Recently, I’ve shared how you must update your belief system to improve your life. One of the fastest ways of doing this is through improving your inner voice. To transform your life into the success you want it to be, you’ll need to take the megaphone from that bullying voice in your head and hand it to the supportive, inspirational, and motivational cheerleader who’s been silent far too long. (If you don’t have a motivational cheerleader in your head, grab a copy of this book to help you create one.) Here’s the first step in the process:
Arguing With Yourself
Have you ever had a mental argument with yourself, like there are two of you inside your head battling it out? “I’m doing this! No you’re not, you’ll only get hurt! I’m hurting anyway. You’ll hurt worse!”
Remember this: When you argue with yourself, you’ll always lose. The best defense against this to either write down your thoughts or begin saying them out loud so that you can hear how critical or ridiculous the comments may be!
Saying critical statements out loud may help you recognize how mean, unfair, or over-the-top your comments might be. For example, let’s imagine you are 5-minutes late to work and you say, “I’m always late. This is a total disaster! I just want to shoot myself in the head!” If you heard a total stranger exclaim those words because s/he was 5-minutes late for work, wouldn’t you think it was a bit extreme? Yet, in the moment, we often don’t realize how strong our language is or how damaging those comments are to our self-esteem.
Clients who’ve done writing exercise have said they had no idea they were being so mean to themselves. “Writing my thoughts down allowed me to go back and see how hard I was being to myself. I really never thought of it this way, but I was bullying myself, and this activity helped me to recognize when I was making things worse than they really were.” If you are aware of how hard you are being on yourself, keep reading…
The Influence of Positive Self-Talk
William James, the founder of modern psychology, said the quality of your thinking determines the quality of your life. He’s right! One surefire way to create a more prosperous life is through focusing most of your mental energy not on what you have, or who you are now, but rather toward what you want and who you are becoming.
The good news is you can begin right now to create a new dialogue with yourself that is loving, supportive, and encouraging. Stop waiting for someone else to say these things to you. Instead, give yourself what you need. You can silence your bullying inner voice and become your own best support system and friend!
It’s important to develop a strong Positive Mental Attitude (PMA) because if your self-talk isn’t positive, supportive, and encouraging, you might revert back to your former negative beliefs. To prevent this, here’s a four-step process for generating an unstoppable PMA:
Step One: Become more aware of your current self-talk.
You have roughly 60,000 thoughts each day. Where are the majority of your thoughts focused? Is that voice in your mind loving or scared, supportive or skeptical, calm or angry? You can’t improve something unless you’ve identified the problem. Therefore, you must become more conscious of how you think. Simply put, what you think about, comes about. So what are you thinking about?
Step Two: When you make a negative comment to yourself, interrupt or challenge that thought immediately.
You can interrupt negative thinking by imagining a big red stop sign popping out in front of you. Then say loudly and clearly to yourself, “CANCEL! CLEAR!” Say this out loud. Remember, it is impossible to win an argument with yourself inside your head.
Try this exercise: Say out loud “I’m such a failure,” and then immediately picture a big red stop sign in front of you. Then say, with passion, “CANCEL! CLEAR!” As you do this, the thought and accompanying feelings should become smaller and fade away. If not, challenge them. You’ve already learned some very effective strategies for accomplishing this task. You can repeat the negative comment, and then yell out, “What a bunch of BS!” Or move the thought over to the False folder. You can even run it through your Six Power Questions.
Here’s another useful method:
Often, when being overly critical or dramatic, you’ll find yourself using words like always or never. If so, emphasize that particular word and challenge the statement. “Things never work out for me!” “Never? Really? Nothing has ever worked out for me…ever?” It forces you to bring the situation back into proportion. “Okay, lots of things have worked out for me. It’s just that this hasn’t happened yet, but maybe it still can if I keep focusing on what I want.”
This is how to turn bullying negative self-talk into a more encouraging inner voice. In the process, you’ll transform an upsetting situation into one where you feel more reassured and supported.
Step Three: Replace the negative thought with a more empowering, positive comment or statement
When you pull a weed, replace it with a flower. Otherwise the weed just grows back. If you wish your life to go in a certain direction, you must plant the mental seeds to take you there!
The following are examples of supportive, encouraging self-talk. Remember to say things that you want to belief and experience, rather than focusing on how it has been:
- Things do work out in my life, often better than I expected.
- I always learn from every situation, and this makes me stronger and wiser.
- There is no failure, only feedback, which means I can learn from any situation and feel successful from it.
- I am the person I was created to be. I am supposed to be here on this planet. My life does have meaning and purpose.
- My thoughts, feelings, values, and beliefs are just as important as anyone else’s. I am just as important as everyone else!
- Today is my day, and I’m going to make it great!
Step Four: Practice and repeat
The only reason people tend to believe negative things about themselves is because they’ve heard those negative statements far more often than positive ones. If you want to really believe something is better, say it to yourself so many times that you can’t remember anything else you used to say!
Here’s the million-dollar happiness question:
If you had to say a positive self-statement – one that would free you from pain and create massive pleasure in your life –
10,000 times before you finally truly believed it, would you?
As Tony Robbins said, “Repetition is the mother of all skills.” Many of the things you now do with ease were once difficult tasks you had to practice and repeat: tying your shoes, driving a car, beginning a new job, and so on.
So keep planting those seeds of success. Sometimes you’ll have to fake it until you become it, and that’s okay. Eventually you won’t have to fake it anymore. One day soon, your mind will accept the affirmations you continue feeding it, and your life will continually be transformed.
Overview: The Key Ingredient for Success is Believing in Yourself
Although your beliefs influence the quality of your thoughts, the quality of your daily thinking can also greatly influence your beliefs. Thus, one way to enhance your beliefs is to tell yourself what you want to believe. If your unconscious hears it enough, it will eventually accept it.
It’s incredibly important that your thinking (self-talk) is positive, loving, and supportive for another reason: What you say to yourself creates how you feel in the moment. Remember, the thoughts you have create the feelings you experience. Those feelings determine what kinds of choices you make. Those choices influence the results you get. And those results then reinforce the thinking that started it all!
Ultimately, how you think determines how your life will be. Once you begin to THINK SUCCESS, your odds of succeeding increase dramatically! Here’s the success formula I teach my clients:
Belief + Expectation = Results.
You can accomplish more than you’ve ever imagined as you continue to get out of your own way. And that starts with turning down the volume of the bullying voice in your head and amping up the voice of the cheerleader. You can do it! Go YOU!
To learn more about how to transform your negative inner voice into positive and motivating self-talk, check out my e-book, Get Out of Your Way, my audio book, The Power of Optimism: Mental Strategies for Silencing Your Inner Critic, or you can contact me at 317.579.7500.
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Tim Shurr, MA, is President of Shurr! Success, Inc., a personal and professional development company based in Indianapolis, and Director of Indy Hypnosis Center. He is an award-winning speaker, business strategist, TV personality, and an internationally known expert in Peak Performance. For more tips, visit www.OvercomeSelfSabotageNow.com or www.indyhypnosis.com/blog.
Really good reminder – I love the emails – and really nice updated picture!
Be well