Episode Transcript
In this episode, I am going to talk to you about negative self-talk and how harmful it is. I will give you 2 tips on how you can ditch your negative self-talk. And I share with you why it is so important for us to do it. So let’s get started!
How do you feel about your inner voice? Are you good friends or do you feel like your inner voice is your biggest critic? Most of us have fallen into the habit of being more critical of ourselves than is good for us. One of the reasons is our drive to become better and achieve more which is natural. But we start using our inner voice to drive this growth and quickly it can become harsh, and demanding. We are telling ourselves off or beating ourselves up. And this is where it gets counterproductive and dangerous.
※ BECOMING AWARE OF THE NEGATIVE SELF-TALK ※
Our self-talk can be anything we want it to be if we have the awareness and the control over it. Human nature, unfortunately, is prone to negative self-talk. That includes sweeping assertions like “I can’t do anything right” or “I’m a complete failure.” That’s why it is so important to be mindful and aware of what your inner voice is doing.
An easy way to do that is to check in throughout your day, interrupt your thoughts and assess them. A good way to test out how your inner voice sounds are to ask yourself if you would speak like that to your best friend. Would you say exactly these words to your best friend? Sadly we speak quite often much harsher, more critical and destructive to ourselves than we would to any other person in the world.
When I started working on my inner voice I wanted to stop my thought spirals. It’s these ongoing thoughts about one particular topic that does not get you anywhere. They can be about something that happened in the past. I would ruminate about how it went, how it could have been better or questioning why I did it.
Or it would be worrying about the future. Thinking about how a meeting or conversation will go and of course that means thinking about the worst-case scenario. So my number one goal was to quieten my mind so it would not waste all of that time and energy on useless thoughts that mostly made me feel worse.
“I MAINLY DID 2 THINGS TO ACHIEVE IT. I USED AWARENESS WHEN THESE THOUGHT SPIRALS WERE OUT OF CONTROL AND I USED MEDITATION TO QUIETEN MY INNER VOICE.”
So let’s talk first about awareness of our thoughts. Using awareness is the same as giving something your attention. We want to give our inner voice more attention than we did in the past.
My inner voice was kind of out of control. It did what it wanted to do which ended up not being good for me. So I decided to give it more attention, watching throughout my waking hours what it was saying. In the beginning, this takes more effort and consciousness because you are not used to it. It’s a practice that gets easier over time.
※ REMIND YOURSELF TO DITCH THE NEGATIVE SELF-TALK ※
You want to remind yourself of doing it. Set yourself reminders in your calendar, pop up reminders on your phone. Partner up with someone so you both start practising putting more attention on your thoughts and reminding each other. You can write down words or themes that you want to let go of and that way you give yourself a message to catch yourself when this automatically comes up.
So when you catch yourself with an unhelpful inner voice or stuck in a thought spiral, get yourself out of it. Stop it and do something else. Think about something different preferably something positive, distract your brain with an activity or you can set yourself a mantra sentence that you always say when you catch yourself and want to disrupt this thought pattern.
You will see that after a while it gets easier and easier and you catch yourself quicker and disrupt the pattern better.
※ USE MEDITATION TO STOP THE HARMFUL SELF-TALK ※
The second thing I use is meditation to practise quietening my mind. In meditation, we practise quietening our analytical minds and not having any thoughts. To not have any thoughts for a long time is something just a few people can do, so having thoughts during the meditation is normal and the practice during the meditation is to let them go and go back to the state of not having thoughts. This is an amazing practice as it just not quietens the mind during meditation but as well outside of meditation.
If I think back to my inner voice and my mind about 1.5 years ago, it’s unbelievably different. I have hardly any thoughts spirals anymore because I trained my mind to not have them. And my mind is much quieter, it does not have anymore these useless thoughts to just fill the silence.
And my inner voice has become a whole lot nicer. I have still a way to go with the inner voice but the improvement for me is already so huge from what it once was.
“SO MY 2 TIPS FOR YOU ARE TO GIVE YOUR INNER VOICE MORE ATTENTION AND STOP ANY HURTFUL PATTERNS AND THEN THROUGH MEDITATION OR SIMILAR EXERCISES TO TRAIN YOUR MIND TO BE CALMER.”
And now I am going to share with you why I think it is so important to go through this journey. Training our mind and our inner voice is directly linked to self-love and self-discovery. We are never able to fully love and accept ourselves if we keep letting our inner voice bring us down, criticizing ourselves and beating ourselves up.
※ CONNECTING WITH YOUR SELF-LOVE BY QUIETENING THE NEGATIVE SELF-TALK ※
I talked in last week’s episode about how much power our thoughts and feelings have in the manifestation process and the inner voice is part of it. If we don’t check it and make sure it’s positive and beneficial for our mental health, then it can even manifest into depression and anxiety.
And if you are interested to be more self-loving and bringing more peace into your life, then this is something that you want to tackle.
※ GIVING YOUR HIGHER SELF THE CHANCE TO TALK TO YOU ※
Having good training in calming your mind and pausing you from constantly having thoughts gives your subconscious mind the possibility of bringing up new ideas, messages and new perspectives. I discovered that I receive now important messages or ideas when I am in silence. This can be during meditation but as well at other times. Now that my mind is not chatting along all the time, I give it the space to think of new ways, new inspirations or see a sign that I would have before ignored.
I describe it as being more connected with my higher self, with the universal energy that we all carry inside of us. The energy that wants us to feel good all the time, to achieve everything we want in life and enjoy life to the fullest. If you have the training to calm your analytical mind, then in silence you receive insights, AHA moments and eye-opening realizations.
“THIS IS WHY IT IS SO IMPORTANT TO ME TO SPEND MORE QUIET TIME, MORE TIME IN SILENCE. SILENCE ISN´T EMPTY, IT’S FULL OF ANSWERS.”
These messages that you can start to receive when you sit in silence will bring you even closer to loving yourself because they are for your own good. They want you to become your best self and that is the self that you can love.
That is what I want for all of you. That you love yourself more and more and that you realize how you can express this most beneficially in this 3D world, for yourself and the world. How does that sound? Great!
A really good book on quieting your negative self-talk and the busy mind is “Chatter” by Ethan Cross. His book can help you to get even better at bringing calm and peace into your life.
