Empower Yourself with Positive Self-Talk
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Empowering Yourself with Positive Self-Talk
When an actor wins an award, he or she thanks family and friends. When an athlete wins a medal, he or she thanks coaches and supporters. Any time a human achieves something meaningful, the first instinct is to thank the people who have supported us and made it possible. The importance of cheerleaders is something easily recognized. And yet, when it comes to inner monologues and self-talk, instead of being our own greatest cheerleaders we're often our own worst critics. That negativity quickly gets in the way of accomplishing goals and realizing dreams. When the negativity is replaced with empowering self-talk and encouragement, we're able to reach new heights because trying—and even failing—doesn't seem quite so earth-shattering.
What is Self-Talk?
Whether you've consciously thought about it or not, you keep a running monologue inside your mind throughout your waking hours. You process your experiences, make judgments and decisions, and layer in value statements about yourself. A lot of this monologue may be mundane and neutral—grocery lists, to-do lists, thoughts on the media you consume—but the way you speak directly to yourself about yourself is the heart of self-talk. Whether you cheer yourself toward success or convince yourself not to try, self-talk is directly related to your sense of worth and your abilities. “Replacing negative psychological messages with positive ones can build self-esteem and confidence, and may bring results that surprise you,” say psychologists at Walden University.
What kinds of things do you say to yourself when it seems impossible to finish a workout? What about when a school or work task is overwhelming? When the entire house needs cleaning and you don't know where to begin?
You engage in negative self-talk when you say things like:
“I can't do it.”
“It's too hard.”
“I'm not smart enough to figure this out.”
“I'm not strong enough to finish this.”
By verbally reinforcing your negative feelings, you validate the faulty judgments you pass on yourself. Eventually it feels like a concrete truth about who you are.
Engaging in positive, empowering self-talk will sound like:
“I can go a little further.”
“I can break this down into smaller, more manageable tasks.”
“I will do what I know how to do and ask for help for the things I don't know how to do.”
“This is an opportunity to learn something new.”
In short, self-talk is the way we either encourage or discourage ourselves. Empowering self-talk starts with the small moments of the day and builds until it's a natural part of every internal conversation.
Why Does Self-Talk Matter?
If you doubt the efficacy of self-talk, think of something you didn't do because you told yourself you couldn't. Was it a dream career or college major? Have you held yourself back because you believe you aren't smart enough, pretty enough, experienced enough, fill-in-the-blank enough? The moment these thoughts are introduced into our minds, brought into our self-talk, they become part of the narrative directing our efforts and achievements.
How effective are you at accomplishing tasks that are overwhelming to you or in which you have little experience? How ready are you to try new things and take chances? If these things seem impossible to you, chances are your self-talk isn't empowering. Self-talk that depreciates your value and ability feeds directly into your self-esteem and keeps you trapped in cycles of thinking and believing that you aren't good enough. Discouraging self-talk doesn't leave room for learning, for trying new things, and for simply being a human who can't be good at everything.
Empowering self-talk doesn't make you magically good or successful at everything you try. It doesn't even erase fear and shame. What it does is set you up to try new things and process the results in a healthy and objective way. Empowering self-talk helps train your brain to change its automatic processes and create new neural pathways. What your mind gets in the habit of saying and believing is what will manifest in your behaviors. When you focus on catching the negative thoughts and correcting them with encouragement, you're telling your brain that the existing pathways need to be changed. Eventually, instead of shying away from opportunities out of fear, you'll be empowered to try new things in spite of your fear. Instead of feeling shame for being imperfect or failing at something, you'll be empowered to separate who you are from what you do and draw lessons from all your experiences. Self-empowerment through self-talk is something we have to practice every day. It's a skill we learn and then choose to use. It will become more natural the more we engage with it, but some situations will always require intentional effort.
In addition, empowering or positive self-talk has been linked with physical and mental health benefits. It's an effective tool for battling anxiety, depression, and stress.
How Do I Use Empowering Self-Talk?
Empowering self-talk begins with grace. Shifting toward empowering and positive self-talk is a process. It's not a simple matter of deciding to speak more kindly to yourself—if it were that easy we'd all be positive and empowered! The grace you'll need for yourself is two-fold: 1. grace for actions that are less than what you wanted and 2. grace for when you forget to be gracious to yourself.
In order to change the way you talk to yourself, you've got to first be aware of how you are talking to yourself. Taking the time to notice what you say to yourself is the first step in empowering yourself through self-talk. Positive Psychology recommends keeping a journal of your thoughts and self-talk for at least one week in order to identify thought patterns and situations that trigger you to speak poorly about yourself.
