Leading behavioral researchers have told us that as much as SEVENTY-SEVEN PERCENT of everything we think is negative, counterproductive, and works against us Year after year, word by word, our life scripts are etched. Layer by layer our selfimages are created. Hundreds, even thousands of times, we tell ourselves the same words and thoughts repeatedly of what we cannot do, cannot and will never accomplish. Repetition is a convincing argument! And as we begin to believe what we are hearing it begins to become true.
If everything you tell yourself about yourself becomes a directive to your subconscious mind, then any time you make a statement about yourself that is negative you are directing your subconscious mind to make you become the person you just described . . . negatively! For example, let’s consider the common problem of not being able to remember names.For twenty-five years you may have said to yourself, “I can never remember names.” Then one evening you go to a party. You are introduced to someone whose name you want to remember and you say to yourself, “I’m going to remember this person’s name.” What happens ten seconds later? You forget the name! Why? Because for the past twenty-five years you have been telling yourself that that’s what you’ll do. You have been PROGRAMMING yourself to forget!
The Good News is, It’s Not Too Late to Change
You can reprogram your mental computer in new, more life enhancing ways which will have a positive impact on your behavior, your attitude, your capabilities, your outcomes.The key to reprogramming our own brains is realizing our alternatives. We have a choice each time we think: to think or react positively or negatively. Pay attention and you’ll begin to hear your inner voice chattering away. Whenever you hear yourself thinking a negative word,phrase, or sentence, immediately translate it into a positive. Whether you “believe” it’s true yet,or not, change your reaction as soon as you recognize its negativity.
Repetition convinces the mind that what you are telling it is true. If these types of sentences and questions have come into your mind for years, the programming is deeply imbedded. In order to discover whether or not you use this type of self-sabotaging Self-Talk,here’s what you can do. It’s easy: over the next few days and weeks, simply pay attention.Listen to yourself. Become aware of what runs through your mind as you chatter to yourself all day long. Well, okay, maybe it’s not easy. But it’s worth the effort.
Begin to notice if you automatically use these words, make such statements, or ask these types of questions of yourself. (If so, be sure not to judge or be angry or critical of your mind. Be objective, detached. Rest assured that it’s okay if this has happened in the past. You didn’t realize the impact your own thoughts were having on you. And you didn’t know you had the choice to change what you say, how you react, what questions you ask yourself. The time has come to revise some of your thinking and create the results you truly desire.)
The Final Step
Each time you notice a self-defeating word, sentence, question surfacing in your mind –
1. Catch it.
2. Write it down.
3. Then, in order to cancel, erase, eliminate, eradicate the negative influence our own selfdefeating thoughts can have on our lives, take each one, one at a time, and make-up a replacement which contains positive, constructive, optimistic, encouraging, or supportive Self-Talk.
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