Self-Talk can impact your mental, physical health
I am a late bloomer.
Many say I fulfilled my potential much later in life than expected. It took years for me to find my stride and to learn how to become who I wanted to be.
What changed? After years of struggling, I decided to change the way I thought and talked to myself. This changed my life.
The secret weapon to changing my thinking was positive affirmations. I wrote them down and said them out loud so I could hear them. I put encouraging words on index cards and covered my mirror, nightstand, and refrigerator with them. I would come back to these words daily, something even hourly.
It was vital that I preach these words out loud to myself. You can repeat them to yourself mentally, but it will not have the same powerful effect or benefit as repeating them out loud.
Studies have even shown that your subconscious mind better takes in affirmations through the ear's senses.
These positive affirmations redirected my thoughts and helped to redirect my life.
What is self-talk?
What I didn’t realize then was that I was teaching myself to have better-self talk.
Self-talk is your inner voice — it’s how you talk to yourself.
Self-talk shapes your beliefs about who you are, how the world works, and where you fit into it all, according to the University of Arizona Counseling and Psych Services. Both negative and positive self-talk can impact your mental and physical health.
Any decision you make stems from self-talk. Victor Vroom at the Yale School of Management argued that the choices people make stem from what they think will happen. If you tell yourself that you can achieve a goal, then you are more likely to pursue decisions that help you reach it.
While self-talk can define much of who we are, self-talk patterns don’t have to be set in stone. Negative self-talk can be transformed into positive and have radical impacts on our life.
Positive Self-Talk: It is often the praise or encouraging words that help you to focus on how you can achieve goals and grow yourself.
As a Life Coach at Project Arrow, I work with students and parents to increase their positive self-talk. I teach them how to reframe the difficulties in their life.
When I see my students tell themselves positive affirmations, they build up their resiliency, change their mindsets, and persist in achieving their goals.
Positive words can also influence behavior, helping people to shape new habits and patterns.
Negative Self-Talk: It is the inner voice that is unreasonably negative and pessimistic. Negative self-talk focuses on the alarming. It tells you that failure is inevitable.
Our patterns of self-talk are all too often negative.
It can feel like our brains are hardwired to remember negative experiences over positive ones. Unfortunately, I often vacillate towards negative self-talk because of a history of life challenges.
Stop and think, which are you, negative or positive? You know the conversation, the dialogue that persists hourly in your head. Does it sound something like “I’m not good enough” or “There are just too many challenges”?
Questions to Evaluate Your Self-Talk
- Is this dialogue negative or positive?
- What am I telling myself about my concerns?
- What is causing my anxiety and apprehensions?
- How is my self-talk impacting the view of myself?
So often, we tell ourselves that we are always failures or that we can never do anything right.
Yet, these statements simply aren’t true.
I became a life coach to inspire others to excel. I want you to see that you are not defined by your situation or your mistakes. You can thrive, and you can grow.
It starts with what you tell yourself. You believe in your own voice more than any other.
Five tips to talk to yourself better
- Talk to yourself the way you would talk to a dear friend.
- Sift through what your thoughts are and what people say about you.
- Remember, our brains like to focus on the negative.
- Instead of dwelling on something that bothers you — talk about it.
- Take on a growth mindset. You aren’t defined by failures; rather, consider them a part of your learning process.
Gale McKoy Wilkins is a wife, mom, grandparent and family life coach. She is the founder of Project Arrow, an evidence-based peer-to-peer and leadership program teaching middle, high school and first-year college students how to deal with trauma and crisis using life coaching. It's the first life coaching organization in the state to receive funding from the Department of Public Instruction and the first to implement life coaching in a school setting.