Edmund J. Bourne, author of The Anxiety and Phobia Workbook, outlines certain thought patterns and voices to watch for. Most people identify with at least one of four sub-personality types that contribute to negative self-talk:
the worrier who promotes anxiety
the critic who promotes low self-esteem
the victim who promotes depression
the perfectionist who promotes stress and burnout
These inner voices feed into various thought patterns that keep us stuck in negative self-talk, including:
overestimation of negative outcomes (“what if...”)
catastrophizing (“the worse case is most likely to happen”)
overgeneralizing (“this always/never happens”)
filtering (focusing on one fact without contextualizing it)
emotional reasoning (“I feel this so I am this”)
Once you are aware of your patterns and triggers, you're able to begin crafting counter statements to your negative self-talk. Let's try an example.
Let's say your inner sub-personality is a die-hard perfectionist. It's difficult for you to try new things and take on new tasks because anything less then perfection is failure, regardless of your experience level. But you've just been assigned a task at work that requires you doing something new, something you've never done and don't fully know how to do. Your inner monologue might go something like this: “I can't do this, I don't know how. I'm going to mess this up and get fired. My boss and coworkers will think I'm bad at my job because I'll mess this up.”
A victim sub-personality in the same situation might think something like, “I'll never be able to learn how to do this before the deadline. This always happens to me; they want me to do things without training me first. I should just go tell my boss right now that I can't do this. If he doesn't fire me I should probably quit, I'm not qualified to be here anyway.”
Considered objectively, neither of these thought processes hold water. They don't leave room to try and learn. They don't leave room to ask for help. Self-worth is tied to whether you can or can't accomplish this task on your own, in the most absolute sense. A counter statement for both these monologues might go something like this: “I've never tried this before, but I am capable of learning. My boss and coworkers are willing to help me if I ask. If I work closely with people who can help me, I will succeed. Any mistakes I make are a chance to learn and grow. My boss wouldn't ask me to do this if she wasn't confident that I can succeed.”
In this situation, as well as in many others you may find yourself in, positive self-talk works to remove you from an isolated vacuum and remember that other people are willing and able to help and support you—and that it is OK for you to seek help and support.
The Mayo Clinic also offers some negative and positive self-talk examples:
Instead of, “I've never done this before,” try, “This is an opportunity to try something new.”
Instead of, “There's no way it will work,” try, “I can try to make it work.”
Instead of, “I'm not going to get any better at this,” try, “I'll give it another try.”
Empowering self-talk isn't dismissive about the challenges and concerns that crop up. What empowering self-talk does is help you contextualize them and separate your sense of self-worth from a faulty checklist. Empowering self-talk is about progress over perfection. Some things you will be good at, some things you will be bad at, and some things you will continually be growing in. Empowering self-talk recognizes that and, instead of assigning worth and value to yourself based on ability, sees how all these things come together to make you.
Empowering Self-Esteem Through Personal Beliefs
No conversation on self-talk can avoid the intersection with personal beliefs. The things you believe about yourself, about others, and about the world, all coalesce within your self-talk. When you believe that you have less value because you are imperfect, because you don't know how to do something, or because something didn't work out for you, your self-talk will follow that belief and reaffirm it. The Anxiety and Phobia Workbook offers these five questions to help challenge your beliefs and negative self-talk:
What is the evidence for this belief or statement?
Is this belief or statement always true for you?
Does this belief or statement account for the whole picture?
Does this belief or statement promote your well-being and peace of mind?
Is this belief or statement something you chose on your own, or was it handed down/developed through experiences with family and/or friends?
As you evaluate your answers, you're likely to find that any absolute statements you use (“I'm always failing at this,” or “I never do that,”) are over-generalizations that don't account for the entirety of the situation.
Affirmations are very similar to the counter statements used to combat negative self-talk. Where counter statements are intentionally crafted to target specific things we tell ourselves, affirmations target the underlying beliefs that motivate our self-talk. For example, we'll use counter statements to change, “I can't do this,” into, “I will try my best and learn from this.” An affirmation will look at the personal belief that leads us to say, “I can't do this.” Let's say that we hold tightly to the belief that failure is terrible, leading us to avoid trying new things. Edmund Bourne's affirmation to counter this belief is, “It's OK to make mistakes. I'm willing to accept my mistakes and learn from them.”
To get the most out of affirmations, Bourne recommends repetition and conviction. Our personal beliefs weren't instilled in one day, so they won't be countered in one day, either. Another option is to work with a trusted partner who recognizes the truth in your affirmations already.
Empowered to Dream
Living with a negative mindset is exhausting. Living around people who have negative mindsets is also exhausting (and unpleasant!). Making the choice to speak internally with empowering self-talk doesn't mean lying to yourself or pretending things are better than they are. Contextualizing and objectively considering the facts moves you away from an inner world of absolutes and makes room for grace and growth.
Empowering self-talk means building your self-confidence so that you can make decisions that aren't fear-based. It means knowing your self-worth and keeping it separate and secure in the face of learning curves. It means reaching for the dreams and goals that you've maybe spent a lot of time telling yourself you can never achieve, and accepting that achievement might look far different than you expect right now.
When you embrace empowering self-talk and make it a daily practice, you're taking the first steps toward true success.
For Further Reading:
https://positivepsychology.com/positive-self-talk/
