On any given day, tens of thousands of thoughts race through your mind. The exact number may vary from day to day, but the majority of them are you telling yourself about the world around you. And how you’re doing in the world. Daily, we experience a variety of opportunities that will allow us to make decisions that make life better. To make choices that contribute to growth, success, fulfilment, and happiness. Developing the habit of positive self-talk is a big reason that people can stand up to rigorous training, deep pain, and overwhelming challenges. How would anyone be able to overcome discomfort and fear if they didn’t possess positive self-talk? It’s essentially our way to hypnotize ourselves to deal with anything life can throw at them. A mantra-like pain is a weakness leaving the body? That’s how Soldiers disassociate from themselves to get things done. It might not sound like it, but it’s a form of positive self-talk that creates small change to produce a significant outcome. If you think that your self-talk isn’t within your control, then think again. A lot of people falsely believe they can’t fix their thoughts. Yet, you do control your self-talk through the power of your mind. Self-talk is essentially just the things you tell yourself about you. Think about it for a moment. Think of a moment when you have done something silly. How do you react? Do you dismiss yourself for being foolish or stupid or tell yourself you’re a clumsy mess? Your self-talk is powerful, that dialogue that follows you around all day. It matters. Yet, far too often that dialogue is a script that prevents you from achieving your potential. You tell yourself you’re not smart enough, talented enough, attractive enough, good enough. None of that is true. Developing Self-Talk • Defining Your Best How do you behave when you’re at your best? How do you think when you’re at your best? How do you feel when you’re at your best? What does your best look like? Create a picture of it in your mind. Now, make it as real as you possibly can. Imagine how you speak, act, feel, and think. What images come to mind? Capture them and write them out, try to do it from the perspective of a third person. There is research to suggest that doing it in the third person is a more powerful approach. • Repeating Your Best To max out your self-talk, set a commitment. Give yourself a 90-day commitment to repeat your best. Every day, repeat this scene daily. Rewrite the images, capture your words, practice them in your imagination. Commit to doing this daily for three months. It might be a simple sentence that you can repeat as needed and keep handy on a sticky note. The purpose of this is to build neural pathways in your brain that allow both positive self-image and a self-image to form and thrive. • Creating Your Best To create your best, you have to provide yourself with a positive environment. Essentially, you want to create a spa environment for your brain. So, your favourite photos, books you love, articles you enjoy, anything that you can regularly absorb to provide a healthy escape for your mind. Think of it as creating somewhere to fuel your best self in real-time and in your head. You can defeat yourself with negative self-talk. Or, you can use those tens of thousands of daily thoughts to promote positive self-talk. You can think of it as reprogramming, a hard reset or whatever you need to, to inspire authenticity.
Interesting read.