Know your Self Talk-it can be your Warden or your Superpower
Day # 6 of 30 Days of Insights, and how I turn them into actionable wisdom that changes my life.
Let’s talk about that dialogue in your head. The one that’s there all the time. The running commentary that is assessing, judging, alerting, filling in the blanks, trying to make sense of the world for you. That’s your mind speaking to you, that’s you’re self-talk. It was born with your ability to recognize and understand language. Know that it has more influence on you than any other input. Don’t underestimate its power to create your life.
Be mindful of your self-talk. It’s a conversation with the universe.
Imagine your self-talk steps outside of your head and steps into a body. You think that ‘separate person’ is your friend because they have always been there with you. They are there day and night, with that running commentary to you, about anything and everything…
“ Hey, what are you doing? Shouldn’t you be doing something else? You said you were going to do that thing. You know, you do this a lot. You never follow through. No wonder you don’t have many friends like so and so does. He’s funny and good looking, and very successful. Why are you eating that junk? No wonder you’re so out of shape. You should join the gym. Maybe not. You can’t really afford it and you’d look so awkward next to all those people that are disciplined and know what they are doing. Don’t do it. You’ll only be rejected.
Honestly, how long would you let this person hang around?
“Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t — you’re right.”
Henry Ford
Self talk that is not your Support and Ally will sabotage your psychology and infect your emotional state in a heartbeat. You know all it takes is one negative or fearful thought to cause a cascade of supporting thoughts and a rollercoaster of difficult emotion. Conversely one thought can cause feelings like hope, enthusiasm or intense gratitude and that your heart can fill to near bursting.
Your self-talk memorizes and reinforces some kind of belief, every time you buy into a thought. And because we only really see what we believe, that self-talk is dictating your personality, your current experience of life, and prescribing what is possible for you in the future. Your behavior is dictated by it. How you behave is your communication to the world about how to respond to you.
“Argue for your limitations and, sure enough, they’re yours.”
Richard Bach
The insidious nature of my Self talk -an insight worth putting to work
For a long time I believed the thought ‘I don’t know’ when asking myself why I wasn’t experiencing what I was truly capable of. I later let go of ‘I don’t know’ because I realized of course, I DO know. We all know. The answers we seek are inside each of us, always have been.
Later I started arguing for ‘something is blocking me’ from some awareness or understanding of what I ‘should’ be doing.
In the last few years I graduated to ‘I lack clarity’. That was me taking a little more responsibility for what felt like blockage. This too is bullshit. If the answer is there, it is clear. I am obscuring it with some belief I picked up somewhere and/or I’m just resisting it because ‘small me’ is simply afraid.
Most recently I’ve been maintaining the gentler ‘I have a gap’ or a ‘blank’ space between the answer and where I sit. But I’ve decided that does not serve me.
“The most important relationship we can all have is the one you have with yourself, the most important journey you can take is one of self-discovery…”
What I commit to now
Here’s the truth. I still have the self-talk of a fixed mindset when it comes to what is possible for me. I’m still limiting myself. I know this because on a deep level I am enormously excited about what I know is trying, in spite of me, to emerge. I DO know. But I know I can change a fixed mindset to a growth mindset.
I have an individual coach, a group coach, a whole community of wonderful peer coaches and a few excellent mentors I can call on. I have a burning desire as a coach myself, to keep expanding as ‘a spiritual being having this particular human experience’, and I want to see how far I can help this expansion go in this lifetime.
I commit to self-talk that always reminds me that I KNOW, that my answers are right in front of me. The answers are there because I have a purpose to fulfill, my part in the fabric of reality we all co-create, and I want nothing more than to give the gift I’m meant to give.
People and resources are also right there waiting to help me, so I will seek them and receive them.
And through all the rest of my days I will regard myself with the Love that created me and all that is. And I will treat myself with the magic pointed to by words like unconditional, grace, gratitude and total acceptance. I think I’ll add determination, humor , playfulness and creativity.
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