Self Talk: Positively Powerful, Part 2
December 14th, 2007 | by Molly's Brother |Each month, I will take a look at a topic and explore it over the course of the four weeks. Each Friday, there will be a new post in the series. In a lead-up to the New Year, throughout December we will explore “Self Talk: Positively Powerful.”
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Last week, we began to explore the idea that, in order to bring real change into your life, you must work on changing the thoughts that run through your mind. In order to help us create more positive habits in thinking, we first need to explore our own negative self talk. Since the focus of this blog is money (generally) and your financial New Year’s resolution (specifically), we will focus our conversation around those two topics.
Step 1. Become aware of it.
Recognize that you might have developed a habit of negative self-talk. Often times, this negative self-talk is not so silent. If you are having trouble recognizing your own patterns, talk to a trusted friend for some honest and helpful feedback. Once you are truly aware of the depth and scope of your negative thoughts, only then can you begin to destroy them.
Step 2. Find out where the negative self-talk originated.
Hey, I didn’t say this was going to be easy! Now that you have identified the existence of your less-than-helpful thoughts, spend some time thinking about the content and the origin of the thoughts. Let’s say one of your thoughts was “I will always be poor.” Interesting. Sit with this. Explore how frequently it pops into your mind. Discover when it began appearing. Perhaps, you’ll find out that your mother always talked negatively about the wealthy family at the end of the street. Or maybe your mother was a hard-working man, but no matter, because he never got ahead in life. Witnessing these examples throughout your life, you may have developed a connection between wealth being bad (your mother’s comments) or hard-work being valued, even if it never came to much (your mother’s example).
Negative self-talk comes about as a result of a million different things and does not always extend back to your childhood. Only you know the real roots of your limiting thoughts.
Step 3. Acknowledge the pay-offs.
You are getting something out of it. It is working for you on some level. Perhaps your thoughts about “always being poor,” means that you can continue running up your credit card debt. Perhaps this idea that you will never be wealthy in some way liberates you from a life of hard work and responsibility. After all, if you never reach for that goal, you’ll never have to deal with the reality that…you just might be able. (How terrifying is that? You just might be able to live that life you’ve dreamed.)
Next week we’ll explore ways that you can mitigate and eliminate the negative self-talk.
