Everyone feels down sometimes. You worry about work, family, debts, and your own health. That your day just isn’t going right and there is nothing that you can do to pull yourself out of the bad day. Self-talk is a way to perk your day up and remind you of what is good in life. It is also a way to motivate yourself beyond your current mood. It works for me and it should work for you.
What is Self Talk?
Self-talk is a way to analyze your own mood and make adjustments to it as you go through your day. It is a way to convince yourself you are doing the right thing, a good job, and that you have your situation under your control. It is one of the more modern movements to encourage self-improvement and self-control. It’s a way to help boost your self-confidence and stop those negative emotions before they take over.
How Does it Work?
Everything is within your own mind. Part of how self-talk works are just allowing yourself to slow down long enough to understand how you are currently feeling and how you can adjust those feeling and respond to them as your day goes on. The talk itself is supportive of your own efforts and affirming in what you are doing. It is letting the positive do the speaking through your day and not the negative.
Negative Self-Talk
Negative self-talk occurs when you keep replaying upsetting or unsettling thoughts throughout your day over and over again, especially about the past. It is when your mind does not allow itself to relax into the day and sticks to the bad thing that happened in the morning. These types of thoughts can start to be self-defeating as well as grow out of control.
Where do I Start to Be a Positive Self-talker?
This is a very relevant question for many of us. How you say something to yourself is the main difference between the negative and the positive self-talk. Negative self-talk stems from making the entire situation personal to yourself and using the first person to describe what is happening (“I” or “me”), whereas positive self-talk places you in the third person (“he” or “she”).
By removing personalization of the negative self-talk to the third person, it helps distance it from yourself. It allows you to be more objective about the situation and depersonalize the situation. It reduces the stress and anxiety that gets placed on you by helping you think about it in terms that are not yourself.
Listen
To improve on your own day-to-day health you should start by listening to yourself. This sounds simple, but it’s not. This means stopping throughout your day or when the stress is getting to you to just assess your moods. It is easy to remove yourself to a bathroom so you can have a few minutes to yourself to assess and adjust as needed. This means just thinking through your current situations and guiding your thoughts back on track. Ask yourself the following questions:
- Am I overreacting?
- Am I over thinking the situation?
- Am I assuming things of other people?
- Am I guessing how they will react if I do something?
There are many questions you can ask yourself, but you should always finish with, “how accurate is this feeling?”
Readjusting
From here, you should know what your current state is and what your inner world is telling you. It means you need to take charge of your own mind and start the positive self-talk. This means taking those harsh words and setting them to a more positive tune.
Example
- “I just failed that test. I am such an idiot.”
- Readjust: “If I didn’t do well, I will study differently the next time because I know I can do better. If I change my approach I can do this.”
Example
- “I can’t keep up with this workload. It’s all due at the end of the week!”
- Readjust: “If I prioritize my work and get the simple stuff out of the way first, I can do this.”
Why Positive Self-Talk is Important
Positive self-talk not only helps you throughout your day, but it is also a good way to forgive yourself for being human. You are not perfect and as long as you are doing your best you can continue to work to improve yourself. Positive self-talk helps you move forward towards the direction of your goals. If your goal is to pay off your debt and start living a debt-free life, then you need to remind yourself regularly that you can do it and it’s just a matter of time.
Examples of positive self-talk that I use on a daily basis:
- “I can accomplish anything that I want and I can prove it!’
- “Life is too short not to be happy!”
- “If others can do it, I can do it too!”
And here’s one of my favorites.
It is not what you are that holds you back, it’s what you think you’re not.
Denis Waitley
Self-talk is something that should be used daily to keep you focused on what is good about yourself and how you are doing your best to move forward. It is the perfect thing to add periodically throughout your day to keep you moving in a positive direction and prevent you from backsliding into a negative mindset. It is something anyone of any age can do and it is perfect for all situations. It is there as a tool to help you find your footing and keep you moving forward.