Self Talk Part 4 Be Your Own Best Friend

So everyone has this inner voice to a lesser or greater effect. And it can be harnessed and trained to be more helpful. To do this, one needs to adopt a cognitive trick to channel out needless and senseless self-talk.

If there is one recurring negative thought still bugging you, then research it, turning your mind to focus on it. Try to seek out its origin from among your past experiences. See the threat it seems to represent in the total context of your life and your new goal. As the same negative thought reoccurs, tell yourself how less and less it squares with the new image and information you have.

There is another excellent book by Tim Laurence called ‘You Can Change Your Life’ and based on the Hofman Process of improving your Self-Awareness. It suggests another solution. Laurence advocates that where your emotions kick in hard and your inner voice begins to drown out all reason, that we should try his clever suggestion.

Visualise the two parts of you. First see your emotional self designed to warn you of all and any danger to life and limb. Then envisage the other part, your intellectual and considered self. Whenever the emotional side goes on a rampage yelling at your intellect and constraining it from doing calmly and calculatingly what you think would be best to do, listen to the ideal, imaginary conversation between them.

Listen to the emotional rampage for a moment. Then hear the Intellect very calmly thank the Emotional part for bringing the caution and warning. Hear it go on to promise to the Emotional part that the Intellectual part will take heed in future of the anxiety, while it considers the most effective way ahead to complete the task.

Many people are simply not aware of the sheer scale of research on human thought and behaviour. This has been occurring extensively across the world, particularly in the last three decades.

In the context of Self Talk, what has been proven is the great influence our relentless inner self talk has on the relevant self-image we have of ourselves. This appears to be true in any particular aspect of our lives. Self-talk can talk up that relevant self-image and in consequence increase our resulting performance. In so doing it can create a wonderfully strong virtuous circle. Equally, it can talk our situation down, lower our ultimate achievement level and become a vicious cycle of negativity.

But there is even more to this!

Research has shown that in the absence of any other influence, we meet and deal with challenges, not according to our actual ability but according to our perceived level of our ability - our self-image in that situation.

In other words if we think we can do it well we can even exceed our actual current ability, by performing, as it is sometimes said, ‘out of our skins’. But if our view of ourselves is poor, then we perform well below that inherent ability we have.

So, at the end of this four par article, some concluding questions for you to ask yourself on
Self Talk and some resolutions to make.

“Am I fully aware of both the value as well as the potential downside of my self-talk?”

“Doesn’t everyone benefit from it or suffer by it, as they choose?”

“Shouldn’t I desist right now from giving myself verbal abuse? Which mental strategy of those listed am I choosing to “delete” or “divert” this abuse?”

“Shouldn’t I be my own best friend in terms of everything I say to myself?”

“Isn’t it time I identified and applied my own strategy to screen out my destructive self talk?”

“Instead of running myself down, let me advise me, counsel and encourage me
constructively.”

“I will keep in the forefront of my mind the fact that we meet and deal with challenges not according to our actual ability but according to our perceived level of our ability - our self-image as represented by our Self Talk.”

Think well and be your own very best friend.