will yours be? Do you want to build yourself up so you can act with conviction instead of being dragged down by hesitancy. If you are unaware of your self-talk, you are more likely to default to the negativity that is built into your brain to keep you safe.
Let's begin by defining what self-talk is which is your inner voice, the things that you tell yourself on a repeated daily basis. From the moment you wake up to the moment you fall asleep, and everything in between are the messages that you tell yourself. This includes the highs and lows that you experience throughout your day which affect what you choose to reinforce.
The things that you repeat to yourself the most are the things that will stick with you and eventually become grained. So you must be careful about the things that you tell yourself. There is no need to put a bigger burden on yourself by being overly critical or self-defeating. When you can develop and encode the proper self-talk to work for you, the less dependent you become on needing that belief from others to validate if you can truly do something. It truly fosters the greater belief within yourself that allows you to move forward with what you envision.
Tapping into your potential
We all have an extraordinary amount of potential, but it requires a lot of work to access it. Many times when things don't come easy there is a tendency to go another route to find the path of least resistance and in doing so you might think you do not have the potential to do great things. But that is wrong, for some their natural talents and abilities come out a lot sooner and with a lot less difficulty. Just because others have arrived at it when you haven't does not mean you are not up to par. It just means you need to work at it until you start to tap into all the great abilities that lie within you.
Talents are less impressive because it is something that has been given to you, what you work towards and actually achieve with little to no talent is far more impressive because it requires a high level of determination and perseverance that you have developed. You don't determine how tall you are or talented you are, but you do determine how much you're willing to develop yourself to use your strengths to your advantages and manage your weaknesses to not be a liability.
Evaluate your self-talk
Determine what self-talk you have and if it is helping or hurting you. Referring to yourself with words such as stupid, dumb, idiot, fat, slow, not enough, ridiculous, or even can’t, need to be eliminated immediately. They do you no good. While it might seem that negativity can motivate you to be better it is actually eroding your self-worth. It can push you to reach a goal, but it will condition you to tie yourself worth to a certain outcome.
So wanting to lose weight because you tell yourself you are fat and nobody will love anyone who is, is conditional if you reach a certain metric. This makes you value yourself on a conditional basis that if you meet a certain criteria then you are worthy based on it. And this will trickle down into every area of your life constantly needing to achieve something to prove that you are enough. It is self-defeating because no matter what you accomplish you will always be trying to fill the void that you ultimately created through the things you tell yourself. The outward world may see you as a big success, but the internal struggle will make you wonder why because it will be hard for you to see the things truly make you great.
Greatness is not just something that is gained on an outward basis, but it is an internal revelation that comes through discovering yourself. And discovering yourself comes through accepting who you are and building yourself to constantly be your best version. It is knowing that you are enough without any external rewards. The external things are limited to how much happiness it can bring you, but the internal gratification is limitless.
To create this, develop the self-talk by replacing those self-defeating words with the simple phrase “I am making progress”. If you think about it, we all are a work in progress, not one of us is a complete version of ourselves and this is something that we should embrace. That means that the best of you is yet to come. What a concept that just invokes hope because it means that today is better than yesterday, tomorrow is better than today, and the potential for the future is immense. This brings a level of excitement that causes you to go at life with a tenacity that makes you truly feel alive, that you are seizing the opportunities that you create for yourself.
While it may not seem like that on a day-to-day basis, because you may be focused on the daily scorecard that you are constantly measuring. Over time you’ll realize your life is meant to have valleys so you can truly cherish and enjoy the peaks. Sometimes, making progress involves taking a few steps back to see the bigger picture. When you can focus on getting better you ultimately decide to live empowered that gives you so many different avenues in life. The hard part will be deciding which route to take. What a position to work yourself into.
2nd & 3rd person
When developing the right self-talk refer to yourself in the second or third person to help give yourself some distance to think more objectively about your emotions and response. This helps to reduce stress and anxiety. The 2nd person point of view replaces “I” or “me” with “you” that allows you step away from the 1st person point of view. So instead of saying “I am not doing well today”, it becomes “you are not doing well today”. The 3rd person point of view replaces “I” with “she”, “he” or “they”. This gives you a lot more distance than being in the 2nd person point of view.
In the 1st-person point of view you are the narrator and you're right in the heat of battle and more prone to being emotional and reactive. Because of this, impressions and descriptions are colored by your opinions, mood, past experiences and even perceptions of what you see and hear. It makes you more biased about the things you want to see and hear that can exclude valuable information. In the 1st-person point of view you're more likely to find blame or excuses of why things didn't work out or when things do workout you are more likely to credit only yourself for it. It becomes all about the me syndrome, where it seems like everything is revolving around me. That I am failing because the world wants me to, or I succeeded in spite of the world not wanting me to.
But the 2nd- and 3rd-person point of view gets you out of that state that allows you to recognize things for what they actually are. If things didn't work out for you and you're in the 2nd or 3rd person point of view it helps you realize that what good does it do you to find blame for your shortcomings. Instead, it makes you focus on finding solutions. It also helps you when things do go your way, recognizing all the people that helped you get where you are. This helps to manage your ego from getting too big that can prevent a bigger and more painful downfall.
Finding the right balance
As you develop your self-talk look to find the proper balance to avoid being too lenient with yourself and avoid being too critical. You essentially want to be able to self-regulate to make you take action. Too far in either direction will cause inaction where it can hurt your confidence, or the fuel is not big enough to light the fire to get you to move. Think about when you make a mistake the default self-talk might be to say, “that was stupid of me to have done that, what was I thinking”. When this happens your emotions can run wild that take you on a deep spiral downward that just crushes your spirit and can keep you there. Our greatest enemy many times can be ourselves because we just implode with all these self-destructive thoughts.
If the self-talk is too lenient where you give yourself too much slack it might sound something like “well I didn't make a mistake so it was other people's fault” and in this case you will continuously coddle yourself where it makes you weaker mentally and it inflates your ego. This type of self-talk can cause you to put people down to make yourself feel good. So instead of rising up to be in better you'll be hitting people at the kneecaps just to bring them down to make yourself look bigger. Finding the right gauge will be crucial so you can effectively know how to get yourself going.
Have default phrases
Identify what you want to tell yourself that way you have a plan of what you're going to say as opposed to just letting your default voice take over. When you give yourself enough time to think things through you come up with some really great ideas. Too many times we're on a constant treadmill that keeps us just in reaction mode which makes it very difficult to get out of the cycle of not recognizing your own patterns.
While you may want to have the right self-talk to build yourself up it can get lost throughout your day as you move from one thing to another and it becomes a lot harder to regulate the thoughts you want to have. To help you remember what you really want to tell yourself, have a few go to phrases that you can always go back to without really having to think about it. It might even help you to write it out so it gets ingrained into your memory.
Final thoughts
The more you're able to repeat these things that you want to tell yourself the more it's going to stick with you to the point where it's going to override the default mode of negativity, self-pity and wanting to give up. You must be your biggest asset so develop the proper self-talk so you can truly thrive. The power of what you tell yourself is so immense because it's going to dictate what you do and how you do it. Your life begins with the things that you tell yourself on a consistent basis.
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