Spring Clean Your Self-Talk

Time to wash your mouth and mindset out with soap.

While your spring cleaning everything else, stop and consider how you talk to yourself. How often do you use “can’t”, “should”, “shouldn’t”, “fat”, “horrible,” “old”...Are you talking to yourself like you would talk to your best friend?

Self-talk is powerful. Positive self-talk improves confidence, decreases stress, and increases your resilience. Positive self-talk means your more likely to succeed in your goals. It makes sense when you think about it, right? Is someone more likely to be successful through encouragement or constant beat downs? Hopefully you said encouragement.

To start changing your inner dialogue, simply begin by observing. When you catch yourself talking down to yourself, call it out. Negative self-talk falls into four categories:

-Personalizing: blaming yourself when things go wrong.

-Binary thinking: viewing situations as good or bad.

-Magnifying: focusing on only the bad in a situation, never looking for the positive.

-Catastrophizing: expecting the worst.

When you catch yourself slipping into one of these traps, ask yourself why you thought/said that. Is it really true? Challenge yourself. Over time you will get faster and better at catching yourself and reframing your outlook. And eventually, the positive outlook will become your first response.