There are moments in life when we lack motivation to do what we need to do. How we guide our thoughts at that first moment can be critical. Self talk is something we all do. We may not talk out loud, but we all use self talk and what we tell ourselves is important. Today I really felt sluggish getting up. That isn't a good sign as today is when I do dead lifts at the gym. Anyone who has ever used the dead lift as a workout knows how important attitude is. I caught myself thinking negative in time enough to use the tool of self talk. I told myself that I was going to enjoy trying to lift as much as I possibly could. At first my mind fought against this. My mind and body had already formed an 'alliance of the lazy'. I had to use self talk for a good 5 minutes to get myself to a point where my mind and body gave in. Self talk is a simple tool to use, but often people use it to talk themselves out of doing things they really need or want to do.
I think of the teenager who has been told time and time again by his or her peers that they can't do something. Maybe a girl really likes a guy, but her friends tell her he is out of her league. The girl not only starts believing this, but she starts using self talk to talk herself out of asking the guy out. That is criminal on two counts. First, those aren't friends telling her this type of thing. Those are people to stay away from. Second, letting others control what you feel is horrible. It is not the girls fault in this case. I would bet no one ever told her she was just as worthy and valuable as anyone else. The facts rarely align with the voices in these cases. The voices speaking to her and the doubt she now carries come from a place of lies. It also saps the girl's courage to ask the boy out. This is true of every aspect of life. I just use the one example here.
Learning that it is OK to lose or be 'turned down' is a concept lost on the kids of today. In fact, it has been lost for decades. We learn more from a loss than a win so why are we so afraid of it? It is simple. We let other voices seep into our mind and create a fear that isn't based on fact. After enough time, we use self talk to criticize our self and that not only gives us a poor self image, but it destroys our potential. In these cases, we need to use self talk as a means to gain courage to do the things in life we feel we need to do. In other words, do not sell yourself short. The girl mentioned before would have grown more as a human if she asked the guy out and was turned down. The fact is in many cases, the guy may have said yes. Either way, it would have been a better situation if she used self talk to gain the courage to try.
The development of self talk is really an important step. We tell ourselves 10,000 things a day. We need to discipline what we are telling ourselves. The biggest fact is we lie to ourselves about what we are capable of and those lies are mostly telling us 'You can't do that'. Discipline your self talk. Again, go back to my articles on using a journal. If you told yourself you are going to do this or accomplish that and that old negative voice pops into your head saying it is impossible, use your self talk to shut that voice down. You can start to monitor this and even write down in a journal how much of your self talk was positive or negative. You may have learned that there is something you wanted to do that was not what you thought it would be. Tell yourself, OK, I learned from that and now I go on to other things. If you don't learn from life continuously, you are not living up to your full potential. The great news is that it is never too late to learn to discipline your self talk to help you grow and find the joy in life.
The best time to start using self talk is right before you go to sleep and right when you get up. A goal should be to see if the self talk is consistent. Over time, you will learn that at night you may be too critical and in the morning you may have to fight to stay positive. It is a fight in both instances. Take that fight on and use self talk to control your emotions and gain your peace of mind. Be honest, but give yourself some slack. Life is a continuous fight. I urge you to use self talk to have another weapon in your arsenal to take that fight on. Over time, you will grow to know who you are and what you can achieve.
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