When you consider that you spend infinitely more time with
your "self" -- listening to your internal dialogue -- than you
do to any other person in your life, it pays to have it on a
leash!
1. Our self-talk is constant.
What your say to yourself in your head goes on 24/7. When
you think about it, this is tremendously more input into your
life than any other person could possibly have.
2. Our self-talk takes place in real time.
It's a running commentary. If it's good self-talk, that's
the best 'friend' you can have. If it's the 'idiot in the
house' instead, you're stuck with crazy, negative,
self-defeating statements going on all day long: "I could
never do math," "I'm too fat," "Men can't stand me," "All
women are bitches," Everyone's smarter than me," "I'll never
make any money," "I'll never be a stock broker," etc. (And of
course such statements tend to become self-fulfilling.)
3. Our bodies react as if our self-talk were
real.
What we say to ourselves in our head has physiological
outcomes, i.e., when we think "This proposition is horrible
and they're going to laugh me out of the room, and when I get
back without the contract, I'll get fired, and then we'll lose
the house..." our palms sweat, our hearts beat faster,
adrenalin clouds our thinking and we function less well and
put our bodies under tremendous stress. This makes it
difficult for us at the moment, and then creates habitual
thought patterns that kick up in the future, and there's a
cumulative stress.
4. Our self-talk is heavily influenced by our
locus-of-control.
("locus-of-control" = what we attribute things to) There
are basically 3 choices -- everything's my fault; everything's
someone else's fault; or it happened because of chance or
luck. The last choice is the healthiest, according to
research.
5. It's a bully.
It's so powerful, it overwhelms other input, including
reality. For instance your self-talk tells you that women
don't like to date you, and your head's so full of that at the
cocktail party that you fail to even notice the rather shy but
extremely appealing young woman who does her best to get your
attention and initiate a conversation.
6. Negative self-talk gets the loudest when
you need it the least.
When the pressure's on, we revert to default mode. For
instance, everyone has one side of the brain dominant, and can
and does use both hemispheres, but when learning something
new, which is stressful, we all default to the dominant
hemisphere. By the same token, when feeling stressed we hype
up the negative self-talk, which is -- to say the least --
self-defeating. We're bringing in the negative self-talk
because we think we can't do something, then it tells us we
can't do something, and then we make sure we can't!
7. Self-talk can be a major life force.
Self-talk is relentless and ever-present. That's one reason
we say in EI (emotional intelligence), "be adamantly and
relentlessly self-forgiving." Most of us just don't reach
adulthood with self-talk that goes "I'm very good at selling
and sell best under pressure," or "Most women like me and I
have always dated lovely women though some of the
relationships didn't work out." In at least one area, most of
us have some really negative self-talk tapes running.
8. You talk to your self in ways you would
never think of talking to someone else.
If you walked up to someone else and said "You're a stupid,
worthless son-of-a-bitch" they would recoil in horror and
pain, or lash back at you with verbal or physical abuse.
However, it's not uncommon to have that kind of self-talk
going on. You know in your heart that if you talked to someone
else this way, it would exacerbate the situation, and not
solve anything, as well as being unkind and possibly untrue;
and yet we sometimes talk that way to ourselves.
9. Ultimately if you have negative self-talk
you create a toxic internal environment.
Considering that self-talk goes on 24/7 and also that many
people aren't consciously aware of it -- or aware that it
isn't a "given" and can be changed -- as the months and years
go by, you create a sort of closed-loop toxic waste area. In
the worst-case scenario, every time you dip in, you pull up
something negative and self-defeating, and defeat yourself,
and then throw that back into the, well, cesspool. It can get
pretty bad.
10. You need to listen to your body because
it certainly listens to you.
Such a toxic inner environment is what causes headaches,
pain, depression, anxiety, poor functioning, and a
self-defeating spiral into self-defeat. Any degree of
negativity from yourself to yourself is more than you need.
It's like your authentic self crying "Help me! Get me out of
here!"
Your 'real' self knows that you're competent, intelligent,
motivated, prepared... and it's trying to function with
negative self-talk. This creates tension. Mindfulness can help
turn this situation around by helping you become aware of your
self-talk, and helping you change it to get it in synch with
reality!
And check to make sure someone in your current environment
isn't feeding you negative self-talk ideas!
BONUS TIP: thoughts make good servants
but bad masters.
