The current status of your own self-talk.

I'm inviting you to think about the current status of your own self-talk. And by this I mean: what are you saying to yourself? 

What are the thoughts you think about yourself?

How do you speak to yourself in your mind?

What do you say to yourself when no one is around to hear?

This is your self-talk. And it says a lot about you and your relationship with yourself. The status of your own self-talk is really important to your mental health. It determines how you feel about yourself and it’s also probably affecting how you think and feel about other people.

And there's GOOD NEWS about this! You can totally shift and change your self-talk to work better for you. 

First, you want to become more aware of what you’re doing and get more clear about the current status of your self-talk. So ,let’s say you forget to do something you said you’d do. What do you say when you remember? Is it like, “oh darn! Whoops. Silly me,” or is it more like, “you GODDAMN IDIOT! JEEZZZZZ. How can you be so stupid?!”

Yeah.

That’s your self-talk. And depending on the words we use when we accomplish something or don’t meet our own expectations, we either beat ourselves up and break ourselves down or we encourage ourselves in ways that help us achieve more.

We’re basically being our own worst enemy or best friend, just with the words we use to talk to ourselves.

This is helpful to know because it helps us create a life we truly love. It helps us develop more self-esteem and self-confidence. It helps us GROW and it also helps us in our relationships with other people. Here’s how that works:

our self-talk is a demonstration of our own relationship to and with ourselves. It’s a demonstration of our self-worth and how much we value and appreciate ourselves. If we beat ourselves in our minds or out loud, there’s a good chance we’re doing that to others to, implicitly or explicitly. But until we’re mindful of this, we wouldn’t notice it. Just something to think about.

If you’re aware of your own self-talk and you know it can use some work to improve it, there’s a term in psychology known as “self-appraisals”. You probably see the word PRAISE in there (sort of).

If you want to improve your relationship to yourself, you can start using more positive self-appraisals. Some examples would be:

“oh whoops. You made a mistake. Try again next time.”

“your dinner tastes pretty good. Seems like you’re making progress with home-cooking!”

“you weren’t selected for that job. Maybe your skills aren’t a good fit for that opportunity.”

“keep trying to find a solution. You’ve made a lot of progress so far and you seem pretty close.”

You can think of it like you’re talking to a kid. Would you be really harsh and unkind? Or would you be encouraging and supportive? Research shows that shame and blame rarely work to encourage positive change. We like to think it works, take the diet industry for example, but over time it really does NOT work. In fact it backfires significantly.

I’m probably not telling you something you don’t already know. Look online and you’ll see defensive people get if anyone says the slightest thing perceived as an attack and how people react when people use kind and encouraging words.

You’ve also probably noticed how beating yourself up about food or your body or procrastinating or your mental health doesn’t seem to make the situation better. In fact, you probably notice the hole only deepens.

So, think about your own self-talk. Try drafting some positive self-appraisals to pull out next time something doesn’t go according to plan or when you need a little boost. And notice how your brain responds to positive self-talk as opposed to something negative or punishing.

And BONUS POINTS if you catch yourself thinking thoughts or saying things about others that are less than encouraging or supportive. Can you see the connection between those thoughts or words and your own self-talk?

Cool.

Until next time!