“Begin challenging your own assumptions. Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won't come in.” ---Alan Alda
We each have an internal dialogue, not a monologue. We manage to somehow speak to ourselves - go figure. And it is this internal dialogue where we tell ourselves how to best negotiate our feelings and reconcile them with our immediate environment.
Notice that these are in the present tense.
Most people simply do not take seriously how important it is to think about how one thinks. The quality of your thinking has a huge impact on the quality of your life, and if you choose to, you can strengthen your mental state through positive thinking and developing your self-talk skills.
Your thinking affects the actions you take or do not take. You are what you think about most of the time. Think about that. There have been periods of my adult life when I have had my thinking hijacked by my own under-skill of managing my self-talk. I remember a time when I was living and working in Victoria, BC how I thought of nothing but how I missed my home in Toronto, how I missed a few select people who were back home, and how I wanted to return. I had limited understanding of my inner language. It was a foreign tongue to me most of the time. I had never thought about how I could choose what I was thinking about as a skill. In hindsight, I think I missed a great deal of actually living in Victoria because I was unable to leverage influence on my own thoughts. I was physically in the moment and mentally in the past. This went on for months before I had life shake it out of me by bringing a series of small crises to jerk my thinking into the present.
Self-talk understanding is a technique I offer to many groups I work with under the umbrella of management skills or people-influencing skills. It asks you to imagine what another person's self-talk may be. The challenge with this understanding is then to speak it, albeit tentatively out loud. This means you are putting language to what you are guessing may be the self-talk of your listener, and then speculating out loud as to what you think they are thinking. This is empathetic thinking; it is a stretch for many of us who spend more of our time thinking about what we will say next rather than listening to another person's words let alone, not only listening, but trying to imagine what the thinking that is informing the other person's words may be. Geez. I warned you, it is complicated, but well worth it. It is asking you to equip the other person's point of view, not accept it or deny it. It is asking you to hear and validate the other's perspective, perhaps before they have articulated it very well themselves.
5 Self-Talk Exercises:
- Positive In and Positive Out
Try to use the same language on the inside as you do on the outside. This is much easier to write about than to do. Positive language frames our thinking and can create the platforms our thoughts use to establish our expectations.
3. Affirmations and Confirmations
Positive thinking is not enough. It is the starting point of a re-orientation to
the language that you think and ultimately that you choose to use to interact successfully with others. Creating your own tag lines of positive phrases and imagery can be how to take this to the next level. "I am good at ..." Make sure you are in the present tense. Be clear and specific and then like the shampoo bottles say, repeat.
3. Thought Pointing
Ever wonder why we don't spend more time thinking about those things that may interest us like art, love or a special memory or person? This is a technique that allows you to direct your thinking and to luxuriate in a specific idea or image of your choice. No, it's not "a happy place" although it could be. Instead, it is a choice of what you want to think about. You can develop an inventory of thoughts that you point to one spot, thing, or object that you enjoy. These thoughts are a convenient way to re-experience a memory, ignite your creativity about a current situation or challenge, or even to forecast and plan with relish. The pointed thoughts are how to consciously keep your thinking about your thinking at the forefront of your thinking!
4. Increase Your Self-Awareness
Increase your self-awareness by getting involved in opportunities to know yourself better. What does this mean? It means taking that ½ day course on communication skills that your HR Dept. has arranged for your organization, even though you're busy (who isn't?) and despite you being pretty darn sure your communicate skills are just fine.
5. Gratitude
It is easy to be grateful when there is plenty and not so when there is scarcity. The importance of your self-talk is never higher than when you feel un-ease. It's in those situations like a job interview, or when you see a tractor trailer jackknife on the highway in the lane next to yours, that our deliberate self-talk will allow us to better frame the situation so we can see the opportunity for gratitude. Sometimes, I know it's been this way for me more than once, you have to scrape the very bottom of the gratitude barrel to find it, but there is always some there. You just have to reach with your thoughts to find it.
Latest posts by Diana Kawarsky, MA, CCP (see all)
- Secret Success Tool: Self-Talk Affirmations - October 22, 2020
